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Harvard Students Help Mom-and-Pop Shops Get off the Ground
Senior Lecturer Kristin W. Mugford
(photo courtesy of Kristin Mugford)
Senior Lecturer Kristin W. Mugford
(photo courtesy of Kristin Mugford)
Students at Harvard Business Schools are taking their education to the streets of Boston to help small entrepreneurs build their businesses and succeed. Along the way, the students are learning lessons that their classroom experience has perhaps only hinted at.
“It’s one thing to learn in a case study environment,” said senior lecturer Kristin W. Mugford, who helped launch the class with Baker Foundation Professor Len Schlesinger. “It’s a very different situation when you’re sitting and meeting with a small business owner and an employee walks out of the door and the owner has to go into the kitchen and work the grill.”
Students from the class have worked with about a dozen small businesses over the past two semesters, including yoga studios, pho restaurants, and neighborhood bakeries in Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and Somerville, Mugford told the Boston Globe. And the experience has been eye-opening.
“The projects I’ve worked on for boards took months and months,” said Lia Prendergast (MBA 2017), who worked with the managers of Allston’s Swissbakers on a new inventory management system. “Here the impact was tangible.”
Read more of this story at the Boston Globe.
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