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Brought to you by the Wharton School in collaboration with Accenture, Where AI Works explores AI’s real-world impact on business. Each season takes a fresh approach, led by a different Wharton faculty expert who brings their own AI-focused expertise to the conversation, alongside practitioners actively shaping AI’s role in innovation, strategy, and transformation.

“AI is rewriting the playbook for business and society. In Season 1 of Where AI Works, I’m excited to explore what that means for decision-making, marketing, and beyond.

Kartik Hosanagar
Professor of Technology & Digital Business,
Co-Director of Wharton Human-AI Research
Host, Season 1: The Impact of AI in Marketing

Brought to you by the Wharton School in collaboration with Accenture, Where AI Works explores AI’s real-world impact on business. Each season takes a fresh approach, led by a different Wharton faculty expert who brings their own AI-focused expertise to the conversation, alongside practitioners actively shaping AI’s role in innovation, strategy, and transformation.

“AI is rewriting the playbook for business and society. In Season 1 of Where AI Works, I’m excited to explore what that means for decision-making, marketing, and beyond.

Kartik Hosanagar
Professor of Technology & Digital Business,
Co-Director of Wharton Human-AI Research
Host, Season 1: The Impact of AI in Marketing

New episodes will drop every two weeks

Season 1: The Impact of AI in Marketing

Photo of Katrik Hosangar

 

In Season 1, Wharton Professor Kartik Hosanagar explores AI’s transformative role in marketing—how AI-powered social listening, digital advertising, and creative automation are reshaping strategy, customer engagement, and brand trust.

 

 

Episode 1

Guest: Jonathan Halvorson, SVP, Consumer Experience; Mondelēz International 

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Episode 2

Guest: Jill Kramer, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer; Accenture

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Episode 3

Guest: David Droga, Chief Executive Officer; Accenture Song

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Episode 4

Guest: Lan Guan, Chief A.I. Officer; Accenture

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Episode 5

Host: Kartik Hosanagar, John C. Hower Professor; Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions; Co-Director, Wharton Human-AI Research; Professor of Marketing

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Season 2: AI & Business Model Innovation

Premieres June 26

In Season 2, Wharton Vice Dean Serguei Netessine explores how AI is reshaping business models—helping companies unlock new sources of value, rethink competitive advantage, and navigate disruption through innovation.

Season 3: AI & Workforce Transformation

Photo of Peter Cappelli

Premieres September 4 

In Season 3, Wharton Professor Peter Cappelli unpacks how AI is reshaping the workforce—shifting job roles, redefining skills, and driving human-AI collaboration while businesses navigate job displacement and ethical AI challenges.

Mohan Valrani was born in 1940 in an affluent family in Sind, then part of undivided India. The country was partitioned when Valrani was seven, and the family went overnight from being landlords to refugees. The Valranis left most of their wealth behind in Pakistan and went on to build a new life as immigrants in Gujarat, India.

Today Valrani, at age 79, is co-founder, senior vice chairman and managing director of the Dubai-based Al Shirawi Group, one of the largest private conglomerates in the United Arab Emirates and the Arabian Gulf region. The group’s companies operate in industries ranging from manufacturing and engineering services to logistics, among several others.

Valrani now focuses on providing a high-quality education to children through his legacy venture, Arcadia Education. “What is important to me is what you do with your money and not how much you make,” he says. In a conversation with Knowledge at Wharton, Valrani talks about life’s most important lessons. This is part of a series in which senior executives discuss what matters most in life. An edited version of the interview appears below. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

Knowledge at Wharton: Could you tell us about your mentors? Who molded your most cherished values?

Mohan Valrani: My mentors were my parents and also my partner, Abdulla Al Shirawi. In 1947, when I was seven, our family had to leave our home in Sind due to the partition of India. Overnight, we went from being landlords to refugees within our own country. After partition, we first settled down in Gujarat, in a small town called Baroda [renamed Vadodara in 1974]. Our family moved from a life of luxury to a life of frugality.

My father had to start his entrepreneurship journey from scratch. He worked like never before — 10 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It was a difficult time for him — and also for all of us. From age 12, I would accompany him to the plant during my school holidays and summer vacations. It was there that I learned my early lessons of entrepreneurship. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I never regretted that I was missing my holidays. My mother’s role during this time was also important. She was ambitious and wanted us to prosper. Mother made sure we were well educated. It is through my parents that I learned about the value of hard work and dedication.

I cannot possibly answer this question without talking about my dear friend and partner, Abdulla Al Shirawi. He had the courage to face adversity; he did not believe in giving up when the chips were down. He is a charismatic leader. We have been together for the last 51 years; we have seen many ups and downs. My friendship with him taught me the value of being resilient.

Knowledge at Wharton: A business partnership that lasts more than 50 years is unusual. What is the secret to building a long-lasting partnership?

Valrani: Transparency is the key. Transparency creates trust. Everything is an open book. That leads to collaboration and cooperation, not competition. This creates the power of one. Not only the first generation but also our second generation works on this basis. They collaborate and cooperate and work as a team. They work as one member rather than seven. This has been the reason for our success. We have gone through good times, bad times, difficult times, and we have worked together, we have not given up on each other. It’s basically all about trust and transparency.

“What is important to me is what you do with your money and not how much you make.”

Knowledge at Wharton: Which books shaped your outlook on life? When did you read them and why do you think they meant so much? Did you re-read them later and discover something new?

Valrani: The Internet has been a blessing for me. At my age, I think the Internet is my friend. Every year, I take a reading holiday for 15 days. I try to avoid being in touch with anybody.

McKinsey Insights is one of my favorite apps for business management, international issues and the future of effective technology in our everyday life. I subscribe to podcasts from prominent university academics. I spend on an average two hours a day reading and listening to various audio books and podcasts.

The list of books that have shaped my outlook is endless and keeps growing. But some of them, which I have re-read, include Siddhartha, Sadhana: The Realization of Life, Book of the Way, The Art of Communicating and the Bhagavad Gita. These books have allowed me to reflect and prioritize what is important in life and why. They have also taught me to seek a higher purpose than the pursuit of money.

Knowledge at Wharton: What were your deepest aspirations when you were young? What are they today? Have your aspirations changed? If so, how?

Valrani: Yes, my aspirations have changed. When I was young, I wanted to focus on making money. I wanted to make money at any cost. Over the years, this has changed. What is now important to me is what you do with your money and not how much you make. Money beyond a certain point loses its utility.

What remains of my life is now dedicated to the education of children. My next project will be a school that will provide a top-notch British education to those who normally could not afford one. Thousands of students will benefit from the education that we will provide through the Arcadia network of schools.

Knowledge at Wharton: What choices have you made that had the most pivotal impact on your life and that of others? Why did you make those choices? In hindsight, were they the right ones?

Valrani: The most important decision of my life was made in 1986. With the start of the Iraq-Iran war in 1982, our companies began their decline. Our construction site in Basra was bombed. Ten people died, and we had to report it to 5,000 people. To compound our problems, oil prices crashed from $23 to $8 [per barrel]. Our group went into negative equity. All the oil-producing countries refused to pay or delayed payments.

“Your actions will never be unethical if you are transparent.”

I had to make a choice — whether to stay in Dubai and work for the next decade to meet my liabilities or to take the easy route and skip town. Some of my well-wishers advised me to leave. But I decided to stay on. History has shown it was the right choice.

Knowledge@Wharton: What has been your guiding philosophy in dealing with people? How did you arrive at it? If a protégé asked to learn that philosophy, how would you teach it?

