Stories
Stories
Investing in Innovation
Photo by Susan Young
On April 25, Harvard Business School launched a campaign that will position the School for leadership in management education in the 21st century. The primary objectives of The Harvard Business School Campaign are to:
- Inspire significantly increased levels of participation and engagement among alumni
- Inform, identify, and engage the next generation of HBS leaders
- Strengthen the perception of HBS and business in the world
- Engage with and support the University in new and mutually beneficial ways
- Raise funds for current priorities and future flexibility.
"Today, as we launch this new Campaign for Harvard Business School," said Dean Nitin Nohria in addressing the nearly 600 alumni leaders and invited guests who attended the daylong HBS Campaign Inaugural program, "let us take the opportunity to ask ourselves: When future generations look back on this time, what will our legacy be? What choices will we make? How will we reimagine this institution and leave it stronger than we found it?
"When I look at the challenges facing our world today, I'm convinced that now more than ever we need the type of leadership Harvard Business School can provide," Nohria said. "Over the last century, more than a billion people have been brought into the circle of economic inclusion—but there are still billions more waiting, in America and around the world. Business leaders have a vital role to play in helping to widen this circle of inclusion. Together, we can make a difference.
"To prepare leaders to succeed in this more complex world, and to increase our scale and reach to bring our mission to even more people, requires a relentless dedication to innovation."
John Hess (AB 1975, MBA 1977), CEO of the Hess Corporation and chair of The Harvard Business School Campaign, joined Dean Nohria and Harvard President Drew Faust for the Inaugural Event, which included a morning and afternoon of case discussion, student interactions, and faculty-led alumni panel sessions.
"In America and around the world, the public has lost trust in business," said Hess in his remarks to the audience. "Business and society have never been more divided. Even as the economy has recovered, trust has not. As business leaders, we need to remind the public that business is a force for good and is fundamental to societal progress by creating jobs, investing in communities, and bringing the world much-needed products and services.
"In an era of budget austerity and political gridlock," Hess added, "business is called on to play a larger role in providing social good. And we need the public to understand how important Harvard Business School is to this effort."
University-wide Effort
With the launch of The Harvard Business School Campaign, the School has now formally joined the other schools of Harvard in an unprecedented University-wide campaign. At the time of the University kick-off, Harvard President Faust said, "Although a campaign is most explicitly about generating resources, it is at the same time about intensifying the commitment of alumni and friends, creating new supporters, and identifying emerging volunteer leadership. A campaign is inevitably a defining moment—an opportunity for institutional reflection, analysis, and self-definition, and for articulating aspirations and pursuing priorities."
In September 2013, Faust launched the five-year, $6.5 billion Harvard Campaign. The financial goal for The Harvard Business School Campaign is $1 billion. As of April 25, HBS had raised more than 50 percent of that goal, with gifts from thousands of alumni and friends who gave to the HBS Fund for Leadership and Innovation or made gifts directed to specific priorities.
A multiyear series of Campaign events will be held in more than 20 locations around the world, each designed to connect alumni in learning about and sharing the vision for the School. The first was set for the HBS campus for all alumni in the Greater Boston region on April 26, followed by events in San Francisco and Los Angeles in June.
"This campaign gives us new opportunities to connect with our alumni," Hess noted. "Personally, it's been a wonderful opportunity for me to get to know so many of you. It's natural for the school to look toward alumni for financial support. But it wants—and needs—us to serve other roles as well—to recruit, mentor, and advise students; to inspire and inform case studies; and to share our insight and experience."
Mission and Priorities
"The mission of Harvard Business School is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world," said Nohria.
"By joining this Campaign, you are joining with us to push forward in our mission, and investing to build better leaders. No gift can have greater leverage than an investment in developing leaders. Each of you has witnessed the difference leadership makes in the organizations you care most about—how an effective leader can create so much better and how an ineffective leader can destroy so much value. Leaders have a powerful multiplier effect. They can make the investment you make in any organization produce significantly greater returns.
"Put simply, leadership makes all the difference—and few institutions can rival Harvard Business School in developing leaders. I ask you for your support in this important work."
Referring to the School's five "I's" priorities, Nohria laid out how the Campaign will promote progress in each of these areas:
- Innovation—Redefining management education for the 21st century through current-use and endowment gifts to support continued innovation in the MBA Program, such as the field method, and HBX, the School's new online education platform.
- Intellectual Ambition—Pursuing cross-disciplinary faculty collaboration, generating important and relevant scholarly work focused on society's complex challenges, and supporting the development of junior and practitioner faculty.
- Internationalization—Pursuing a broad intellectual footprint with a lean physical footprint through research, case writing, and the HBS global research center network.
- Inclusion—Current-use and endowment gifts will support MBA and doctoral fellowships and help create an inclusive environment where the world's best talent can thrive and be inspired to do their best work in support of the School's mission.
- Integration—Pursuing opportunities to encourage and support research and curriculum development for HBS faculty members teaching undergraduate and graduate students across the University through the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) and in cross-University initiatives such as the Public Education Leadership Project.
"In order to innovate in our educational programs to develop the next generation of leaders," Hess said, "the school requires flexible funding to invest in innovation. That's an important part of what this campaign will help to achieve."
Robert Steven Kaplan, the Martin Marshall Professor of Management Practice in Business Administration and faculty chair for the Campaign, noted that a crucial element of support for the innovative work of the School and its faculty is the HBS Fund for Leadership and Innovation, which provides immediate-impact (unrestricted, current-use) funding for new and emerging initiatives. Without these funds, Kaplan said, the School's ability to respond rapidly to pathbreaking new programs and activities is severely limited.
"Where gifts to the School's endowment strengthen our ability to fund established commitments such as professorships and building projects," Kaplan said, "current-use, unrestricted funding gives us the flexibility to pursue exciting new paths and programs. It is the most powerful way for our alumni and friends to drive innovation and new initiatives at Harvard Business School."
"The innovations we are pursuing," said Nohria, "are great examples of how we are responding to the big shifts we see in the world today—globalization, vast entrepreneurial opportunities, the transformational power of digital technologies, and the immense potential of One Harvard to meet these challenges. They are designed to make Harvard Business School stronger and the leaders it educates better prepared to make a difference in the world.
"As important as we believe these innovations will be, we must have the humility to accept that the world will inevitably present challenges we cannot anticipate today," Nohria added. "By undertaking these innovations, and proving to ourselves we can do so successfully and sustainably, the most important thing we are doing is preparing HBS for any future challenge. As we have shown throughout our history, the best—indeed only—way to remain a leader is to be an innovator. The enduring legacy of this campaign will be to enable HBS to be the best at innovation—not just for the coming decade, but for many more to come."
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