Liberal Arts Meet Business: Danny Warshay on the Nelson Center’s Innovative Approach to Entrepreneurship

What does it mean to teach entrepreneurship in dominantly a liberal arts setting? The way I teach entrepreneurship is a structured process for solving problems, and I not only think of the way we teach entrepreneurship as that structured process to be appropriate for a liberal arts setting, I think of it as a liberal art. And I know from being in touch with the thousands who've taken I've had students take my class that they come back and they say, you know, I wasn't exactly sure how I was gonna use that See, Solve, Scale method, but I use it all the time. And that's people doing everything Brown students do— public health, like you, a physician, the law, being in the arts, the military, being on Wall Street, being in big companies, running nonprofits, government. They all use the approach that I've taught them. To identify, to solve on a small scale, and then to scale big solutions to consequential problems. And so that's why I've grown to understand that teaching entrepreneurship the way we do at the Nelson Center and the way I write in my book and the way I teach it in my classes is not only appropriate for a liberal arts environment, it is a liberal art.

This is the Visible Voices podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Risa E. Lewis. In today's episode, I am delighted to share my conversation with Danny Warshay. Danny is the executive director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship and professor of the practice at Brown University. He is a graduate of Brown and also of Harvard Business School. He's the author of the St. Martin's Press book, See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. Question listeners, do you consider yourself a designer, an entrepreneur? I actually believe that we are all designers, and Danny and I both believe we are all entrepreneurs. And the working definition we have for entrepreneurship is a structured process for solving problems without regard to the resources currently available. Danny, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Risa. Real pleasure to be here.

So according to your father, writing is the most important skill we can master. Discuss.

It's a nice thing to think at the very outset of this podcast about my father. I was very close with my parents. I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and my father was a chemical engineer, a PhD working at NASA, literally a rocket scientist for almost all his career. And so when the Shaker Heights school system came to him and wanted some advice about how to start a science magnet school, and they started to talk a little bit about the curriculum, he said the most important thing for you to teach in this science magnet school is the students how to write. And the people from the school district recoiled a little bit. They were confused. They said, no, no, no, Dr. Warshay, we're talking about a science magnet school. And he said, I know I spend a lot of time in my science experiments, but they're worthless if I can't communicate what I've discovered. And so that always stuck with me. And even now, when I teach at Brown, a staple of my course is to learn how to communicate.

And that communication is both the written word as well as the spoken word. You studied history. I was a sociology concentrator. Tell me and the audience why liberal arts is important and plays a role in any kind of education.

I'm a huge proponent of the liberal arts and probably now more than ever. And I certainly am a proponent of liberal arts as a background, as a foundational skill for entrepreneurship. What does it mean to teach entrepreneurship in dominantly a liberal arts setting? The way I teach entrepreneurship is a structured process for solving problems. And I not only think of the way we teach entrepreneurship as that structured process to be appropriate for a liberal arts setting, I think of it as a liberal art. And I know from being in touch with the thousands who have taken my class that they come back and they say, you know, I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to use that See, solve, scale method, but I use it all the time. And that's people doing everything Brown students do: public health, like you, a physician, the law, being in the arts, the military, being on Wall Street, being in big companies, running nonprofits, government. They all use the approach that I've taught them to identify, to solve on a small scale, and then to scale big solutions to consequential problems. And so that's why I've grown to understand that teaching entrepreneurship the way we do at the Nelson Center and the way I write in my book and the way I teach it in my classes is not only appropriate for a liberal arts environment, it is a liberal art.

I love that very much. It is a liberal art. And as I shared in my intro, I actually think all of us are entrepreneurs, whether we realize it or not. We are all storytellers, whether we realize it or not, and we are all designers. And my frame has been through healthcare and as a physician and healthcare design. And similar to the See-Solve-Scale, there is this concept of observing, imagining, making. And that first stage of the brainstorm, the what exactly is the question, what are we looking to solve, is actually one of the more difficult. I wanna go back out again to the Nelson Center. For audience members that aren't that familiar, it's almost a decade old. It's about to celebrate its 10th birthday. And the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, it was founded in September 2016, launched with a $25 million gift from Jonathan M. Nelson, who was Brown class of '77. And the mission of the center is to help students in the community develop impactful solutions. And speaking of see, solve, scale, it has become wildly popular. Alum know all about the Nelson Center. Certainly everybody on campus and in the Providence community knows about the Nelson Center. You oversee, work with a team. It's a small team. It's a powerful team. How are you scaling this wild popularity, the demand, and the fact that so many people want a piece of the Nelson Center and directly, indirectly a piece of you?