Valrani: Transparency is the key. Your actions will never be unethical if you are transparent. With transparency being one of my key values, I have to be mindful and compassionate in my thoughts, speech and actions. As a result, I am able to avoid conflict and concentrate on what I wish to do. I always practice Ashtanga yoga. That has benefited me tremendously. I would suggest to all protégés that they take up yoga. It puts things in the right perspective.

Knowledge at Wharton: Could you tell us about an experience that might have seemed devastating when it happened, but which you came to see in a different light in retrospect? What did it teach you?

Valrani: This experience also had to do with the Gulf War. The first Gulf War in 1991 was devastating in many ways. Saddam Hussein had taken over Kuwait and was a threat to the whole region. We thought the United Arab Emirates would be next. There was a major population exodus in UAE. About 90% of the expat population either left or at the very least sent their families back home.

We decided to stay. My partner Abdulla Al Shirawi and I came to the conclusion that Saddam could not defeat the U.S.-led coalition. The rest is history. Saddam was defeated in 1991 and Dubai began its march towards becoming a global city. These experiences have made me realize the importance of remaining calm. Even under the most trying of circumstances, one needs to have calmness within oneself in order to keep others around us calm.

Knowledge at Wharton: Could you describe an ethical dilemma — professional or personal — that was difficult to resolve? How did you deal with it? What did you learn from it?

Valrani: The decision, in 1986 — of whether to skip town or stay back and pay the banks off — was very difficult for me. On one side, I had my duty towards my wife and children. On the other side, I had my responsibility to my partner and all my 9,000 employees. I used my wife and children as a source of strength to take on the responsibility of saving the company. One draws strength from sources that one cannot imagine. It is important to have an open heart that welcomes different sources of strength.

“Even in the most trying of circumstances, one needs to have calmness within oneself in order to keep others around us calm.”

Knowledge at Wharton: If you were to think beyond your professional accomplishments, what has been your life’s mission and purpose? When and how did you discover it? Have you been able to fulfill it?

Valrani: My professional accomplishments have been tied to the growth of the Al Shirawi Group. But for the last decade, my mission and purpose has been to educate students. I was chairman of a non-profit school of 12,000 students for four years. Now I am building and operating schools under the Arcadia umbrella. I am enjoying the journey and want it to continue. I would like Arcadia to always be known for an innovative style of education. Although I understand that it’s not possible, I would not like this journey to ever end. The journey is more satisfying than reaching the goal. Once you reach the goal, it’s boring.

Knowledge at Wharton: What are your ideals? By ideals, I mean a standard of perfection that you set for yourself. Have your ideals changed over time? How and why?

Valrani: I have always tried my best to lead a virtuous life. However, over the years, there has been a shift from external achievements to internal peace. I now focus on the mind, body and the intellect through the practice of yoga. From money making, I am now spending my time educating students and staff. The education sector globally, as you know, has challenges. Teachers need to innovate. They need to change and adapt to a new norm of students having the same access to information as they do. Technology has to be adapted in the right manner.

Knowledge at Wharton: What life lessons would you like to pass on to future generations to guide them on their journey?

Valrani: Having seen so many ups and downs, I would say, accept the unpredictability of life. Do not be afraid of the unknown. Move out of your comfort zone and walk the extra mile. Allow yourself time to nurture your natural talents. Learn how to learn. Be a life-long learner. Aim to be financially literate before leaving high school. This is very important. I made sure that all my three boys had basic knowledge of accounting before they left school. Reverse mentoring is important. You can learn a lot from the young. Associate with the right people. Don’t waste time. It is finite.

Knowledge at Wharton: What advice would you give to young people about how to be happy?

“Be grateful for what has been bestowed upon you. It is only in gratitude that you will find peace.”

Valrani: Remain curious. It makes life wonderful. Curiosity leads to creativity. I’m enjoying life because I have never lost touch with curiosity. Be transparent; you have nothing to hide. Aim to lead a conflict-free life without compromising on your principles. Conflict is a waste of time. Take care of your emotional and physical health. Practice meditation. Be flexible. Change is the only constant in life.

Knowledge at Wharton: What role does giving back play in your life right now, and what forms does it take?

Valrani: I believe the shortcut to eternal happiness is in giving. Apart from donating your wealth, giving of yourself is equally meaningful. I aim to be in a giving attitude all the time. I’m giving when I’m praying; I’m giving when I wish someone good luck. And I am also giving when I communicate with compassion and love.

One of the best forms of giving is forgiveness. If people learn to forgive, the world will be a better place. The moment I have forgiven, my enemy becomes my well-wisher. I don’t have to focus my time on hatred, on revenge. All that is out, and all that time is saved. You are at peace because you have forgiven. It is so simple, and it costs you nothing. It’s free.

Forgiveness is often hard because of attitude, ego and living in the past. To think of someone that “he has done this to me, so I have to take my revenge,” is not the right approach. [That attitude] has more to do with living in the past than in the future or the present. The past is gone. The future is unknown. Enjoy the present and move on.

Knowledge at Wharton: What matters most in life?

Valrani: It’s very simple. Be grateful for what has been bestowed upon you. It is only in gratitude that you will find peace. It is gratitude all the way.

For a startup to succeed, it’s not enough to have a good business idea. Resilience, passion, flexibility, focus, trust and people skills are just as important for success. But success should not only be measured in terms of numerical gains; an enterprise’s social and environmental contributions also should be considered, according to Shiv Khemka, executive chairman of The Global Education and Leadership Foundation (tGELF), an organization in India focused on bringing up leaders with ethical and altruistic values.

Khemka spoke to Knowledge at Wharton about the importance of cultivating good business leaders. He was joined by Shaima Hamidaddin, executive manager at the MiSK Foundation in Saudi Arabia, and Abdulrahman Al Suhaymi, who leads the global entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives there. MiSK is a nonprofit established by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz to develop the next generation of innovative leaders among the Saudi youth. The Misk Foundation and tGELF are collaborating in a global business contest called the Entrepreneurship World Cup.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge at Wharton: Shaima, which entrepreneurial leader do you admire most, and why?

Shaima Hamidaddin: That’s a tough one, because we have so many inspirational people available to us as role models. But I think for me, it’s Bill Gates. Not only did this man revolutionize the computer industry, but he also made philanthropy popular. And he is now known not just for what he did in the computer industry, but all his charitable and philanthropic activities. It’s a great example for someone who has been successful and now is dedicating time and resources to give back — not just to his local community but to the world.

Abdulrahman al Suhaymi: Of the two people who always inspired me with their entrepreneurial spirit, one would be Elon Musk. His passion drives and builds his resilience when he is building startups. He always starts with what’s good as a solution to our problem – what’s good for the human race – and he works backward from there. Luckily he has the capacity to follow through those tough missions that he puts for himself.

The second is the mayor of Dubai (Dawood Al Hajri, the director-general of the Dubai Municipality), for the way he approached developing Dubai from a small town to the great goal that he set for their government and the whole team. It took almost the same entrepreneurial spirit [as Musk], which is about being resilient, not giving up, constantly finding solutions, and being flexible. He definitely demonstrated these qualities.

“Entrepreneurial leaders must have a huge degree of flexibility in terms of solving problems of the future.” –Shiv Khemka

Shiv Khemka: I have admired two entrepreneurs. One is John Bogle, who created Vanguard. His family lost everything in the Great Depression. He came out of that and started Vanguard Funds. He came up with the idea of index funds and was able to create one of the world’s largest fund management businesses. He was a deeply humble man who wrote a beautiful book which I recommend to all young people called Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life, talking about how you don’t need to acquire more and more in life. The question is, when do you draw the line and say, enough? He was deeply philanthropic and a deeply humble person.

