Fall 2012, Detailed Schedule

SPEAKER: Kevin Casey (Harvard University, Associate VP for Public Affairs and Communications)

LOCATION:  Cumnock Hall 230, Harvard Business School, MAP

TITLE: "The Biotech Industry in Massachusetts: The Role of NIH, Venture Capital, and Harvard in a Period of Budgetary Austerity"

ABSTRACT: 

BIO: As Associate Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications, Kevin is responsible for the day to day administrative operations of the department, all of Harvard’s government relations activities in Washington and he oversees representations on Harvard’s behalf to the state of Massachusetts in regulatory and legislative matters. He specializes in legislative and regulatory issues relating to basic research, intellectual property, technology transfer and many miscellaneous matters, including immigration policy. He has been with Harvard since April 1989. Prior to joining Harvard, Kevin served as the Boston office Chief of Staff to Massachusetts Congressman Edward J. Markey. Earlier Kevin was the Staff Director of the Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Commerce and Labor. Kevin is a graduate of Merrimack College and The New England School of Law and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1989.

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September 28, 2012

SPEAKER: Gautam Mukunda (Harvard Business School)

LOCATION: Baker 102, HBS campus, MAP

TITLE: "When Leaders Really Matter" 

CHAPTER: "Does History Make the Man, or Does the Man Make History? Links to an external site." (link not active)
Register at link to download

ABSTRACT: Indispensable:  Practitioners, journalists, and historians believe that leaders play a crucial role in events.  Social science theories, however, generally argue that leaders are unimportant.  Indispensable proposes a two-stage theory of leader impact called Leader Filtration Theory (LFT).  In the first stage, leaders are usually chosen from among a pool of candidates by a filtration process that homogenizes the pool.  This makes actual leaders highly similar to those who almost got the job, making candidates fungible.  Sometimes filtration can be bypassed.  When this occurs, leaders can gain power who are very different from potential alternates.  In the second stage, leaders face constraints from within their organization and outside it.  If these constraints are sufficiently weak an unfiltered leader can have a very large impact on outcomes.   Such leaders are likely to display a high degree of variance in their performance. 
- The theory is tested quantitatively using historians’ rankings of U.S. Presidents.  Unfiltered leaders should be disproportionately represented among the best and worst Presidents.  LFT’s prediction of higher variance in performance is very strongly supported by this test. 
- The theory is also tested by examining three American Presidents and two British Prime Ministers.
- Jefferson, a Filtered President, made decisions with regards to the Louisiana Purchase very similar to those that alternative Presidents would have made.  Lincoln and Wilson, by contrast, both Unfiltered Presidents, made decisions that were radically different from those that would have been made by alternative Presidents.
- Chamberlain, a Filtered Prime Minister (PM), made decisions with regards to appeasement of Germany before the Second World War very similar to those of alternative PMs.  When his preferences diverged from those of potential alternate PMs, British policy followed the alternates’ preferences, not his.  When Churchill, an Unfiltered PM, gained office, his unique preferences determined British policy.
- The theory should have power outside democratic politics as well.  Four leaders from other domains – the military, business, and scientific research - who are commonly believed to have been highly consequential are examined.  All eight would have been classified as Unfiltered by LFT.  Finally, five approaches to choosing better leaders suggested by LFT are described.

BIO: Gautam Mukunda is an Assistant Professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School.  Before joining the business school he was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies.  He received his PhD from MIT in Political Science and an A.B. in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude.  His research focuses on leadership, international relations, and the social and political implications of technological change. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and MIT's Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies.

Before graduate school he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector.  He is Founding Managing Director of The Two Rivers Group, a strategy consulting firm focusing on applying insights from academia to private and public sector problems.  He is a member of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Mentorship Committee ofThe Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent.  He is a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, and a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly.  He has published articles on leadership, military innovation, network-centric warfare, and the security and economic implications of synthetic biology in Security Studies, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, Systems and Synthetic Biology, and the Washington Post. His first book, "Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter Links to an external site.," is forthcoming in September from Harvard Business Review Press. 

