Harvard Launches AI ‘Foundry,’ Making The Case For Moving Beyond The Case Study

The Founder Mindset host and HBS professor Reza Satchu. Courtesy photo

Harvard Business School is launching a new podcast on founder decision-making, pairing it with a broader digital initiative aimed at extending its entrepreneurship teaching beyond the classroom – though not fundamentally changing how the school educates MBAs.

The Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu, which debuts May 6, will feature conversations with entrepreneurs and creators about the uncertain, high-stakes decisions that shape companies before outcomes are known. The first episode features Reese Witherspoon, with future guests including Tim Ferriss and Kevin O’Leary.

The podcast is hosted by Reza Satchu, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who teaches courses on entrepreneurship and founder judgment.

FOCUSED ON DECISIONS, NOT OUTCOMES

Rather than retelling polished success stories, the podcast asks guests to revisit moments when the path forward was unclear  – and decisions had to be made without certainty.

“Most business podcasts ask founders to narrate their success stories,” Satchu said in the school’s announcement. “I want to hear about the decision that terrified them.”

The format mirrors a growing emphasis in MBA programs on judgment under uncertainty – a theme that has increasingly shown up in entrepreneurship curricula.

PART OF A BROADER DIGITAL PUSH

The podcast is being produced under HBS Foundry, a newly launched “AI-native” platform designed to support founders from early-stage ideas through company building. The initiative includes simulations, tools, and access to a broader entrepreneurial network.

Together, the podcast and Foundry are intended to bring elements of HBS’s entrepreneurship teaching to a wider audience – including non-MBAs – through scalable digital formats.

HBS says its alumni have founded more than 1,700 companies over the past decade, raising more than $84 billion in capital. The school has increasingly looked for ways to package that ecosystem into formats that reach a broader audience.

A BREAK FROM THE CASE METHOD?

Despite the framing around innovation, the launch is better understood as an extension of HBS’s existing approach rather than a departure from it.

The school’s signature case method – in place for more than a century – remains the backbone of the MBA classroom. And while HBS has periodically experimented with ways to complement it, those efforts have been far more substantial than a content play. In 2012, for example, HBS sent roughly 900 first-year MBA students into the field across 10 countries as part of its FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development) program – a sweeping, resource-intensive overhaul designed to inject real-world execution into a case-driven curriculum.

That context invites some skepticism around familiar claims that new initiatives signal a move “beyond” the case method. In past, meaningful departures at HBS have tended to involve structural changes to how students learn, not extensions of content or reach.

Learn more about The Foundry here.

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