In India, there are some great entrepreneurs who’ve started with nothing and have created very significant businesses. Look at Azim Premji, for example, and what he has created in terms of one of the largest IT services companies in the world — Wipro. His Premji Foundation has led philanthropic giving in India, and he [has committed most of his wealth to] The Giving Pledge, (an initiative of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett).

Knowledge at Wharton: What are some of the top attributes of these leaders, especially entrepreneurial leaders – in contrast to leaders of established companies or political leaders or military leaders? Why do you find these qualities or attributes significant?

Khemka: Entrepreneurial leaders must have a huge degree of flexibility in terms of solving problems of the future that they cannot envision today. They come up with those solutions without any structure or people around them – and have the boldness to bring together the resources to create that impact.

Political leaders and military leaders have big institutions around them, and tools they can use to do things. Entrepreneurial leaders often start with nothing – just an idea, a dream, a vision. Like a magnet, they have to [attract] people who believe in that vision, and go with them through thick and thin to solve problems that often seem insurmountable. They must have a deep capacity for human empathy and for creating a joint vision.

Hamidaddin: I agree with Shiv. Entrepreneurs have limited resources and need to be creative in their thinking and be problem solvers. But what is admirable [about] entrepreneurial leaders is they have an insatiable hunger to keep going to the next level and try to continuously push the status quo.

So, even if they set an objective and they meet it, it’s not enough. They want to go further and see how they can continue to break glass ceilings or come up with more innovative approaches or identify an opportunity maybe that they haven’t seen before. That hunger to keep going and to keep being innovative is something that truly separates entrepreneurial leaders from [political or other] leaders and corporations.

“Being flexible is essential and fundamental to being successful as an entrepreneur.”— Abdulrahman Al Suhaymi

Suhaymi: I couldn’t agree more. Being flexible is essential and fundamental to being successful as an entrepreneur, or an entrepreneurial leader, as the ability to innovate. What you’re going through [as an entrepreneur] is not the norm. Most of the challenges are those that others were not able to solve. You’ll find yourself having to constantly problem-solve. I would add the ability to have cross-functionality. When you’re faced with lots of challenges, you would need that ability to learn quickly to do multiple things at the same time.

Knowledge at Wharton: As all of you have pointed out, entrepreneurial leaders face special challenges that are not necessarily the same ones that leaders at existing companies or existing structures face. In fact, research shows that the mortality rate of startups is extremely high.

We recently interviewed John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco, for Knowledge at Wharton, and he told us that in some studies, the failure rate of startups is as high as 70%. What do you think are some of the main reasons for this high failure rate? And what role can leadership play — not just in prolonging the life of startups, but also in ensuring that they emerge as successful enterprises?

Suhaymi: Successful startups need a reason to be alive, to exist. And that reason is to solve a problem. So, when you’re often starting a new business, … at the top of the co-founder’s or the entrepreneur’s mind is, ‘what problem does it solve? What solution is it bringing to customers or to the market or to people?’ You have to start from that point and work backward, until you reach the point of designing and developing a product. This is what entrepreneurs would miss in some cases.

In the other cases, it goes back to what Shiv mentioned in terms of the need for flexibility. Sometimes you end up in markets where there might be bigger players than your company that you wouldn’t be able to compete with in terms of resources or in terms of capacity. You need to be flexible — predict the change before it happens, and pivot from that direction to another direction, should that be needed. Some of those traits are often overlooked by some of the startups. This unfortunately contributes to their high mortality rate.

Khemka: We run venture capital funds, and we’ve made lots of investments in startups over the last 30 years. There are three main buckets of reasons why companies fail. The first is the idea/strategy bucket, where the idea isn’t right — they are either too early or too late, or they haven’t thought through the issue carefully — and the strategic dimension of what they’re doing is not deep enough.

The second is funding. A lot of companies have a great idea, but they underestimate the funding [that is needed] or they raise a lot of money and burn through it, thinking it’s always going to be available.

Finally, and probably the most important reason why many companies have failed, is because the leaders often haven’t been able to build a really resilient institution of trust. They don’t have the people skills to [retain] people through the thick and thin of the entrepreneurial battle that’s going to happen. As companies change direction, it’s almost like going through the rapids. You need to be able to shift through those rapids as you build a company.

“What is admirable [about] entrepreneurial leaders is they have an insatiable hunger to keep going to the next level.” –Shaima Hamidaddin

In terms of what can prolong the life and make a company successful, it’s about the quality of leadership, and most importantly the quality of the team. The leader is nothing without a team, so it’s about who are on the team. Do they work together? Have they forged a bond of brotherhood and sisterhood to pick through the challenges of what it takes to build an entrepreneurial organization? If they can do that, they can build a company that may start off as one thing but end up as something totally different, but still be deeply successful.

Knowledge at Wharton: Shiv, the three reasons you gave for why startups can fail are spot on. Do you have any examples of those principles?

Khemka: Let’s take the electrical vehicle business, which — 10 or 15 years ago — was just too early. There were people coming up with [ideas for] electric batteries or electric charging, but their companies failed because they were just ahead of their time.

Funding, of course [is always an issue] – look at all of these tech companies that are out there. Many companies that think they’re growing, and they have a model [where] if they keep raising money, they’ll make it. Then the money runs out, and they fail. Obviously there are companies that succeed through that.

In terms of trust, people skills, etc., Wall Street and Silicon Valley are littered with examples. The most recent one is of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. Many people just aren’t able to build trust. They take people so far, and because they lack integrity, or they lack the ability to deliver on something that they promised, everything fails and dries up.

Knowledge at Wharton: Shaima, what’s your view on the mortality rate of startups and the roles leaders can play in helping startups be more successful?

Hamidaddin: I would like [talk about] the barriers to entry or intention with regard to entrepreneurs. The Global Youth Index, a tool for understanding the challenges and opportunities for youth in the future economy, [reveals how some aspects have] negative impacts on entrepreneurial action. One is education. We learned that young people who actually studied entrepreneurship are less inclined to start their own businesses. The other is the level of social capital. The more connected you are, the more people you know, the less likely it is that you would start a business, because you feel like you have a better chance of finding a job.

Knowledge at Wharton: Recently there has been this trend of large enterprises working with ecosystems of startups. I think the effort there is to absorb innovation from some of these start-ups. Could you share from your experience an example of a large company that has successfully used this approach?

Hamidaddin: There’s a lot to learn from the way startups operate. The key aspects are agility and flexibility, which allow individual contributors or your team to be creative and innovative. As teams become younger in age, they operate better and more efficiently when they have grown to be innovative and creative and not have so many rules, policies and layers.

“The most important reason why many companies have failed, is because the leaders often haven’t been able to build … trust.” –Shiv Khemka

So, a flatter organization is more efficient for your business than one that’s bureaucratic and with lots of hierarchy. Young people, specifically, feel suffocated in a way, where they’re not able to express themselves for the business or even personally. That limits their productivity.

Suhaymi: Large enterprises take different approaches [in gaining] access to innovation. Some of them literally acquire the innovation – which is by either hiring the people or acquiring the whole business. But it is important that they [retain] the environment that allowed them to succeed in the first place in order to not let that be absorbed by the culture or the matrix of the [acquiring] organization – and continue that innovation.

Khemka: Cisco is a great example of a company that grew through acquisitions of small companies — again and again. Integration is the most difficult piece. Big companies have a lot of organization, processes, systems and hierarchy, which enable them to perpetuate themselves regardless of any individual. When they acquire small companies that are often founder-led, it’s a real challenge for them to make enough space and room for the founder and the team to feel respected, valued, and given the freedom to create and build on what made them successful.