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October 5, 2012

SPEAKER: Dr. Griffin M. Weber, Chief Technology Officer, Harvard Medical School 

LOCATION:  Aldrich 210, HBS campus, MAP

TITLE: "Analyzing Collaboration Using Harvard Catalyst Profiles"

ABSTRACT: Harvard Catalyst Profiles (http://profiles.catalyst.harvard.edu) is an open source website that creates research profiles for an institution's faculty. It links these profiles together through both Passive Networks, which are automatically generated based on information known about investigators, and Active Networks, which users themselves create by indicating their relationships to other researchers. These networks have numerous applications, ranging from finding individual collaborators and mentors to understanding the dynamics of an entire research community. This presentation will describe Harvard Catalyst Profiles and its use of Linked Open Data to represent network information, and it will show examples of what can be learned by applying bibliometric and social network analysis to this data. 

BIO: Dr. Griffin Weber is the Chief Technology Officer of Harvard Medical School and an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. He invented the Harvard Catalyst Profiles website, and his research is in the area of expertise mining and social network analysis. Dr. Weber is also an investigator on Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), an NIH National Center for Biomedical Computing, for which he helped develop a web-based open source platform for querying and analyzing clinical data repositories. Dr. Weber received his MD and PhD in computer science from Harvard University and has worked on numerous biomedical informatics projects, such as analyzing DNA microarrays, modeling the growth of breast cancer tumors, developing algorithms to predict life expectancy, and building a medical education web portal.

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October 12, 2012

No Seminar (HBS reunion ceremonies)

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October 19, 2012

SPEAKER: Ambar Bhattacharyya (Bessemer Venture Partners)

LOCATION: Baker 102, HBS campus, MAP

TITLE: "Healthcare Venture Capital - from a practitioner's point of view"

ABSTRACT: The venture capital industry is responsible for a significant amount of new company creation every year.  This seminar will discuss how the venture capital industry functions (both from a theoretical and practical perspective) and how an individual venture firm operates.  We will also talk about how firms approach portfolio diversification, and how their setups optimizes for mitigating certain sets of risks, but may be suboptimally set up to manage other risks.  Lastly, we discuss key trends in healthcare venture capital and how HBS has had an impact in preparing one for the industry.

BIO: Ambar Bhattacharyya is a vice president in BVP’s Cambridge, MA office.  He focuses on investments in early- and growth-stage healthcare and education companies and has been closely involved in Bessemer's investments in Verastem  Links to an external site.(IPO),OvaScience Links to an external site., Liazon Links to an external site., Fractyl Laboratories, andAccuvein Links to an external site.. He is also actively involved in BVP’s investments in Cerulean  Links to an external site.and Oxagen Links to an external site.. Prior to joining Bessemer, Ambar worked as an associate at Bain Capital Ventures. There, he helped make investments in companies such as Ameritox, Accelecare, LinkedIn (IPO), iPay Technologies (acq. by Jack Henry), TargetSpot, and VMLogix (acq. by Citrix). Before Bain Capital, Ambar was the assistant to the CEO at MinuteClinic, a company that runs health clinics staffed by nurse practitioners inside retail settings and was acquired by CVS.  He began his career at Bain & Co. where he worked on projects across various industries, including healthcare, business services and technology, as well as for non-profit clients at The Bridgespan Group.  After attending business school, Ambar interned with the City of Fremont, CA, where he helped the city develop its clean-tech strategy.

Ambar holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in economics and a B.A. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated magna cum laude.  He currently serves on the steering committee of the New England Venture Network (NEVN) and leads their healthcare group.  Ambar regularly blogs on his own site  Links to an external site.and at The Healthcare Breakfast Club Links to an external site..

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October 26, 2012

SPEAKER:  Richard B. Freeman, Harvard Economics Dept and NBER

LOCATION:  Cumnock Hall 103, Harvard Business School, MAP

TITLE: "Globalization of Science and Engineering Research Within and Across Countries".  
            Based on work with Wei Huang and work with Ina Ganguli and Raviv Goroff-Muriciano

BACKGROUND PAPERS: 
"What Does Global Expansion of Higher Education Mean for the US?" Chapter 11 in Charles T. Clotfelter (ed) American Universities in a Global Market (Univ of Chicago for NBER: 2010), pp 373-404. LINK Links to an external site.

