Inside HBS with Jeff Bussgang - Scaling Minority Businesses (8/28/20)

Foreign. Jeff Busgang here from Harvard Business School and Flybridge Capital. I am really excited to share some big news about a new course that's launching next week at Harvard Business School called Scaling Minority Businesses. The course was created this summer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. It was put together to address the racial inequities in business that black business owners face and to do Harvard's part in a small way to engage our students in the work ahead. The course was created by two of my faculty colleagues who I have with me today and I'm excited to have them to share with you about the course. Professor Henry McGee and Professor Archie Jones. Professor McGee was a former media executive who's been on the Harvard faculty for seven years now and and Professor Jones is in his second year with the Entrepreneurship department and is going to be teaching this course as the course head, a former financial services executive with great experience to talk about these challenges that minority businesses face. So with that, let me turn it over to Professor McGee and he can share with you a little bit about the course.

Henry thank you, Jeff. I'm very excited to be part of the team that put together this course. The need for Scaling Minority Businesses could not be more urgent. We've put together this course in order to have an important impact on Boston area black businesses and also provide an important learning opportunity for our students. To do that, we're going to use three different modes of learning. Certainly we'll use the traditional case study method, but we're also going to hear from experts in the field as guest lecturers and also, and importantly, the core of the course. We're going to have hands on consulting projects with Boston area minority businesses. Our virtual classroom cases will include a new case on the HBS Black Venture Competition that is co authored by Professor Bus Gang and HBS Senior Fellow Karen Mills, the former head of the Small Business Administration who will serve as a guest lecturer for the course. We're also going to employ a new live case format for discussion involving a Boston Area initiative, Support Minority Entrepreneurs, which didn't work out as hope. The protagonists are going to join us in the virtual classroom and we're going to work together to see if we can figure out a way to get this program back on track. We also have an amazing list of guest speakers. Professor Michael Porter, whose groundbreaking work you studied last year in Strategy, will talk about the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City that he's founded. We'll hear from Brookings Institution Fellow Andre Perry on his research on the impact of COVID 19 on Black businesses. Sharon Patterson, who's the CEO of the Billion Dollar Roundtable, the organization of businesses that annually spend at least $1 billion with minority owned suppliers, will talk with us about what works and what doesn't work when it comes to minority supplier development programs. Of course, the core of the course is our hands on consulting projects with Boston businesses. And for that I'm going to turn it over to the course head, Professor Archie Jones. Archie?

Thanks Henry. The power of this course is marrying together great course content with great guest speakers, and then also delivering high value, high impact field work. As Such, we've selected 10 wonderful minority owned businesses here in the Boston area. These businesses are ready to scale. And by ready to scale, I mean they aren't just looking to survive in these uncertain times, but these businesses are looking to thrive and looking for our students to be a part of that effort. Also, in order to have great field work, you got to have a variety of industries and sectors and we've got that. We have businesses ranging in sectors from cyber security, specialized construction, real estate development and community development. And we've even got a couple of innovative nonprofits that are focusing on building the talent and financial pipeline for minority firms. Last but not least, we've got impactful projects. These projects are just what you'd expect for a course entitled Scaling Minority Businesses. These projects are all focused in on scaling, whether it's prioritizing strategic growth options, developing business and financing plans, integrating recently completed mergers and acquisitions, or looking to the future for new acquisitions and new strategic partnerships. Over to you, Jeff.

Thanks Archie and Henry. This course is going to be awesome. Super excited to see how it develops. Look, Harvard, like many institutions, has been thinking deeply about grappling with the role that capitalism plays historically in racist policies. We believe that capitalism has been a force for good over the centuries, but we also acknowledge that capitalism has failed many. And this course is really going to dig into the intellectual underpinnings of that question as well as allowing our students to really have impact in the community. Should be a tremendous amount of fun. I hope Henry and Archie will come back and tell us more about the course as things develop. And certainly I hope we'll see some of you in the course soon. Thanks so much.

Thank you.