I was recently at Google talking to some people there, and the effort is to make Google into many small, entrepreneurial teams [working] and feeling like they’re small companies. If you can get that balance right, you can build the infrastructure that allows you to absorb innovation from small startups.

Knowledge at Wharton: Social entrepreneurship has been growing all over the world. Do you believe leaders of social enterprises need the same attributes and skills as entrepreneurs in conventional businesses? If not, how do you think social entrepreneurs should think and act differently than other entrepreneurial leaders?

Khemka: The formulation of the SDGs (the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations) and more clarity about the tremendous challenges that the world faces have brought social entrepreneurship as a movement to the fore. The world is getting together and organizing its thinking about social challenges as part of the 17 SDGs.

Business leaders who have been entrepreneurs can be extremely effective social entrepreneurs — as long as they have the empathy to understand that social entrepreneurship is really about solving the problem in a sustainable manner, without the bells and whistles of entrepreneurship and financial results.

Choices become very important. You have to navigate through social choice and ethics, which often in the world of business you do in a different way and in a much more numerical manner. In the social entrepreneurship space, there are many ethical and other issues that one has to think about carefully. One is often dealing with a consumer base that really has a different type of bargaining power. And so, it’s extremely important for social entrepreneurs to be deeply empathetic and to have values of ethics and altruism embedded in their psyches. I think those are the ones that are deeply successful.

“Sometimes the key to success is speed and agility, especially when it comes to strategy and decision-making.” –Abdulrahman Al Suhaymi

Look at Bill Drayton who started the Ashoka foundation and the tremendous work it has been doing around the world, supporting social entrepreneurship. Other examples of great social entrepreneurs are Mohammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank [in Bangladesh], and Salman Khan with Khan Academy. The technology revolution is creating a unique opportunity for great and transformational social entrepreneurship. The next 20 years will see some great entrepreneurs emerge.

Knowledge at Wharton: Shaima, I was struck by what you said about Bill Gates. He went from being a leader of a technology company to lead a huge foundation – and a social entrepreneur in some ways. Do you think the skills that helped him succeed at Microsoft are the same as those he needs to lead the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation? Or is there a difference?

Hamidaddin: Most of the traits are similar, whether you’re a social entrepreneur or a business-focused entrepreneur. The only difference is that the factors that a social entrepreneur takes into consideration are not just economical. They are environmental. They are social. They are behavioral. It has a much wider scope. You would want a successful startup, but you also want to make sure that the impact of the startup is positive in the community and has the potential [to drive] positive behavioral change within the community.

Suhaymi: A social enterprise requires specific attention or a specific level of passion. But in the end, it is an enterprise, and enterprises need to succeed, whether that is a business enterprise or a social one. In the case of Bill Gates, [consider] how Microsoft since its founding had gone through lots of changes. It started out as a software company, but then later it developed into more than that.

In many ways, it might seem from the outside like it was technology, and that it was his area. But within, there were lots of verticals that he wasn’t necessarily familiar with. Once he moved to the Gates Foundation, there were new areas [he had to learn about], but that required the same attributes and skills.

The more challenging and more exciting [aspect of being] social entrepreneurs is that the impact that you’re seeking is more than financial. As much as it feels rewarding, and it is multifaceted. You have to take into account what you want to achieve long-term, mid-term, and short-term.

Knowledge at Wharton: If the CEO of a startup were to ask you for one piece of advice so that she or he could build a successful venture, what would you tell that person?

Suhaymi: Patience and resilience would be at the top. Definitely the passion is needed, and successful entrepreneurs must have a great idea and resources — funding or otherwise. No matter how perfect the beginning is, it must face challenges at some point. Some of them might feel like mountains in front of you; only patience and resilience will get you to the other side.

“We learned that young people who actually studied entrepreneurship are less inclined to start their own businesses.” –Shaima Hamidaddin

Khemka: If someone asked me for advice, I would typically give two pieces of advice. The first one would be internal — focus on your integrity and ethics — because that will create trust and will allow you to be a leader of caliber. The second is, “It’s all about team, team, team, and the people you bring into the team.”

Hamidaddin: Passion and truly loving what you’re working on [is important], because oftentimes it gets very lonely being an entrepreneur. You have so many challenges, and you may have people saying, “This is not going to work,” or “It doesn’t make sense,” or “It’s too outrageous.”

Knowledge at Wharton: Are there any concluding thoughts you would like to share?

Hamidaddin: We have younger people becoming entrepreneurs. We see more developing countries leading the early entrepreneurship activity. And, you see this growing in size. But it’s important to match those entrepreneurial ambitions with developing that ecosystem and those tools that could help them succeed. Also, becoming more technologically savvy — it’s very easy for someone from one side of the world to support another person on the other side of the world and give them the tools to be successful.

Khemka: I’ll give two more pieces of advice. One is that many more startups die of indigestion, rather than starvation, because you can be too ambitious about all the things you’re trying to do and not focus enough. The second piece of advice I would give them is to participate in the Entrepreneurship World Cup. You’ll meet lots of interesting people, improve your caliber and capacity, and build a global community of friends and partners.

Suhaymi: Sometimes the key to success is speed and agility, especially when it comes to strategy and decision-making – whether you’re in the beginning, or if your startup is in the middle of its life cycle. Maybe it’s about all the features or trying to build the right product. Speed always wins over perfection, so this is something that most of the successful entrepreneurs share as advice all the time. Other than that, it’s a wonderful time to be an entrepreneur and to watch entrepreneurs grow.

As climate change heats up the planet, more people will rely on air conditioners to cool down. But billions of air conditioners blasting at once can threaten the electrical infrastructure, especially in developing countries. With a tropical climate and more than 1.3 billion inhabitants, India alone is expected to become the world’s top user of electricity for cooling. Inspired by frequent trips to India, one Penn student and his colleagues have found a solution: a patent-pending air conditioner that combines two different cooling technologies to work up to 20 times more efficiently than conventional models.

Aerate is the business venture of Wharton business and Penn engineering undergrads Ashwin Kishen, Connor Sendel, Yann Pfitzer, Jake Fine, Sam Weintraub and Spencer Collins. Aerate is also the Perlman Grand Prize winner of the 2019 Wharton Startup Challenge. The students received $30,000 for the grand prize and $15,000 in legal, accounting and strategy services to help bring their idea to the marketplace. Aerate was one of eight finalists chosen from a pool of nearly 30 semifinalists to pitch their idea in front of a live audience and a panel of expert judges. In addition to the top prize, Aerate also won $10,000 for Best Undergraduate Team; $10,000 for the Robert S. Blank New Venture Collaboration Award; and $3,000 for the People’s Choice Award.

The showcase runner-up was Strella Biotechnology, which aims to reduce food waste and optimize the supply chain by detecting produce ripeness. The venture won $15,000 for the prize and another $15,000 in legal, accounting and strategy services.

Other showcase winners include:  

    • Innovation Award: Minimize, $10,000 for the prize, $15,000 in legal, accounting and strategy services.
    • Launch Prize: Halo, $10,000 for the prize, $15,000 in legal, accounting and strategy services.
    • Social Impact Prize: Text-911, $10,000.
    • Crowd Favorite Award: Boost Scooters, $2,000.

Half of Aerate’s team — Kishen, Sendel and Pfitzer – joined the Knowledge at Wharton radio show on SiriusXM to discuss the idea behind their startup and their collective desire to alleviate the devastating effects of climate change. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge at Wharton: What was the genesis of Aerate?

Connor Sendel: From a business perspective, it all started with identifying this problem of cooling around the world. As engineers, we really were thinking about it from an engineering perspective. We saw this problem and looked at a bunch of different ways to possibly solve it. It ended up going really well from an engineering perspective, and the business kind of followed suit.

