Tackling Grand Challenges

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The purpose of the course is to equip students with conceptual tools to reflect upon, evaluate, design, and manage initiatives aimed at tackling grand challenges that face modern society. Many of today’s problems are uncertain, complex, and cross-jurisdictional in nature and cannot be tackled by a single firm or organization. Instead, actors seek collaborations across sector and organizational boundaries to develop and execute solutions. Yet, bringing together heterogeneous actors poses unique challenges, and organizing beyond traditional authority-based hierarchies requires new sets of tools. The first part of the course exposes students to the scholarly literature on grand challenges, along with the Theory of the Firm, with the aim of achieving a greater understanding of the limits of organizing. The second part aims to introduce the fundamentals for managing heterogeneous actors, with a basis in the research on organization design of inter organizational relationships. The third part aims to introduce what governments do to promote solutions to grand challenges, with a special focus on the trend of mission-oriented innovation policy. In all, students will develop the ability to critically assess the role of markets, firms, and the state in the economics and organization of tackling grand challenges.