Entrepreneurial Unit Travels to China
While China’s Communist Party still controls the country’s political machinery, the nation’s booming economy is increasingly in the hands of savvy entrepreneurs, with an estimated 70 percent of the nation’s GDP now produced by the private sector. To get an up-close look at China’s entrepreneurial success, ten faculty members from the School’s Entrepreneurial Management Unit traveled there last summer for a six-day, three-city series of meetings with dozens of business leaders, educators, and government officials.
“The goals of the trip were to begin to comprehend some of the fundamental changes in the Chinese economic and social system, and to see how entrepreneurship is being facilitated to play a role in this,” said Senior Lecturer Dan Isenberg, who helped organize the visits to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. The group met with 29 entrepreneurs, 75 venture-capital and private-equity professionals, and 77 corporate and government officials — contacts that will be helpful in future research and course development activities at the School.
The group learned that government at all levels is supportive of entrepreneurship. “It is impossible to grasp the scale of China’s transformation without seeing it with one’s own eyes,” Isenberg added. “The physical, economic, and social immensity of the change is impressive.”
For more about the trip, read an interview with Isenberg in HBS Working Knowledge: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5523.html.