Ashwin Kishen: For me, it was a personal motivation. I’ve spent a lot of my life visiting back and forth between the U.S. and India. I started to realize that here in the U.S., where it’s much cooler, I had much more comfortable temperatures in my home. Nice air conditioners. Turn it on blast in the summertime and forget about it. When I’d go to India, it was a bit of a shock being in that heat and having to be comfortable in that. But over time, I’ve seen more and more air conditioners come into being. That was the genesis of an idea for our Senior Design Project here at Penn Engineering.

We took that concept, did a lot of research and realized that if air conditioners continue to have the same efficiency as they have today, you’re looking at a half-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures caused by air conditioners alone by 2100. That’s an unacceptable risk to the planet.

Knowledge at Wharton: And it’s a component I don’t think many people even discuss.

Kishen: Exactly. Everyone’s familiar with the environmental impact of your car, but do you really think about how much your air conditioner is causing, beyond it being a chunk of change you’re spending once a month on your electricity bill?

Knowledge at Wharton: What do you hope that you’ll be able to do?

Yann Pfitzer: In the beginning, this was a Senior Design Project, so we were really just trying to see if we can make something work at all. We took a project that had a pretty big risk. Right now, almost all ACs use the vapor compression cycle, which uses a lot of harmful chemicals that have a very large global warming potential. We wanted to revisit air conditioning as a whole and completely eliminate any chemicals.

We looked at a bunch of different technologies that were out there, read a lot of research papers, and spent about three weeks just digging through the literature to see the alternatives. We settled on membrane dehumidification and evaporative cooling.

Sendel: In the next 30 years in India, we’re expecting over one billion new air conditioners, which is a crazy number, but it’s a result of a number of factors. You look at climate change as necessitating the air conditioning. You look at the rising incomes in developing countries, specifically India — you have 55 million Indians every year entering the middle class. These are people who look at air conditioners as key to their quality of life, especially given this climate change.

Then you look at things like urbanization, government initiatives. There are all these factors compounding that big number. If those one billion air conditioners are as inefficient as air conditioners today, as Ashwin mentioned, it would be impossible to stay under the 2 degree Celsius threshold of global warming. That’s really bad news.

Knowledge at Wharton: There is an ongoing push in India to make sure that all parts of the country have electricity, which is necessary for this buildout.

Kishen: Air conditioning is one of the drivers of needing to install more power stations. Basically, peak power is what limits the amount of stations you need. If you’re able to decrease the amount of air conditioning required, you can drastically alter the number of power plants a country needs, which is why India is a great place to focus on energy efficiency. It’s a reason why we’ve worked with power companies in India. It’s a reason that people are focusing on this problem. Basically, when you get home in the evening at 5 p.m., everyone in the country turns on their air conditioner, and that’s that huge power spike that you want to reduce.

Sendel: Up to 70% of the energy used at any given time in India could be for cooling. The government is really looking at technologies like this, where they can pull that peak down, because it reduces their costs on the power grid and reduces risk to their energy infrastructure.

Knowledge at Wharton: So there is a recognition by the government that is a problem they have to solve?

Pfitzer: Absolutely. I think some papers have worked out that just the increase in energy demand due to air conditioning alone will necessitate 600 new medium-sized power plants to be built in India by 2050. Obviously, the government has a huge interest in trying to increase the efficiency of air conditioners, maybe change people’s behaviors towards air conditioners.

Kishen: It’s one of the challenges that we faced with air conditioning as a market, and cooling and energy efficiency. The people who get the most gains from this — power companies, the government — aren’t necessarily the ones that are putting up the chunk of change and buying an air conditioner. So, matching incentives is a real challenge. It’s one of the reasons that investors sometimes aren’t interested in cooling. It’s why some companies have failed in this region. It’s the reason we’re focusing on India, because the government has identified this incentive mismatch as a real struggle for companies, like Aerate, which are focused on bringing in new technologies to cooling. They’re trying to combat that by doing things like buying in bulk so that they’re pushing these efficient air conditioners into people’s homes more quickly. India is also sponsoring things like the Global Cooling Prize, which is an ongoing international endeavor to address the problems we’ve talked about here.

“When you get home in the evening at 5 p.m., everyone in the country turns on their air conditioner, and that’s that huge power spike that you want to reduce.”–Ashwin Kishen

Knowledge at Wharton: Let’s go back now and talk about the competition and its process. Tell us about pitching this idea to judges who could end up being investors.

Sendel: It is a multistage competition. There is a preliminary application to get in. In our case, we entered the competition through a different competition here at Penn called Pennvention. Essentially, we gave two pitches to panels of five judges, all of which are industry experts, whether it’s in VC, the energy industry, or generally business, like professors here at Wharton.

From there, our idea was selected as one of the finalists. There were 27 semi-finalists and then eight finalists. From there, we pitched to four more industry experts — really cream of the crop, VC entrepreneurship advisory board members here at Wharton — and got a great chance to interact with them and got some really positive feedback. It really did help generate more and more traction and leads for us.

Knowledge at Wharton: What are the next steps?

Pfitzer: One of the big next steps for us is the Global Cooling Prize, which is a competition sponsored by the Indian government and [Virgin CEO] Richard Branson. It’s kind of their equivalent of the Gates Reinvent the Toilet initiative. We’ll be applying to that over the summer, and see where that takes us.

Kishen: That takes us into deeper technology development than what we have done so far. We only had about six months to generate this entire company idea and develop three prototypes of systems, so there’s a lot of work to be done in terms of taking a prototype and bringing it up to a market-ready, home-ready system. That’s what we want to focus on in the next six months.

Knowledge at Wharton: Realistically, is this an open market for you?

Kishen: I think the cooling market today has been relatively — I don’t want to say stagnant. They’ve really focused on driving down costs and getting these units into people’s homes because there was massive growth around the world. But the pressure on efficiency and getting it up beyond what it is today is very much a new drive.

Knowledge at Wharton: Can you take this idea to the business side and think about the cooling issues that companies have to deal with?

“We wanted to revisit air conditioning as a whole and completely eliminate any chemicals.”–Yann Pfitzer

Pfitzer:  The cooling prize is one option for us. But we’re going to try to reach out to more people in India to get business development on the ground there.

Sendel: One of the really cool things about what we’ve designed is that it is scalable. A lot of our efforts this year were focused on taking these promising research results on a very small scale, then applying them generally to an actual system that could cool a room. We feel pretty confident that the technology we’ve built now could continue to be scaled for commercial applications.

Kishen: I’d love to give a little explainer of the technology. Evaporative cooling has been used around the world for thousands of years. It’s an extremely efficient cooling method. You just evaporate a small amount of water into air. Unfortunately, these systems don’t work well in humid environments, such as in the monsoon season in India, or right here in Philadelphia today.

What we’ve introduced is a membrane dehumidifier. It’s a new method of dehumidifying, where you separate water from air using vacuum suction across a specialized material. Using that combination of membrane dehumidification, which is done extremely efficiently, and evaporative cooling done with this dry air stream that comes out of the membrane dehumidifier, we’re able to cool using a completely new process that eliminates refrigerants, is more efficient and saves money for the consumer.

There’s definitely a cost curve, economies of scale consideration. Haier, LG, all of these companies, build millions of units a year. Right now, our system would be much more expensive on a COGs (cost of goods) basis. But if you could get it up to scale, it’s on a comparable price point for manufacturing.

Sendel: Looking at the reduced energy use, you can extend that out to a savings number. Because we use substantially less power over the 10-year lifespan of an air conditioner — which is what we expect ours to last and is the industry standard — we expect up to $1,000 savings for the user just on energy alone.

