Interfaculty Teaching at Harvard

TEACHING Interfaculty Teaching at Harvard

The Institute supports the creation of curricula that explores solutions to complex challenges in the developing world, providing interdisciplinary courses taught by Harvard faculty to students and the virtual global community.

GenEd 1011 Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems

For over a decade, this unique and innovative course has been open to undergraduate and graduate students across Harvard. The course, started by Prof. Tarun Khanna, Mittal Institute Faculty Director, provides an interdisciplinary framework and multiple lenses through which to think about the economic and social problems that affect five-billion people in the developing world. Taught by multiple Harvard faculty members across schools, case-study discussions cover challenges and potential solutions in fields as diverse as health, education, technology, urban planning, arts and the humanities.

Starting with an introductory module taught by Professor Khanna that reviews salient approaches to development and the roles that entrepreneurs can play within these, the course is co-taught by Professors Satchit Balsari, Krzysztof Gajos, Rahul Mehrotra and Doris Sommer. Students are introduced to cases across the developing world, with a particular focus on Africa, China, Latin America, and South Asia. Throughout the course, students work in teams to design entrepreneurial solutions that address one of the many problems identified, thinking about complex issues from perspectives and disciplines different from their own.

edX Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies

In a virtual business and management course on edX taught by Mittal Institute Faculty Director Tarun Khanna, hundreds of thousands of participants from around the world have enrolled to explore how entrepreneurship and innovation can tackle complex social problems in emerging economies. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the course delves into the prior attempts to address these issues across emerging markets, and students identify points of opportunity for entrepreneurial efforts and propose and develop their own creative solutions. The goal of the course is to make students aware of their own individual agency, exploring what they themselves can do to address a seemingly intractable problem.

Throughout the course, students investigate financing, scaling up of operations, branding, management of property rights and how to create the appropriate metrics to assess the progress and social value of their entrepreneurial endeavors. From issues of healthcare and online commerce to fintech and infrastructure, students examine the diverse geographic regions of Africa, China, Latin America and South Asia to better understand the entrepreneurial opportunities in these emerging markets.

Students

Clockwise from top left:

Nosher Ali Khan ’23, in Pakistan, earns a Guinness World Record for the highest-altitude dance party; Harvard students celebrate with festive dress; Elizabeth Hentschel ’26 researches early childhood responsiveness in Pakistan; e-Rehri wins Seed for Change award; Student grant recipient Nariman Aavani studies Islamic and South Asian philosophical traditions; Zhuu Fruits, an agricultural-tech start-up, wins Seed for Change grant; Members of Harvard’s South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA); Nosher Ali Khan holds his award.

The Mittal Institute supports Harvard undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in their South Asia-related research and internships, entrepreneurial projects, and on-campus student group activities.

Clockwise from top left:

South Asian students meet on campus; students celebrate together; student organization fair; South Asian students on the steps of Harvard Law; a mela on campus; students present their projects.