Megan M za is a half-Mexican female entrepreneur who quit her high-paying job in marketing to launch Bandida, a cold-brew horchata beverage brand. As a social enterprise, Bandida aims to manufacture its product using only partners that are women and people of color. M za soon struggles with issues of cultural identity and ponders whether she can launch her product if she hasn''t met all of her social goals. As M za strategizes how to break .....more

Identifying the next big thing is often treated as an exercise in analyzing trends. But that''s misleading. By the time a trend is established, any opportunities it presents have probably been captured by competitors. And although a company may need to reflect trends in its business plans, that may mean catching up with rivals rather than gaining a competitive edge. To take advantage of emerging trends, companies must identify them when they .....more

Popular notions about founders are often wrong, as demonstrated by five new books: "Amazon Unbound," by Brad Stone; "The Cult of We," by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell; "Tencent," by Wu Xiaobo; "Super Founders," by Ali Tamaseb; and "The New Builders," by Seth Levine and Elizabeth MacBride.

Too much competition diminishes motivation and creativity.

uBiome provided clinical tests that sequenced the DNA of human microbiome samples, providing data on health conditions directly to consumers or to prescribing physicians. Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup raised $105 million from top-tier venture capital firms and recruited prominent biotech executives and scientists as board members and advisors. In April 2019, the FBI raided uBiome''s offices to investigate claims that the .....more

If you''re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of founders and investors and scores of accounts of entrepreneurial setbacks, his findings buck the conventional wisdom that the cause of start-up failure is either the founding .....more

In March 2020, Zach Sims, co-founder and CEO of online education platform Codecademy, prepared for a meeting with his Chief of Staff Kunal Ahuja to discuss the company''s goals. Codecademy billed itself as the largest online resource for computer science literacy and programming skills in the world. It had 45 million active users in 190 countries learning to code by taking its online courses. Ahuja had engaged the leadership team, product .....more

How does the largest membership non-profit in the world renew itself in the face of changing generational expectations? How can large organizations work with emerging startups in a mutually beneficial manner? Students will gain insight into how large organizations try to innovate, the challenges large organizations face when trying to innovate, different innovation models, and the creation of in-house startup incubator programs. Success is not only .....more