Knowledge at Wharton: You are focusing on India, but there are a lot of other countries that could use this as well.

Sendel: India is definitely the biggest contributor with the one billion air conditioners I mentioned. But globally, that number is 3.3 billion air conditioners in the next 30 years. That is a truly crazy number of air conditioners, right? And those air conditioners, on current trends, will triple the amount of energy being used for cooling. When you’re looking across the world to other places, Indonesia and China are huge contributors. South America is a big contributor. Further down the line, even a whole lot of Africa. There are more and more opportunities to continue to use sustainable technology like this one to cool.

Pfitzer: The largest growth we see is residential air conditioners. People are flocking to cities in a lot of these developing countries, and one of their first purchases once they start having a higher income is a residential air conditioner. That’s really what we’re focusing on right now. The technology is fairly scalable, but just achieving the scale we have today with our current technology was a fairly large breakthrough. We’re already really happy with how far we’ve come in terms of scale.

Knowledge at Wharton: What has this experience been like for each of you?

Sendel: I think I can speak for all of us when I say we’ve really enjoyed it, but it’s been a lot of work. A good way to think about it is we’ve been working [the equivalent of] an extra full-time job on the side of our studies here for the last six months, so we’ve really been working hard on it. The first four months of that were tech-only because we didn’t necessarily mean for this to turn into a venture, a company. It was a Senior Design Project, and we just thought it would be cool to build a new, super-efficient air conditioner, just because we think of that as engineers.

As we dug more into the market side of that, and then understood that our technology did have this huge potential and was actually working, the transition to the business side was a turning point for us and also super-exciting because we started seeing these huge numbers that I’m talking about. The billions of air conditioners around the world and, of course, all the money that goes with it.

Knowledge at Wharton: You’re also talking about social impact.

Kishen: It’s certainly a motivation to want to address the challenges that are faced outside of our relatively comfortable space here at Penn. I think designing for places that aren’t necessarily similar to where we are is really challenging. Having had some experience in traveling and seeing the world was really beneficial, and it’s something I brought back to Senior Design. When we were brainstorming ideas, I tried to focus on not just what my life is like here and what problems I have — because to be honest, I have relatively few problems from a mechanical engineering standpoint. But focusing on what other people are experiencing in this world was a huge motivation for me and, I think, for others on our team.

Pfitzer: We were looking for a project that would have a high impact, so we were willing to take on some risk as to whether or not we could make something successful. We were considering water harvesting technologies as some of our projects. We were thinking of car seats. I can’t remember some of the other ideas we bounced around, but it was a long period of brainstorming.

“We feel pretty confident that the technology we’ve built now could continue to be scaled.”–Connor Sendel

Knowledge at Wharton: Are you already starting to receive interest from people and companies within India for this product?

Sendel: In some ways, it can feel like almost too much attention.

Kishen: Too many people are really excited about us. I’ve had people call and ask, “Can I install an air conditioner tomorrow? I’ll hold off on buying one.” And it’s like, “Well, hold on. If tomorrow is 10 years from now, sure.” So yeah, there has been a lot of enthusiasm, which is very uplifting for us.

Knowledge at Wharton: Can you think about what will happen beyond 10 years?

Sendel: I think in 10 years [we’ll have] a very sustainable business. We’re hopefully looking at a little bit shorter timeline, ideally in the market in the next two to three years. I think that’s kind of the critical timeline. One of the first big inflection points in air conditioner growth is in the next two to three years. But long-term, I think there is a huge implication for this, especially when you consider the fact that right now in India, just 7% of the people own air conditioners. When that number gets to 90%, 100%, if this isn’t the technology you have, it’s really going to be catastrophic.

Gender lens investing — using capital to alleviate the economic plight of women and girls — is gaining steam. From being a blip on the screen a mere two decades ago, this field is being embraced by more than 100 private and public funds. And their investment products are getting more targeted: Investors can put money in funds that aim to improve women’s access to health care, for example.

Suzanne Biegel, a gender lens investing pioneer now at the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, recently spoke with Nick Ashburn, the institution’s senior director for impact investing, to discuss the field’s latest trends.

An edited transcript of their conversation follows.

Nick Ashburn: What is gender lens investing?

Suzanne Biegel: Gender lens investing can be defined in a few different ways. One is to think about how you integrate gender analysis into financial analysis to get to a better outcome in any investment. Another way is to think about how we use capital intentionally to achieve positive impacts on women and girls.

You might think about women’s access to capital. You might think about products and services that positively affect women and girls or take advantage of the women’s market. You might think about where women show up across the value chain of a business, in governance, in leadership, in supply chains and distribution channels all the way through to end customers. And you might be thinking about how we use our capital intentionally to shift structural gender inequality.

Ashburn: Help me better understand the demand for this type of investment.

Biegel: When I started doing this kind of investing 17 years ago, it was hard to find other people who were ready to be in this conversation. There were people coming from an international development perspective who were asking, ‘How do we get capital to women entrepreneurs?’

The microfinance industry was thriving. There were people who were thinking about how we get capital to women entrepreneurs, especially in tech, because it was the boom of the tech emergence. There were people who were starting to think about women on boards and in governance, but it was very early. When I really looked to deploy capital 17 years ago with this kind of a lens, there was one fund that with a public equity strategy. There were some women’s opportunity loan funds in local communities, but it was pretty scarce.

Over the past 17 years, we have seen demand come from the investor community, from individuals to institutions, from players in the private markets to people in the public sphere and international development, multilaterals and the development finance institutions. And it’s coming for a few different reasons. One is because people are seeing the rise of women as consumers, whether that’s in B2B or on the consumer side.

The second is that people are sharpening their understanding of where the problems are around gender equality or women’s and girls’ access to education or health care or financial inclusion, and how capital can be part of the overall solution. People are seeing the opportunity that is out there to invest and back high-tech, high-growth women entrepreneurs or fund managers who are developing funds around women’s access to capital or around smart business that has women in leadership.

“When I started doing this kind of investing 17 years ago, it was hard to find other people who were ready to be in this conversation.”

As the additional supply of investible opportunities has grown, that has also influenced demand. As women and men who get it about gender equality and the opportunities to invest with a gender lens are starting to be more vocal, they’re pushing to see more product get created. So, it’s a two-sided market.

Ashburn: Now there’s opportunity to invest in things that we hope will improve the lives of women and girls. In the broader conversation around environmental, social and governance factors, or impact investing with the intentionality lens, a lot of people are saying that if you’re taking into account these different factors — gender being one of them — it’s better business. These will be better-run companies. How does that resonate with you?

Biegel: I’m spending a fair amount of time in Africa and south Asia right now. Whether I’m speaking with male or female business leaders, they’re telling me it just makes sense for us to have women in sales and marketing roles if we are marketing to women. If we are working with primarily women in the value chain, in the supply chain, then we should have women who are thinking about what are the barriers and opportunities for that workforce. If we are designing products and services where women are the primary consumers, it just makes sense to have women in roles of design and development of products and thinking about distribution.

Ashburn: To take that a step further, let’s say Dove body soap is not a women-only product but is often marketed to women. We wouldn’t necessarily expect a room full of men to better understand how to market that product to women.

Biegel: It’s not to say that a room full of men might not. But it is to say that if you are thinking from a user-centered design approach, you would be thinking not only what is it about the product, but what is it about how we speak to our consumer audience, where can they get it, are we respectful in how we’re portraying our target audience? We’d be taking all of that into account, so you’d naturally want to have diversity on the teams that are making those decisions.

