Impact Stories

“I was particularly impressed by the excellence of the teaching.”

I had the great pleasure of receiving the Thomas McCraw Fellowship in 2023 and spending a semester at Harvard Business School. Although the purpose of my stay was research, I was particularly impressed by the excellence of the teaching. Taking part in the Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism course gave me a hands-on experience of the HBS case method. The discussion of topical business issues from a truly global and historical perspective was fascinating, and I'm now trying to draw inspiration from it in my courses in Osaka.

The four months I spent at HBS enabled me to complete the manuscript of a book on the business history of Rolex, in which I explore the relationship between J. Walter Thompson's American advertising agents and Swiss engineers in the creation of a product that expresses social status. I then launched a new project on the business history of the world's hospitals. In both these areas, I have benefited from the extraordinary research environment provided by HBS and Harvard University. The libraries and archives are simply fantastic and exceptionally rich. You only have to spend a few days in the reading rooms, leafing through inventories and browsing through archive boxes, to get a wealth of new ideas and the desire to carry out a multitude of new research projects.

But above all, HBS is all about excellent encounters. The school brings together a large number of personalities with whom discussions are enriching. The multiplicity of approaches to the study of business, the always global and critical dimension, as well as the openness to exchange, all contributed to making my stay at HBS an unforgettable experience.