In the midst of this global coronavirus crisis, we at The Forum for Growth & Innovation are reflecting on how we can lend our hands and hearts to meet the needs of those in our community. Now, more than ever, we are mourning the loss of our friend and colleague, Clayton Christensen, who would have turned 68 this coming Monday, April 6th. This month also marks the release of our 50th podcast episode and, to celebrate this milestone, we’d like to share with you a conversation with Clay, Derek van Bever, and Joe Bower, Clay's doctoral thesis adviser and the Donald K. David Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School. They discuss the origins of Resource Allocation theory, including Joe's groundbreaking book, Managing the Resource Allocation Process: A Study of Corporate Planning and Investment, as Joe's work both sparked Clay's insights into Disruptive Innovation and continues to offer key insights to firms today. The three also speak about the future of management and offer tips for managers and entrepreneurs. We hope that, with this conversation, managers struggling in the depths of this emergency will find a beacon of hope and guidance.

This week on The Disruptive Voice, we are delighted to bring you a conversation, recorded in early March, with Thomas Arnett. Thomas is a Senior Research Fellow - Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute, where he researches disruption in K-12 education, considers the role of educational technology in blended learning teaching models, and contributes to thought leadership on legislation and policies related to digital learning, teacher preparation, and teacher development. Previously, Thomas served as Board President at the Morgan Hill Unified School District, worked as an Education Pioneers Fellow with Achievement First, and was a middle school math teacher at Teach For America in Kansas City, Missouri. Given the national experiment in online education that has begun in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, with schools across the country transitioning to online learning, this conversation has become even more timely. In this episode, Thomas shares insights on the limits of disruption within the K-12 ecosystem, discusses the Jobs that teachers hire educational technology to do, and reflects on his time as a teacher in Kansas City, among other things. He is hosted by Christopher Diak, Program Assistant at The Forum for Growth & Innovation and a candidate for the M.Div. at Harvard Divinity School.   

In the US, many go bankrupt due to the extraordinary high costs in our healthcare system.  On an annual basis, we spend around $3.6 trillion – or 18% of GDP – on healthcare, but what do we get in exchange?  In this engaging episode, Dr. Mahek Shah discusses several topics at the heart of creating a more affordable and accessible healthcare industry: pricing prescription drugs, creating a better patient experience, and unleashing innovation through the power of technology.  For instance, what if going to the doctor was akin to the experience of visiting an Apple store?  Mahek has spent his career at the intersection of business, healthcare, and technology, working to help redesign, reimagine, and rehumanize healthcare. He's been at the frontier of advising organizations in moving to value-based care, understanding their Jobs To Be Done, and leveraging technology to deliver patient-centered care.  Listen now to hear from Dr. Shah as Katie Zandbergen, Community Manager at The Forum for Growth & Innovation, hosts this timely and lively conversation.

Here at Harvard Business School, we are mourning the recent passing of Professor Clayton Christensen. As many listeners will know, Clay died in late January following complications from leukemia. Our hearts go out to all who knew and were touched by him, and we feel that now, more than ever, we must press on, sharing his life’s work. Therefore, we are heartened to bring you this conversation with one of Clay’s brightest students: Horace Dediu. Horace is an analyst who studied disruption with Clay at The Christensen Institute. He's now leading a new revolution in how we transport ourselves: the micromobility revolution. He's the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at BOND Mobility, he co-founded a community-building and content-generating organization called Micromobility Industries, and he's an Analyst at Asymco. In his work, he draws on the theories of Disruption and Jobs To Be Done to target new and low-end markets. In fact, Horace contends that fully half of all driven miles in the United States will be substituted with micromobility-enabled options in the future! He is hosted in this fascinating and timely conversation by Katie Zandbergen, the Community Manager at The Forum for Growth & Innovation.

In 2009, at a time when The Atlantic was a 152 year old publication known chiefly for its erudite monthly magazine, Bob Cohn joined as Editor of Atlantic Digital. A career journalist, he arrived at The Atlantic five years into a fifteen year wave of disruption that shuttered the doors of some 1,800 local newspapers across the United States. Under Bob’s leadership, digital publishing thrived at The Atlantic, and he was named Co-President & COO in 2013 and President in 2016. Bob is hosted on this podcast episode by Derek van Bever, Director of The Forum for Growth & Innovation, and it was recorded in late November of 2019, while Bob was a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he taught a semester long series called “Journalism and Politics in an Age of Disruption.” Bob and Derek discuss the structure of the media industry and the fallout of disruption over the last 20 years, the circumstances which enabled The Atlantic to transition from a print monthly to a digital daily, and habits for responsible media consumption. Bob stepped down from his presidency at The Atlantic in 2019 and has just been named President/Managing Director of The Economist.