Ashburn: You talked about the increase in investment products with a gender lens. What are some of those?

Biegel: On the macro level, we can be looking across all asset classes. The thing that I’m most excited about at the moment is where we can use private equity and private debt. We’re working on a research project here at Wharton that is focused on mapping the field around private equity and venture investing with a gender lens. When I tell them that, people think that I’m going to talk about maybe five or 10 or 15 funds that have that kind of approach. At the moment we’re tracking over 100.

They are domestic and emerging markets, they are very specific around particular sectors and themes, and they’re really thinking about where women are in the picture in terms of leadership. So, it’s a fund to invest in women entrepreneurs in Ohio, or it’s a fund to invest in women who are focused on high-tech, high-growth companies that are in cyber security and AI and deep tech and deep science. There really is a diversity now of structured vehicles that are emerging, and that’s really exciting.

Ashburn: While I understand that the private markets are a great place to have impact, there’s more in public markets in terms of scale of capital on the supply side. If I have more of my assets in that and I want to invest with a gender lens, what might I be considering in that market?

Biegel: On the public side, we have a project that we did with various wealth partners last year that we dubbed Project Rose where we wanted to show the size and the scale of what you could be in from a listed company’s public equities and public debt standpoint. We’re tracking about 20 different fund managers and strategies with an explicit gender lens, a gender lens mandate if you will. What they’re primarily looking at is women in leadership, women on boards, women in the C-suite, women in management.

But there are some that are going further and looking at policies and practices, where are they on pay equity, where are they on providing access to sexual and reproductive health services, for example. No one that we’ve seen so far has gone all the way through to looking at supply chains and products and services and some of the other things that I think will be really important indicators. But even at that level of looking at women in governance and women in leadership, you have the big banks bringing out products. You have some explicit fund managers doing it. And you have this ability to be in small cap, mid-cap.

Ashburn: So, there are investible products out there in the marketplace.

Biegel: There are. In 2014, there were about $400 million under management that we could see. Just bringing it forward to 2016, there’s about $600 million under management across these 20 strategies, and that is for funds that really haven’t articulated a gender lens mandate. There are a number of other strategies where they use gender as a factor of analysis in ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) and are even doing shareholder activism around gendered shareholder proposals, but that represents a whole other pool of capital.

Ashburn: Your role with us at the Wharton Social Impact Initiative and the work that we’re doing together is starting to uncover what is out there because it is nuanced, it’s varied. Some people are more forthcoming around using a gender lens in their analysis. What do you think working with an institution like Wharton brings to this space?

“People are seeing the rise of women as consumers, whether that’s in B2B or on the consumer side.”

Biegel: It’s important that we help people see the breadth and depth of the field. I think that Wharton as a finance [-focused academic] institution really can bring the question of what is the evidence around performance, help people make sense of the different strategies that different fund managers are deploying and help to amplify [the message] to the finance community, not just to general public but really within the finance community. This is a field of investment that is emerging, and these are some of the really important research questions that are coming from that. We can help people make sense of what good looks like.

Ashburn: The Wharton Social Impact Initiative has been doing this long-term study on impact investing private equity. Impact investing fits into a gender lens profile, but not everyone is calling themselves gender lens impact investors. Where might we find funds that are interested in gender lens?

Biegel: We’re tracking 120 funds that we have now broken into four or five different categories. The first are funds that have an explicit, quantified gender lens mandate. They may self-identify as an impact fund, or they may not identify as an impact fund. In some cases they’re allergic to being referred to as an impact fund. Their view of impact is that they’re getting access to capital for women entrepreneurs in high-tech, high-growth arenas or in particular categories that are really growing.

Ashburn: These investors are saying in their investment thesis or more publicly, “this is our stated goal,” and often with a number to quantify what their goals are around this, correct?

Biegel: Yes, so 50% of our portfolio will be into companies with women co-founders, or 100% of our companies will be looking at women’s economic empowerment as the end goal, irrespective of who’s in leadership. That’s quantified gender lens mandate. We have another category in this taxonomy that we’re evolving that is a gender lens mandate. People are saying we absolutely are committed to a gender lens in our fund, but we’re not going to quantify what percentage or how many people need to be on the board or in the C-suite or in the audience.

Another category is gender consideration. That’s really about using gender as a factor of analysis in looking at deals. Again, it’s not a commitment that we’re going to invest in women entrepreneurs or in companies that take advantage of the women’s market, but that we’re looking across the whole suite of areas of analysis.

There’s another category that is really interesting for us where you might have a lot of women in fund management, for example, which is still so, so small, where we think that there is a gender lens in there, but they’re not stating it publicly in their marketing materials, in their deal docs. But we have watched what they’re doing and think that there’s more of an opportunity to bring and sharpen their gender lens in a way that they’re not even speaking about.

Ashburn: Let’s take your Wharton Social Impact Initiative hat off and put your practitioner gender lens investor hat on. What would you like to see as an investor to help you make these decisions?

Biegel: This is exactly one of the reasons why I got this work started with various wealth partners and Wharton. As an investor who’s deploying capital, I want to understand the different strategies of these fund managers so I can make sense of the choices that I have. What kind of capital are they using? What is their thesis around using a gender lens? What sectors and themes are they in? What geographies are they focused on? What stage of companies are they looking to help or address? What are their financial goals as well as their social impact goals? How do they look at the market? Where do they see the trends or what are the problems they’re really trying to solve?

“People are sharpening their understanding of where the problems are around gender equality … and how capital can be part of the overall solution.”

I might come to the conclusion that none of these funds is doing exactly what I want and that I might want to start and seed a new fund, as some have done. I might come to the conclusion that I want to launch my own fund or put money into a number of these funds that are really tied to the strategies that I’m looking to accomplish. And I really want to see the growth of capital going towards promising entrepreneurs, male or female, who are solving the kind of problems that I’m looking to solve.

Ashburn: Is there a demand-side challenge in terms of the investible opportunities and the private markets where people are addressing these issues?

Biegel: There’s no shortage of demand for capital. I think that’s in the billions, even just within the United States, much less when you get beyond the U.S. We’re tracking this on a global basis. If you’re very specifically saying I want to invest in technology companies that are disrupting slavery and trafficking, what’s the quality of the deal flow there? Or if I want to invest in global women’s health with a particular target audience in mind, what’s the quality of the deal flow there?

The opportunities for co-investments across these different funds is also starting to emerge, which I think is very interesting. The question for the strategy that you’re taking as a venture fund or private equity fund is, how are you also able to bring other gender impacts to life and forward with your power as an investor?

One way that fund managers are approaching this is to say, “If I spot an opportunity that I think is a really strong business, going after a solid market with a good management team and a good understanding of product market fit and all the things that we would normally look for in private equity and debt opportunities, and I don’t think that they’re as strong as they could be from a gender perspective, I can use my power as a fund manager or as a limited partner in a fund to influence their evolution.” Whether that’s adding more women to the board, whether that’s looking at the management team, whether that’s looking at helping them sharpen how they’re thinking about marketing and sales or distribution, the opportunity in the private markets that we have is to really influence these companies.

Ashburn: What I love about looking at the gender lens investing space as a researcher is when I look at this as a factor of analysis, or the intentionality that I want to invest to improve the lives of women and girls, I see this as an opportunity to dive deep into one theme or sector. At the same time, these principles that maybe we’ll uncover through the research will be applicable to other factors outside of gender. How could you see that playing out?

Biegel: Some people are really interested in the question of looking at race and class and gender and ethnicity. Where does adding a conscious approach to thinking about diversity improve the financial performance or the social performance of a fund or of a particular business? By focusing on gender, we may also uncover good questions and good trends to be thinking about in other forms of diversity.

