Creating Leaders for Science-Based Businesses

From HBS Working Knowledge, by Garry Emmons ....

It's been said that in this century, carbohydrates will replace hydrocarbons, and biology will supplant physics as the innovation-producing science. As science fiction becomes science fact, and with science-based firms presenting unique challenges for managers, HBS is examining how, in its teaching and research, it can best contribute to what will be a major new force in the American economy.

For several decades, the view from the HBS campus across Western Avenue has been decidedly "old economy." But now, creative destruction has come to the neighborhood, and change is in the air.

While trucks continue to rumble in and out of the container-cargo rail yard opposite the HBS parking lot, the depot's days are numbered. Adjacent to it, several blocks of low-rise commercial buildings are already history, demolished and carted away, seemingly overnight. Spiking skyward above the flattened landscape left behind, giant construction cranes, clustered over the site's several acres, accentuate its emptiness. It is here that Harvard University is putting down a big bet on the future—and on a dramatically new, emerging economy. From the rubble will rise the 530,000-square-foot Allston Science Complex—four multistory buildings, due for completion in 2011—the centerpiece of the initial phase of Harvard's 300-acre development on the Boston side of the Charles River.

New management skills needed

Both in the scale and scope of Harvard's ambitions and in the proximity of these new buildings, this emphasis on science will affect HBS. The unique challenges of managing and leading science-based businesses—certain to be a driver of this century's new economy—demand new management paradigms. For a core group of HBS professors, that has meant some soul-searching in terms of how and what the School teaches, and to whom. How can HBS best complement and contribute to the work of the University's world-renowned laboratories as well as to cutting-edge, science-based firms in Boston and beyond? 

Can the School itself learn from the labs' inspirational (but results-oriented) dedication to finding solutions to huge challenges? For example, should blocks of the HBS curriculum focus on big, multidisciplinary problems—such as the world's water shortage—and how to solve them? How about increasing the number of MBA students who have science backgrounds and the number of Executive Education offerings that teach scientists business and organizational fundamentals? What about joint MBA/Ph.D. programs? How about science/business seminars, more science-based cases, and more science-savvy faculty to teach them?

Read the rest of the article ...