That is a good question. Uh, sometimes I have to wonder that myself, and I'd say maybe one of the most Rewarding comments I can hear from all the stakeholders you mentioned, students of all kinds, every degree kind of candidate, faculty, parents, alumni, applicants, or even prospective applicants. I hear from many, many, many, many prospective applicants now who say, I want to go to Brown because of entrepreneurship in the Nelson Center. And I think, wow, how did that happen? But one of the most rewarding things I hear is, How do you do this? You have, up until a couple months ago, we had 4 people on the team. From now we have 5. So I always like to say, when you look at me, you're looking at 20% of our full-time staff. I am so proud of that. And maybe the short answer to your very good question is we use the same method that we teach everybody. It's see, solve, scale. And I guess if we weren't doing that, there would be a real problem. We use the method that you hinted at about seeing what the problem is before we rush into what I call a solution in search of a problem. We pilot things, we iterate, we know we're not going to get them perfectly, and we have the humility to admit that and the confidence to realize it's okay to do things on a small scale initially, recognizing there may be some failure involved, which is a word often people don't love. And then to your question about scale, we have scarce resources. And, and I know hearing $25 million makes it sound like we wouldn't. I know people think I'm sitting behind a desk with a big giant checkbook and I can write unlimited checks. It is definitely not the case. And we are raising a lot of money. We just committed to raising $13 more million. We've already raised over $50 million. So we are definitely in the scaling section. Last year alone, we had 1,378 students take our courses. That's just take our courses. Then we had thousands of others do our co-curricular activities, workshops, speakers, events. And then we not only want to motivate students to learn about the entrepreneurial process, seesaw scale, we want to empower them to do it. We emphasize the power, the benefits of scarce resources, keeping a small team, being agile and nimble, moving quickly. Not belaboring too much research, but doing some in the initial stage to make sure that we're onto something real. Again, iterating to make sure that we're not committed to something too early, prematurely. And then, yeah, having the guts to scale something to the point where we are embracing as many students who would be interested and then way beyond students, because during COVID we learned we could do these kinds of things. Reach people all over the world.

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When I came back to teach, I had to think about what it would mean to teach entrepreneurship In a dominantly liberal arts environment. You know, as we were saying, if somebody at Stanford said, come run an entrepreneurship center, or Babson or Wharton, the kinds of places you were mentioning, I think the blueprint would've been clear. And so if I had looked at those places, I think they might've confused what the approach should've been at Brown. I had some street cred. I was a Brown grad, a liberal arts concentrator. I had had a early entrepreneurial experience to be part of the leadership team of a software startup my senior year that we built up and sold to Apple. And so I had had a lot of the experiences myself that I was expecting to be empathetic about for our students. And I really didn't want to get too confused by what other places were doing that might not have been the right blueprint. I hope that doesn't hint at any kind of arrogance or condescension. Not at all. And the heads of lots of those other places were very generous. It's kind of the community feel of entrepreneurship centers, and I try to play that forward now. But what I did do is look at what Brown needed and what Brown's interests were. I will say parenthetically that the fact that Brown did not have and does not have a business school worked In our favor.

Yeah. Everybody is an entrepreneur, although they may not realize it.

Yeah. They have the capacity to do it, and they need a lot of things to help them do it, including a process. It's why I'm very particular about the phrasing. Just this morning, somebody emailed me and talked about the entrepreneurial mindset, and I don't like that phrase. It sounds like something you just I certainly don't like the phrase entrepreneurial spirit, which I kept hearing when people asked me to teach. I don't know how to teach a spirit. I don't know what you would do, but a process I think I can teach. I know I can, and I know people can learn it, can get really good at it, and then can apply it in whatever context they want. When I say any context, I mean I am, and we at the Nelson Center are agnostic about Whether you're launching a business, the scale model can be a variety of different things. It can be a nonprofit, it can be in a research lab, a social venture, it can be for profit. In fact, I always say we could rip the name off the building and call it the Nelson Center for Problem Solving, and that would be an accurate depiction.

Speaking of process, so in the built environment architecture world, I was introduced to the effort curve. It's also called the McLerney Curve, where the costs are easiest to control early in the process. Once a project is under construction, changes become exponentially more expensive. I'm sure you've seen this curve. I'm wondering if in analogous way with entrepreneurship about the effort, taking the time upfront is a much better return on investment than making changes later on in the entrepreneurship process.

Yeah, I even use the metaphor of a blueprint in the book and in my teaching. It's why I caution people, and it's the area where people make the biggest mistake, I'd say, not to be a solution in search of a problem. At least start with finding and validating an unmet need. That's one thing that can save you an enormous amount of resource that you could waste later if you rush past that. And just hope you've stumbled onto a solution. Don't leap to the scale stage. You're right. If you have very few resources deployed at the solve stage and you are open to iterating and not getting it perfect, once you do arrive at a solution through this, then you arrive at a place where you have something that is worthy of scaling and investing resources in. But it's so much easier to rearrange the pieces on a blueprint and so much less costly than to have to rip down a building and start from scratch. Yes, I, I like that metaphor.

Let's talk about wildcards, this concept of the importance and the beauty that is a wildcard. And if you can share some wildcard idea that has come on your plate that you've embraced over the last few weeks or in 2025.

