Lynda M. Applegate

Baker Foundation Professor, Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration, Emerita

Professor Applegate is the Baker Foundation Professor at HBS and also serves as the Chair of the Advisory Committee for Harvard University’s Masters’ of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies degrees in finance and management. She also plays a leading role in developing and delivering HBS Executive Education Programs for entrepreneurs and business owners. In addition to serving as the head of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit and chair of the HBS Owner Managed Executive Education Programs, Lynda has held a variety of leadership positions at HBS, including serving as Co-Chair of the MBA program, Chair of Field Based Learning and as a founding member of the HBS Technology Board. She has also held a number of Harvard University leadership positions, including serving as the Co-Chair of the Harvard Policy Group on Networked Government Services and on the Harvard University Provost’s Technology Advisory Board. Prior to joining the HBS faculty, Lynda was on the faculty of the University of Michigan, University of Washington and University of Arizona. In addition to her academic positions, Lynda also held a variety of leadership positions in the health care industry.

Lynda’s research and publications focus on the challenges of building new ventures and leading radical business innovation in the face of significant industry, technological, capital market, and regulatory turbulence. A second stream of research examines emerging leadership and governance models to support entrepreneurial ecosystem evolution and inter-firm collaboration and innovation. During the Global Economic Crisis, she began conducting research on how entrepreneurial leaders innovate through crisis and build resilient organizations. During the past few years, this research expanded to address issues of assuring economic equality for women and for minority entrepreneurs and business owners. In partnership with the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, where she serves on the Board of Trustees, Lynda recently helped launch a Board Ready Bootcamp to prepare women and minority business leaders to serve as Board Members on for-profit and non-profit boards and she is also a member of a working group that has successfully launched a Compact for Social Justice that has been signed by over 80 of the largest technology companies located in Massachusetts. In addition to serving as Series Editor for Harvard Business Publishing’s Core Readings in Entrepreneurship, Lynda is the author of over 40 articles, books, and book chapters, and over 400 published case studies, online learning DVDs, and course materials.

Lynda is the recipient of numerous HBS awards for her research, teaching, and service to the school. She recently received the Robert F. Greenhill Award for her outstanding contributions to HBS over the course of her career. She has also received Harvard Business School’s Berol Award for Research Excellence and its Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching. Lynda has won numerous “Best Paper” awards for her academic research on 21^st century business models and executive team decision-making and collaboration, and has served as a Senior Editor and on the editorial boards for leading research journals in the field of technology innovation. More recently, she also received the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her decades of work with the Women Presidents Organization.

Lynda is an active international consultant and has served on the board of directors of public, private, non-profit and venture-backed companies. She is an advisor and advisory board member for entrepreneurs launching new ventures and for senior executives leading innovation in established companies. In the past, Lynda has also served as a member of the Industry Advisory Board for NASDAQ and as a member of the Executive Council for Information Technology and Management for the U.S. Government Accountability Office. She also served as a policy advisor on a Blue-Ribbon Panel to define a National Research Agenda on the development of the Network Economy and, in the late 1990s, served as a member of President Clinton’s Roundtable on Critical Infrastructure Protection.

Thomas R. Eisenmann

Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration; Peter O. Crisp Faculty Chair, Harvard Innovation Labs

Thomas R. Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, Peter O. Crisp Chair, Harvard Innovation Labs, and Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the Harvard MS/MBA Program, and the Harvard College Technology Innovation Fellows Program. Eisenmann teaches the MBA elective Entrepreneurial Failure and the MS/MBA core courses Technology Venture Immersion and Launch Lab. In recent years, he has served as Chair of Harvard’s MBA Elective Curriculum—the 2nd year of the MBA Program—and as course head of The Entrepreneurial Manager, taught to all 900 1st-year MBAs. With colleagues, he launched the MBA electives Making Markets, which focuses on marketplace design, Scaling Technology Ventures, Entrepreneurial Sales & Marketing, and Product Management 101, in which students specify and supervise development of a software application. Eisenmann also created the January Term Startup Bootcamp for first-year MBAs and the MBA electives Launching Technology Ventures and Managing Networked Business, which surveyed strategies for platform-based businesses that leverage network effects. He twice co-led a Harvard Innovation Lab course, Cultural Entrepreneurship in New York City, in which students from across Harvard spent a winter break week in New York exploring new ventures in fashion, food, and fine arts, and co-led four similar winter break trips to study entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.

