TARUN KHANNA: Welcome to Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies.

I'm Tarun Khanna, and I'll be your steward through this course.

I know I have a vested interest in saying so,

but this is a unbelievably fun course and be an extremely important course

for us all to be concerned with.

Why?

Because there are so many interesting opportunities as well as problems,

those both being the same thing, really.

Most problems are opportunities in emerging markets around the world,

and I'd like to introduce you to some examples

and how we might think about addressing them.

By the same token, there are also enormous examples

of corruption, nepotism, waste that I'd love for us all as a world society,

if you will, increasingly try to get away from in some ways.

So that's why this course is really important.

Now, it's important to be clear at the outset

that by entrepreneurship, I have a pretty big tent

view of what that term entails.

In particular, even though I'm anchored at Harvard Business School, bastion

of capitalism, I'm not purely concerned with young hot shots

launching web-based tech companies and taking them

public for outrageous amounts of money.

Those are fine.

Very, very often, they are great, and the iPhone in my pocket

and my use of Facebook suggests that I'm an aficionado

of some of the output that comes out of these types of projects.

But I'm equally concerned with people who

are making an impact with creativity in a variety of walks of life

in emerging markets around the world.

It might include a bureaucrat in a government agency who is rethinking

the way public services are provided.

It might include a middle manager in a large corporation

who has decided that he or she is going to be much more entrepreneurially

engaged and has the wherewithal and context within which to do so,

and so on and so forth.

So this really is more about an attitude and a willingness

to embrace a little bit of judicious risk-taking,

draw on diverse perspectives, and find a calibrated approach

to begin to address a very wide range of problems.

Now, there was a prior version of this course,

and it was called Entrepreneurship in Healthcare in South Asia,

and I want to pause for a second because the current course is

an evolution of that.

So there are still a lot of examples from health care in the course,

but we've broadened it out to bring in problems related

to branding, problems related to food, problems related

to intellectual property rights, to urbanization, to mass displacements,

just to illustrate that the core tools and frameworks that we introduce

at the beginning of the course apply not just

to health care, which is a super-important sector

in its own right, but apply much more widely to a very large set of problems.

In all these cases, what we're going to do is come back to a core idea

that I want to introduce you to at the very beginning of the course called

an institutional void.

Now, what does that mean?

It sounds like a mouthful.

A void, of course, is something that's missing,

and what I want to draw your attention to

is the idea that one of the structural characteristics

of every single emerging market is that, as the word suggests, it is emerging.

It hasn't yet emerged.

In other words, the market, which is meant

to be a set of rules that bring buyers and sellers together,

isn't quite there yet.

Buyers and sellers continue to have trouble getting together,

and typically, the trouble can be reduced to one or two main root causes.

One cause has to do with not being able to find the relevant information

that they need to find each other.

Unless I know who you are as a seller or who I am as a buyer,

it's very hard for us to get together and transact.

And secondly, it has to come down to things related to trust and contracts

and so on and so forth.

The idea that if I don't have a way of enforcing the implicit or explicit

promise that we enter into when we decide to transact,

perhaps some ex-post adjudication if there's

some dispute that arises and so on, then it's

unlikely that I'm going to be willing to trust you and come together with you.

When you don't have the rules and institutions and intermediaries

in place to allow this thing to happen, that's the situation

that I refer to as institutional voids.

So the core framing of the course really is

to develop a taxonomy of what these institutional voids are in emerging

markets, and that's what makes this distinct

from a course in entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley

or entrepreneurship in Manhattan or London

or someplace where the intermediaries of the sort that I introduce you to

are far more, shall we say, better developed and competing with each other
and refining their approach and so on and so forth.

Now, these voids are important for two reasons.

First, it means that any solution that you come up with,

whether it's a solution for clean water in Africa,

solution for avoiding contaminated food in China,

a solution for delivering vaccines in India, what have you,

has to pay attention to how it's going to get around

these lacuna, these voids, these missing institutions in the emerging

market in question, and that requires a little bit of contextual sensitivity.

It requires a little bit of contextual intelligence.

And what I'd like to do is tell you about a framework

that we've been developing that helps get you

along the way to developing some of this kind of intelligence

that I believe is a precondition for being a successful entrepreneur

in emerging markets.

The second reason this is important is, again, the flip side of the coin.

Not only is it a constraint on entrepreneurship,

but a void is equally an opportunity.

Very many of the examples that I will suggest to you

during the course are situations where a creative person has said,

I see something missing in the environment, and you know what?

If I can actually provide that service, not only will it help me in whatever

I started out to do, but it's something that

can be generically useful to others.

And that itself comes out of an entrepreneurial attitude,

a get-up-and-go type of personality that I'd like to introduce you

to in a variety of settings, both industry problem settings as well

as countries around the world.

So I look forward to doing this with you in the weeks to come.