The idea of a wildcard came from some colleagues who were doing some training, innovation training at big companies, and I thought about this too early on in my teaching. How do I get 20-year-olds to think really big? Because the premise of the scale stage is that you're going to develop something that is really big and really long-term so that it can fundamentally solve the problem that you're looking to solve. And if you can't do that and you're creating something small, it's maybe fine. I just don't call it entrepreneurship. And so I require that the teams I'm working with have at least one wildcard idea. And this colleague of mine occasionally will say a wildcard idea is something, and I don't mean this literally, but just to stretch your mind, illegal, immoral, or could get you fired. I don't mean that literally, but students tend to resonate with that. I have to push them a little bit and they love the idea that I'm getting, giving them permission to think about things that, and here's the other element there of a wildcard idea. that are innovative but not feasible. Because the adage that these couple of colleagues of mine like to use, and I've adopted, is it is far easier to turn an innovative idea feasible than a feasible idea innovative. And so wildcard ideas help get us out of our constraint mentality. There was recently a group of students in the class who Wanted to think about a wildcard idea. And the challenge they were thinking about intergalactic space travel was how do you power the engines of the rockets that are going to be going through multiple galaxies? And at first they had absolutely no idea. They didn't even know whether something was possible. But again, I said, great, don't worry about feasibility. They came across a couple of Brown professors who have some relevant research experience in this kind of a field. And they eventually stuck with that crazy wildcard idea and pitched it to the venture capitalists at the end of the semester. And it was very well received, not because it was feasible. Nobody had a clue how that might unfold, but because people could imagine that was a real unmet need. And look, these students had as much right to think about a solution as anybody. Nobody could call them a liar. But the main thing a wildcard idea does is stretch your thinking. Even if you don't land on that one per se, it will stretch your mind to what I call break your mental fixedness in ways that you won't if you're constrained by current resource constraints.

So important and such a clear way to allow openness, growth mindset, creativity. I'm wondering the extent to which you think a yoga practice and a commitment to non-attachment, non-possessiveness, and non- greed help with that creativity and the wildcard ideas?

I definitely do. I'm a yoga practitioner. We're all beginners. Even though I've been doing yoga for a long, long time, I'm still a beginner. And I asked my beloved yoga teacher, Shauna Green, to even write a section in the book, in the scale section, to help us not cling to things that we might think are important and useful, even imperative. She did, and I love that. But I remember her talking in one class about aparigraha, and aparigraha is about that concept about non-attachment, not clinging, not holding on to things. And I'd say when I work with big companies and other organizations, the military, big nonprofits, the government, the biggest problem they have is the burden of abundant resources. Thinking that all the traditions they have, the established business practices, the money, the talent, they think that all of that will continue to be helpful to them and valuable. And it's usually the opposite. And so learning aparigraha, not to cling to those things, and again, breaking your mental fixedness, changing the way your brain typically views the world, is one of the most important premises associated with all the steps of CSOLV scale approach.

When did you realize you had a voice, and when did you start using that voice?

In some ways, I've had a voice for my whole life. How it became a voice of a teacher is when a beloved professor of mine asked me to come back to Brown to teach, and I had to wonder, why me? I had never taught anything before, and I'm forever grateful to that teacher, Barrett Hazelteen, for asking me. And then it was my students who put me up to writing a book, and I realized I have a voice as an author as well.

The book came out in 2022. How are you different having written this book?

I feel like I have a platform that now does allow me to scale in a way that I didn't when I was teaching in meaningful ways, 40-ish students at a semester's clip. Now I have the ambition to share the CSolve scale approach with problem solvers, would-be problem solvers all over the world. Yeah, I feel like I have a platform that enables me to do what I do at a much larger scale. Let's face it, we have many, many, many problems that the world needs new solutions to. If the book I wrote is a, uh, vehicle, a catalyst to empowering and training new problem solvers, then I feel like my life's work has been worthwhile.

The RISA Wrap-Up. Special thanks to Danny Warshay of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship at Brown University. 3 conversation highlights for you, audience. Number 1, writing. It is absolutely crucial for effective communication And relatedly, public speaking is also a vital skill for everyone. Number 2, wildcard ideas. I love these. These encourage expansive thinking. So get into a creative space. You can do this, for example, by making sure you're really well rested, getting into nature, exercising regularly, doing yoga, and just spending time daydreaming. And number 3, scaling. Scaling an entrepreneurial venture. requires a structured approach to problem solving. And as Danny shared, and as I agree, that approach, entrepreneurship, can be thought of as a liberal art. That's all I have for you this week, audience. See you next time. The Visible Voices podcast amplifies voices in the healthcare equity and current trends spaces. We are a production of the People's Media Network. Our team includes Dr. Giuliano Deportu and me, Dr. Risa E. Lewis. Please find me through my website and on social media, Risa E. Lewis, MD, or through the podcast, thevisiblevoicespodcast.com. Please give us a 5-star rating on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, please be sure to share the show with a friend. The views and opinions expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not necessarily necessarily reflect the opinion of the institution with which they are affiliated or identified. Information herein should never be used as a substitute for clinical judgment or for medical advice.