Professor Eisenmann received his Doctorate in Business Administration (’98), MBA (’83), and BA (’79) from Harvard University. Prior to entering the HBS Doctoral Program, Eisenmann spent eleven years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he was co-head of the Media and Entertainment Practice. He currently serves as a director on the board of Harvard Business Publishing.

Shikhar Ghosh

MBA Class of 1961; Professor of Management Practice of Business Administration

Shikhar Ghosh is a Professor of Management Practice in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. He currently teaches and is the course head for Founders’ Journey in the elective curriculum and is also the Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. He formerly taught and served as co-course head of The Entrepreneurial Manager, required for all 900 1st-year MBAs.

Shikhar has been a successful entrepreneur for the last 20 years. He has been the founder and CEO or Chairman of eight technology-based entrepreneurial companies and was the past Chairman of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MTLC) and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE) – two leading entrepreneurial organizations. He was selected by Business Week as one of the best Entrepreneurs in the US, by Forbes as one of the ‘Masters of the Internet Universe’ and by Fortune as the CEO of one of the 10 most innovative companies in the US. Companies he founded were selected as both the ‘hottest’ and ‘coolest’ emerging companies by business publications.

Shikhar joined the Boston Consulting Group after getting his MBA from HBS in 1980. At BCG he focused on organization and innovation in large organizations. He was elected a worldwide partner of the firm in 1987. Shikhar left BCG in 1988 to become CEO of Appex, an early-stage venture backed company that built the inter-carrier infrastructure for the US mobile phone industry. Appex provided centralized services that enabled independent mobile carriers to operate as a single seamless network. Appex’s services included call forwarding across carriers, fraud prevention services, billing and customer service. Appex was bought by EDS in 1990. By the time Shikhar left in 1993, Appex’s revenues exceeded $100 million with an order backlog of over $1 billion. It was selected by Business week as the fastest growing private company in the US.

Shikhar founded Open Market in 1993. Open Market was one of the pioneering companies in the commercialization of the Internet. It built the first commercial infrastructure for enabling secure commerce on the Internet and provided the software and services that enabled companies like Time Warner and AT&T to offer their services on the Internet. Open Market was one of the first Internet companies to go public. It was selected by numerous business publications as one of the companies that helped to make the Internet what it is today.

Since leaving Open Market Shikhar has been the founder, CEO or Chairman of several companies in the wireless, payment, Internet marketing, and on-line retailing industries. He has worked in all facets of the entrepreneurial process – starting companies with technical teams, providing and raising capital with venture capitalists, buying and selling companies, or taking them public and closing down unsuccessful companies. He has been a keynote speaker in numerous conferences on innovation, entrepreneurship, digital media and on the future of the Internet.

Archie L. Jones

Senior Lecturer of Business Administration

William R. Kerr

Dimitri V. D’Arbeloff – MBA Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration; Unit Head, Entrepreneurial Management

William Kerr is the D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Bill is the Unit Head of Entrepreneurial Management, co-director of Harvard’s Managing the Future of Work initiative, and the faculty chair of the Launching New Ventures program. Bill is a recipient of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship and Harvard’s Distinction in Teaching award.

Bill’s recent book is The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society (2018). It explores the global race for talent and how countries and businesses compete for high-skilled migrants. The book reveals how immigration has transformed U.S. innovation, reshaped the economy through the rise of talent clusters and superstar firms, and influenced society at large in positive and adverse ways. The book argues that America, and the world, can get more out of global talent flows with sensible reforms.

The Managing the Future of Work project considers the unprecedented set of challenges and opportunities presented to businesses, including rapid technological revolutions, shifting global product and labor markets, aging workforces, and growing skills gaps. These forces change the ways that businesses compete with each other and engage workers. This multi-faculty project identifies how companies, schools, workers and the public sector can come together to manage the challenging transitions ahead as the nature of work is radically transformed. The initiative produces leading research on these themes and disseminates to broader audiences through platforms like the MFW podcast series.

Bill’s broader research centers on how companies and economies explore new opportunities and generate growth. He considers the leadership and resources necessary to identify, launch and sustain dynamic and enduring organizations. He works with companies worldwide on the development of new ventures and transformations for profitable growth. He also advises governments about investments in the innovative capacities of their nations.

Bill and his family live in Lexington, MA. They enjoy outdoor sports and trail running, are active members of their local church, and maintain close ties to his wife’s home country of Finland. Bill grew up in Alabama and remains a passionate college football fan.