"Globalization of Scientific and Engineering Talent: International mobility of students, workers, and ideas and the world economy," EINT Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Univ of Ca Berkeley, Vol 19:5 (2010): 393-406.  Downloadable under "Background Documents for Seminar Speakers"

BIO: Richard B. Freeman holds the Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University and is currently serving as Faculty co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School. He directs the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is Senior Research Fellow in Labour Markets at the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance. Professor Freeman is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. 

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November 2, 2012

SPEAKER:  Liam Schwartz, Senior Analyst for Policy Initiatives, Harvard Office of Institutional Research 

LOCATION:  Cumnock Hall 230, Harvard Business School, MAP

TITLE: "Challenges Facing the 21^st Century University: A View from the Office of Institutional Research"

ABSTRACT: The early 21^st century has posed a series of fundamental challenges for research universities.  This presentation will sketch how the Office of Institutional Research has engaged these issues in a number of recent projects, outline useful data sources, and suggest questions for future analysis.

BIO: Liam Schwartz is Senior Analyst for Policy Initiatives in Harvard's Office of Institutional Research.  His work has supported University-wide efforts in areas ranging from global engagement and technology to cross-faculty collaboration and Harvard's competitive positioning.  Liam has a BA in political science from UC Irvine and a PhD in Government from Harvard.

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November 9, 2012

cancelled

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November 16, 2012

tba

LOCATION: Baker 102, HBS campus, MAP

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November 23, 2012 

THANKSGIVING BREAK

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November 30, 2012

SPEAKER: Noubar B. Afeyan, PhD, Managing Partner and CEO, Flagship Ventures, and Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School 

LOCATION: Baker 102, HBS campus, MAP

TITLE: " Experiences in the Emerging Profession of Technology-Based Entrepreneuring" 

ABSTRACT: Entrepreneurship is classically viewed as an individual act, involving extremely low odds of success, great unpredictability, unbounded optimism and improvisation. Based on experiences from co-founding 25 startup ventures in as many years within the fields of healthcare, technology and sustainability, technology-based entrepreneurship appears to be maturing from its roots as a cottage industry and becoming a profession. If true, new models of education (in academia and practice), organization and financing will be needed especially as the profession greatly expands in membership as well as extending into the fast-emerging economies. One such organizational innovation is Flagship VentureLabs, a unique platform to institutionalize the processes of technology-based entrepreneurship with the objective of maximizing the speed, economics and success rate of new ventures. Our current practice, best described as Darwinian Entrepreneuring, involves small teams of experienced professionals that merge their technical and market-based creativity through an evolutionary process to maximize the potential value created. Systematic variation, rapid prototyping, constrained resources, early elimination, customer immersion and many other approaches have emerged as important disciplines in our endeavor.

BIO: Noubar Afeyan is founder, Managing Partner and CEO of Flagship Ventures.  He is also a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management where he has taught courses on technology entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership since 2000.  Dr. Afeyan has authored numerous scientific publications and patents since earning his Ph.D. in Biochemical Engineering from MIT in 1987.  During his 25-year career as inventor, entrepreneur, CEO and venture capitalist, he has co-founded and helped build 25 life science and technology startups.  His current portfolio ventures include:  AeroDesigns,  Affinnova, BIND Biosciences, BG Medicine, Eleven Biotherapeutics, Joule Unlimited, LS9, Midori , moderna therapeutics and ProNutria.  Dr. Afeyan is a member of several advisory boards including the Yale Climate & Energy Initiative and the SKOLKOVO School of Management in Moscow.  He is also a member of the Board of Overseers of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

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December 7, 2012

tba

LOCATION: Baker 102, HBS campus, MAP

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December 14, 2012

No Seminar

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December 21, 2012

No Seminar