2020 is nearly upon us and here at The Forum we’re delighted to welcome the new year with Jessica O. Matthews, Founder & CEO of Uncharted Power. Jessica, a member of the HBS Class of 2014 and a BSSE alumna, is working to transform the global energy system into a renewable, smart, and distributed network of clean energy technology. A prolific inventor and entrepreneur, she was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and is listed on 11 patents and patents pending for technologies relating to energy generation, transmission, and storage. In this episode, Jessica discusses the challenges associated with our aging power grid infrastructure; the impact of her dual US/Nigerian citizenship on design strategies; viable options for energy generation, storage, and transmission; and the smart technologies that she and her team are working to develop at Uncharted Power. She is hosted by Katie Zandbergen, Community Manager at The Forum for Growth & Innovation. Katie holds a DPhil in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford and is a regular host of The Disruptive Voice.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year but for many high school seniors it means one thing: college application deadlines! This week on The Disruptive Voice, as millions of students hit “submit”, we’ve invited Bob Moesta and Michael Horn to The Forum to discuss why we go to college in the first place. They’ve recently released an excellent, highly-readable book called “Choosing College” that uses Jobs To Be Done-based research to examine why people hire education and how to choose it. You can further explore their findings at Choosing College. Michael received his MBA from HBS in 2006 and, since then, has worked closely with Professor Christensen on disruption in education, including as Co-Founder of The Christensen Institute. He's currently the Head of Strategy & Senior Partner Entangled Group and is Chief Strategy Officer & Principal Consultant at Entangled Solutions. Bob is a Disruptive Voice podcast veteran and, along with Prof Christensen, is co-architect of the Jobs To Be Done theory. He is also President & CEO of the The ReWired Group and moonlights as a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan, and the Kellogg School at Northwestern. Bob and Michael are hosted this week by Chris Diak, an M.Div. candidate at Harvard Divinity School and one of our newest members here at The Forum for Growth & Innovation.

The holidays are always a time of reflection and here at The Forum we’re looking inward to understand why people hire Harvard Business School to earn an MBA. Derek van Bever, Director of The Forum for Growth & Innovation, is joined in the studio by Community Manager, Katie Zandbergen, and Research Associate, Iulia Mogosanu, to discuss a research project they’ve undertaken using the Jobs To Be Done approach pioneered by Bob Moesta and Clayton Christensen. This research was carried out as part of a JTBD Toolbox initiative that The Forum team is working on for those interested in learning more about the practicalities of conducting Jobs-based consumer research. In this episode, we discuss the six steps outlined in the JTBD Toolbox, which will be released later this academic year; the process of conducting Jobs interviews; and three Jobs for which students and professionals hire Harvard Business School.

This week on The Disruptive Voice we bring you a conversation between Cliff Maxwell and Ned Calder on the electrification of the auto industry -- or, more broadly, the mobility industry -- using the theories of Disruption and Jobs To Be Done. As a partner at Innosight, where he has worked for over a decade, Ned has consciously applied these theories in his work in the high tech, automotive, aerospace, and defense sectors. His wealth of experience in the tech world also stems from his time with NASA and Atlas Scientific, where he worked prior to joining Innosight. Cliff Maxwell is a newly minted MBA candidate at Harvard Business School who most recently served as Clayton Christensen’s Chief of Staff and as a Product Manager at the Clayton Christensen Institute, where he worked on projects related to educational technology. We’re delighted to bring you this timely conversation on the push to electrify vehicles, the disruptive forces shaping the mobility industry, the prospects for autonomous vehicles, and the role of companies like Rivian.

This week on The Disruptive Voice, we are joined in the studio by Hari Nair, a longtime member of Clay World and one of the original members of the Innosight Asia team. Hari’s career has been focused on overcoming the challenges to innovation, in organizations large and small. Among the many projects and ventures he has pursued, he was deeply involved in the design and rollout of the chotuKool, a market-creating innovation in India that we have profiled in a BSSE case study. Hari has much to teach on how to use Jobs theory to shape product innovation efforts, and on how to spot non-consumption. He offers some advice to entrepreneurs wishing to understand the cues and clues to next-generation products and services. Hari has been on campus for the past year as a member of the school’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, and it is a great pleasure to share what he has learned about innovation, and about targeting non-consumption, with all of you.