Hi, I'm Laura Huang. I'm a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School. I teach the MBA course in entrepreneurship. >> Hi, I'm Kartik Hosanagar. I'm a Professor of Technology and Digital Business at the Wharton School. I teach a course called Enabling Technologies, which is an overview of the tech sector for our undergraduate and MBA students. >> I'm Karl Ulrich, I'm a professor at the Wharton School. And I mostly teach product design. Product design and development, but also design of web based products and services, and innovation management. >> I'm Lori Rosenkopf, I'm a professor at the Wharton School. I teach classes in innovation change and entrepreneurial management in sociology of the tech sector, and in network theory. >> I'm Ethan Mollick, I'm a professor of entrepreneurship here at Wharton, and I teach a bunch of courses on entrepreneurship. >> All right, well, let's see, when I was a sophomore in college, I had a summer job in Salic CIty, and I lived in this little bungalow with a friend named Jay. And Jay had, there was a garage in the back of that bungalow, and he ran a business in that garage. It's called and they made soft goods for the ski patrol. Like, to hold your radio and they made the pads for the ski lifts and so forth. And I remember, I went back into the garage the first time. I opened the door, I looked in there and I thought, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Because you've got the fabric coming in here. And they've got machines that cut it. And then he's got finished goods over there. And there are customers who are paying him money for this stuff. And then he's got workers. I thought, wow, this is the coolest thing ever. And that's when I got really interested in entrepreneurship. And it's actually taken, let's see, about 30 years to actually be able to circle back around and actually be able to teach entrepreneurship, do projects in entrepreneurship that involve small businesses, involve our students. My detour was that I got an engineering degree. I did research and private development and other areas, but I feel just super privileged to now be front and center in what's happening in entrepreneurship at work. >> I was also trained as an engineer, I'm a systems engineer. And in working as an engineer, I found that it wasn't the best technology, the best idea that was winning. It was the one that had the best development, and the most support, and the largest communities creating support for it. So that got me interested in doing my PhD in communities and networks, and how they shape opportunities for individuals, and for firms, and even for industries. So that's what I've been doing for the last 23 years here at Wharton. >> So as for me, I started a business in construction abroad, and my friend's the cofounder of the business, after my undergraduate degree, and made literally every mistake you could possibly make. Every single possible issue, we encountered it. So from hiring issues to equity division issues, to fundraising and we're still pretty successful despite that. And that left me kind of baffled because it felt really hard to build a successful company and despite all the mistakes and I thought I'm going to figure out how to do this right. Got an MBA and then realized I still don't know the answers so maybe I'll go research this. So every since then I have been trying to study the kind of choices that you make in very early in the entrepreneurial process and the long term outcomes of that. And I've become increasingly interested also in how we get more people to be entrepreneurs and innovators. Because opportunities aren't equally available to everybody. Yet, innovation is spread out much more equally. So how do we increase the opportunity of under represented groups geographies to get a chance to do start ups. And that's been my passion recently. So I was also trained as an engineer [LAUGH]. I was an electrical [LAUGH] >> Who wasn't trained as an engineer. You don't have a Korean engineer? >> I don't have a Korean engineer. >> I didn't know that, get rid of him. So I have a degree in engineering, I was an electrical engineer at a Biomedical Engineer and one of my first jobs was designing stents for balloon angioplasty. And basically, I found some of the similar things that Lori had found. Is basically, it wasn't always the best product that would win in the market. And that you could develop a lot of different things and it wasn't always that piece of it. I very quickly realized that the pure engineering side of things was not as interesting to me. And I got pulled onto a technical marketing team, which was basically set out to translate the technical specifications to the marketing and sales groups. And found that I was really interested in the people side of things, and found that a lot of the organizational behavior issues, a lot of the perceptions and attributes that people were making were actually driving what was happening in entrepreneurship and in innovation. And so, a lot of the things that I look at now in terms of my research is from that point of view. Is from looking at what are the perceptions and attributions that people are making? What are the subtle signals and queues that are driving things? It's not always the quality of an idea. Sometimes it's other things that are affecting what's happening and so that's kind of how I became interested in entrepreneurship and how things actually get out there. Mark? >> So in my case, most of my work is focused on technology and digital business. I'm an engineer, as well. >> [LAUGH] >> A critical engineering and computer science and so pretty much my whole professional career has been focused on technology. My first brush with entrepreneurship was as a kid when I ran a crowd source, or a collaborative library with my friends, so all my friends would contribute the books they had, and I would house it at my place and there would be a small membership fee and they could take somebody's elses book and use it over the summer. So that was my first brush. But my more serious foray into entrepreneurship was roughly about ten years back, when I co-founded a company called Yodle with a couple of undergraduate students here at Penn. And that company has grown, we have a thousand plus employees. But I learned most of the practical side of entrepreneurship through that company. And since then I've been working with a lot of students at Penn, advising them, mentoring them, and sometimes investing in them. And so, I've enjoyed that process. And this course actually takes some of that and helps scale this and it's a great opportunity to engage with a larger community of entrepreneurs. >> Wharton has this unique positioning where we are able to teach people how to scale and grow and build their enterprises. And so, I think we use a lot of research based methods and we draw from research a lot to kind of think about how entrepreneurs not only come up with their idea but also continue to take it forward and grow in scale. So I think that's one thing that Wharton does very well. And that's kind of the entrepreneur management piece of it as well. It's not just, do you have a good idea and what do you do with it, but how do you actually take it broader and what are the various ways you can do so. >> Mm-hm. >> No it's one of things I really like about Wharton is that it does seem to find this magic blend of rigor and relevance, which is most people were only interested in working on problems somebody cares about. And entrepreneurship is something a lot of people care about but we don't just bring anecdote or wisdom to it, we try to bring models, data, frameworks, structure to solving problems in entrepreneurship. >> There's been a host of Wharton alumni who've been able to start incredible businesses in a wide variety of industries. And one of the areas where Wharton has historically been known is in finance and, in fact, FinTech is full of Morgan entrepreneurs at this point. >> And EdTech, and- >> Hedge funds, private equity, these were Morgan entrepreneurs starting up these sorts of businesses as well. But you're right, EdTech, lots of different areas. >> What's cool about this session is you were showing us some of what you'll be doing. And there were a lot of examples of folks I didn't even know were entrepreneurs who you had known and worked with. I had this nervous experience where we had this very successful company that the idea came out of one of my classes. And the entrepreneur's coming back to speak in my class and I realized I had to figure out what grade I gave them. Because I was very nervous that, what if I had given them a C or something and they had raised $100 million? But they got an A minus which I think is the perfect grade for that sort of thing. >> [LAUGH] >> But there is a sense that we all got a chance to experience different entrepreneurs coming in through out class. I said we've been entrepreneurs, and we've lived this too. And we live it through our students in a regular basis. >> Yeah, I mean, it's one of the most amazing things about this job is that every September several thousand fresh faces show up. We get to participate in their education and then we have really a life long connection to the entrepreneurs. It's really an amazing thing.
