In our Thought Leadership Series with UC Davis Graduate School of Management, John A. Byrne speaks with leadership and faculty from the MBA program on a wide range of topics from innovation, impact investing, non-profit governance, tech-based markets, and much more.

Find the full series here.

John A. Byrne: Hi, I’m John Byrne with Poets&Quants. Welcome to our Thought Leadership Series at UC Davis’s Graduate School of Management. Over the course of ten different interviews, we’re going to explore the ideas, the passions, and the motivations of some of the faculty here at UC Davis. I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Greta Hsu: Psychologists, cognitive scientists, categories and concepts are kind of this fundamental construct that is informing a lot of their research and so I like to apply those kinds of more micro ideas to thinking about how markets work, how competition works, why certain industries evolve and which the way they do.

Andrew Hargadon: Creativity is coming up with a solution, but innovation is turning it into a system. Interesting. So Ray Kroc didn’t invent the hamburger. Right. But he sure built a pretty good system for making money off of hamburgers.

Andrew Hargadon: And so thinking about how you build a system around your idea is often much more impactful than the idea itself.

Paul Griffin: Today, the risks are entirely different. They deal with sustainability. They deal with the threat of climate change. They deal with issues of operations in different countries, where there could be food shortages, famines, uprisings, and so forth. So businesses face very different risks today, but they are just as important as those old -fashioned traditional risks, but they are underreported because they’re unregulated or much less regulated.

Ayako Yasuda: I think that the next challenge that the impact investing sector faces is coming up with measurements that are somewhat universally accepted and measurable. That’s where the battle is. I think there are attempts to measure things but when we have hundreds of different measures and each picks different measurements, it becomes very difficult to do the type of standardization that we take for granted as financial investors. And we’re talking all aspects of society and the difficulty of measuring all of those things.

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