Tarun Khanna

Most books thus far on emerging markets are either investing-oriented, or country - or market-specific, or descriptive. No book has definitively targeted the corporate strategists who need a practical framework and assessment tools for analyzing emerging markets, identifying new business opportunities, and planning strategy and execution. This book does just that. Rather than defining emerging markets by particular size or growth qualifications, Palepu and Khanna argue that the primary exploitable characteristic of these markets is their lack of developed infrastructures and institutions that might enable efficient business operations. Credit card systems, intellectual property adjudication, and data research firms are all market intermediaries taken for granted in advanced economies, for example, and operating without them poses specific challenges - as well as major opportunities. Building upon of the authors' series of popular HBR articles on the topic, the book gives managers a systematic framework for assessing the institutional context of any emerging market so that they can spot institutional voids, position themselves in the market, and finally build execution strategies that factor in an informed prognosis of that market's future. Translation available in Chinese.

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Translations available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Turkish, Vietnamese.

Western concerns about the rise of China and India are raising alarms today, much as they were fifty years ago. China and India currently operate in the global economy as mirror images of each other—one favors multinationals over indigenous private companies, the other advantages its locals and shuns foreigners. In a book published by Harvard Business School Publishing, HBS Professor Tarun Khanna explores the likely evolution of the Chinese and Indian models and the implications for the world in four settings—China and the world, India and the world, Chinese and Indian mutual relations, and the view from the developed world. And just as hysteria and protectionism proved unwarranted half a century ago, Khanna argues that the rise of China and India is again an opportunity for profit and hope.

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I have come to a conclusion that may surprise you: trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool's errand. Best practices simply don't travel well across borders. That's because conditions not just of economic development but of institutional maturity, educational norms, language, and culture vary enormously from place to place. Students of managerial practice once thought that their technical knowledge of best manufacturing practices (to take one example) was sufficiently developed that processes simply needed to be tweaked to fit local conditions. More often, it turns out, they have to be reworked quite radically—not because the technology is wrong but because everything around it changes how it will work. There's nothing wrong with the tools we have at our disposal, but their application requires contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to a context different from the one in which it was acquired. Until we can better develop and apply contextual intelligence, failure rates for cross-border businesses will remain high, what we learn from experiments unfolding around the world will remain limited, and the promise of healthy growth in all parts of the world will remain unfulfilled.

Grand Challenges for Entrepreneurs (GCE) is designed for students who are interested in entrepreneurial approaches to the biggest challenges of our time.  Grand Challenges are near-intractable, global problems that offer the tantalizing prospect that even a partial resolution will dramatically improve some facet of human existence. Success requires individual creativity to break down a problem into constituent manageable parts, coupled with imaginatively catalyzing collective action in society.

The challenges affect the entire world, though inevitably the burden often falls disproportionately on the fast-growing and populous emerging markets.  Invariably, grand challenges require solutions that beggar the imagination, and that require an embrace of science, with all its excitement and uncertainty. To misquote Peter Thiel, “We wanted flying cars, let’s not be satisfied with 140 characters.”

The course is appropriate for would-be entrepreneurs, as well as those interested in the financing and curation of economic activity at the exciting edges of the knowledge frontier.

What problems do developing countries face, and how can individuals contribute to solutions rather than awaiting the largesse of the state or other actors? Intractable problems – such as lack of access to education and healthcare, forced reliance on contaminated food, deep-seated corruption – are part of the quotidian existence of the vast majority of five of the world’s seven billion people. Developing societies suffer from what we refer to as ‘institutional voids’ that make organized activities of all sorts difficult; think of the mundane but important physical infrastructure that allows us to get to work or school in the developed world, as well as our access to higher-order institutions such as the availability of information at our fingertips or the security of the rule of law. This course demonstrates that reflecting upon the nature of the developing world’s intractable problems through different lenses helps characterize candidate interventions to address them: the scientist’s hypothesis-driven and iterative experimentation, the artist’s imagined counterfactuals through putting oneself in others’ shoes literally and theatrically, and the planner’s top-down articulation of boundary conditions.

The course is divided into five modules: an introduction that reviews various approaches to development and explores the importance of understanding problem-contexts; three thematic modules, each taught by a leader in their respective fields, which introduce the entrepreneurial lenses of the artist, scientist, and planner; and a concluding module that applies lessons learnt throughout the semester to specific problem contexts. The case study discussions included in these modules will cover challenges and solutions in fields as diverse as health, education, technology, urban planning, and arts and the humanities.

In the course of the semester, all students will divide into teams that will each develop a business plan or grant proposal to tackle a chosen problem in a specific developing country/region.

Professor Tarun Khanna has been the faculty chair of the Senior Executive Leadership Program –Middle East (SELPME) since its launch in 2017. SELPME focuses on strategy, leadership, and innovation, in a global context. Each year this rigorous seven-week alumni-status granting program brings 60 senior business leaders together from the Gulf countries and beyond. Participants come from the public and private sector, representing a wide variety of industries and roles. This modular course is run half on the HBS campus and half in Dubai.

This business and management course takes an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding and solving complex social problems. You will learn about prior attempts to address these problems, identify points of opportunity for smart entrepreneurial efforts, and propose and develop your own creative solutions. The focus of this course is on individual agency—what can you do to address a defined problem? You will learn an awareness of the opportunities for entrepreneurship in fast-growing, emerging markets, an understanding of a conceptual framework for evaluating such opportunities, and an appreciation of the types problems that lend themselves to entrepreneurial solutions.