We’re at a point in our evolution in the field of gender lens investing where we don’t necessarily have strong correlation data, and we definitely don’t have strong causation data, about when you look at gender in particular areas does it automatically have a positive financial or social effect.

“This is a field of investment that is emerging.”

One of the things we’re really hoping to do within this field is uncover some of those correlations, especially where is the opportunity for causation. In comparing with non-gender lens mandate funds or with funds that don’t have this, we would be able to show that having that level of diversity or paying attention to markets and trends helps you to deliver a better performance on both a financial and a social basis.

Ashburn: Suzanne, you are one of the foremost experts in this field both as a practitioner and a researcher. What are you most excited about in the future in this space?

Biegel: I am really excited about uncovering how we’re matching structures of capital to the problems that we’re trying to solve, whether that is in a thematic or sectoral areas or for what kind of business is the right capital appropriate. When does it actually make sense to blend philanthropic capital and debt? When does it make sense to have a peer-to-peer lending structure? When does it make sense to have something that doesn’t have a classic 10-year and “2-and-20” structure that is known in the venture capital industry? And where will we need new tools, new forms, new structures that are going to better suit the needs of the entrepreneurs that we’re aiming to help?

We have an opportunity to get more and more refined about enabling people to match the investment structures and strategies with the problems they really want to solve or the market opportunities they really want to see. I think we’ve gone from broad-based investing with a gender lens or investing in women entrepreneurs to being able to get more precise and say, “I care about improving the quality of women’s and girls’ access to health care,” or “I care about girls’ access to education. What can I be in?” That differentiation is something that’s starting to happen. And I think we have both a need and an opportunity to help people see that. The ability to seize market opportunities and to solve problems is just getting more and more refined.

Today’s “learning organization” focuses on much more than skills development. It looks at empowering employees to work in multiple locations and cultural settings and to apply insights across different industry verticals, says Abhijit Bhaduri, chief learning officer at IT services firm Wipro in Bangalore. In a conversation with India Knowledge at Wharton and Ravi Aron, senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation, Bhaduri discusses the relationship between Wipro’s corporate strategy and corporate learning initiatives and shares his ideas on how managers can help employees find a larger relevance for their work.

An edited version of the conversation follows:

India Knowledge at Wharton: Abhijit, thank you so much for joining us today. The question I would love to explore with you is the relationship between Wipro’s corporate strategy and corporate learning initiatives.

Abhijit Bhaduri: All learning strategies try and address three [sets of] questions. One is what is going to be the shape of the business in a three-year or four-year timeframe? What is going to change? What are going to be the [areas] in which we will play? The second question is: If that is really what business is going to look like, what will it take to succeed? If you have answered one and two then your third logical question is: If this is what people need to learn in order to succeed, how do we make sure that they are able to have that? How do we make them learn these skills?

India Knowledge at Wharton: Could you give me some specific examples of how this works at Wipro?

Bhaduri: One of the ways in which we are going expand is to go with a localized talent pool in some markets, which means we are going to have to work very hard to assimilate people into the Wipro way of working and yet draw on the advantage of what you get when you get a lot of people coming in from the outside.

The second [aspect] is in the technology as it is emerging. There is a fair bit of change that happens because we work with a variety of partners [and] a variety of clients. How do we get people to keep their technical skills completely up-to-date? [We have] a huge engine which works on increasing the technical competency of people at all levels. We have a huge focus on developing project management skills because that is the crux of what we do. We have looked at creating a multifunction, multi-geography, and multi-business approach towards developing our leaders. One of the ways in which the leader’s role is going to change is to work with a multi-generational workforce, and that’s not a skill that is taught in most places. How do you work with people who are substantially younger or older than you? That is going to determine success or failure, because as we are getting into different markets, the profile of the workforce is very, very different.

India Knowledge at Wharton: As you have gone about implementing your learning strategies, have you found any particular aspect of it that has worked beyond your expectations and performed extremely well? What lessons have you learned through that experience?

Bhaduri: Leadership development is something we have been doing for the past many years. The proof of that is we have grown our own leaders. If you look at the average tenure of people at the top, we do have people who have been there for 15, 20 and 25 years. I think it has worked very well for us. But strategically at senior levels, we also bring in people from the outside — either because it is [about] technology we haven’t worked with or it is a skill we don’t have in-house. Or, sometimes consciously you want to get in somebody with a different mindset.

But historically one of the things that we have done well is we have given people leadership responsibilities when they have been 65% ready — the [remaining] 35% the person will pick up on the job as you try out different things and you hone and shape your own leadership style. That approach has worked well.

Going forward we would also need to have people who can [ask]: “Where can you shorten the development cycle?” You don’t have the luxury of change happening over three, four, five or six years so you give people enough time to evolve and change their leadership styles. But you have to consciously shape it and work with them to make sure that they are ready as the need arises.

India Knowledge at Wharton: To what degree do you use technology as part of your learning initiatives? Where do you think technology is the most effective? Which problems have you found that technology can’t really solve?

Bhaduri: When you look at building people’s technical competencies or project management skills, clearly technology can sharpen that skill development dramatically. You can stream a real-life problem that somebody is trying to solve in some part of the world and have a bunch of people learn about that. When there are geographically dispersed populations and they are not large enough in number, it is easier to do it on the web and yet have people stay current. Places where we have not really been able to leverage technology a huge amount but we use that as a blended approach is [around] leadership development where we think people learn as they watch leaders. So that’s a place where we have used the philosophy of ‘leaders build leaders.’ We do have our senior leaders coming in and talking about their own experiences, the choices that they were faced with, and they debate that.

Ravi Aron: You have a lot of experience in corporate India spanning a wide range of industries from consumer goods to product technology companies such as Microsoft and now as the pre-eminent services firm in India. You have a window on how Indian managers learn and some of their deficiencies. It has been often noted that Indian companies do not invest sufficiently in training their senior and upper-level managers. What are your thoughts? What are the deficiencies? What are some observations that you would like to make?

Bhaduri: We have different cultures that are predominantly geared toward a certain style of learning. In India we use the story-telling method a lot more [than other methods]. Therefore, people tend to learn better when they are told a story rather than be given a book, which they read up and come into a classroom.

When you look at the opportunities today, you have to use technology because we have people from 55 nationalities. You cannot gear your learning strategy only to address one particular nationality because it is not going to work. We have diverse customers. We have diverse problems. We have diverse nationalities of employees to work with.

As we are bringing in more people, we are trying to experiment a lot more with technology and with much more structured learning approaches than we have done in the past. No one method works well regardless of nationality, which means that we spend a lot of time on mentoring people or a lot of time giving feedback. Feedback is one of the best ways [to] shorten the development curve.

Ravi Aron: If you take a company like Wipro and some of its peers, about seven years ago it was about training Indians to understand European and American business context and culture. But today your client engagement managers are drawn from a widely diverse pool — from Europe, Australia, America and India. So there is also some of that reverse learning of folks that are not of Indian origin learning about the huge delivery capability that resides in India. How does that work?

Bhaduri: As the world becomes smaller and you look at a common pool of employees drawn from a diverse set of countries and experiences, it is less about just the inputs; it is also about creating conditions in which these different styles are allowed to interplay with each other and people learn from each other. If you look at all social learning theories, they say people learn as much from looking at somebody else doing the right thing as they learn from a text book. We think that this is really what has changed.

So when people come in from Western countries and work with Indians, they learn how to work with a lot more ambiguity and a lot less structure. When Indians work with people in many other countries that are a lot more structured and sequential, they learn the value of putting structure down in their own work, in their planning, their delivery and their articulation.

Ravi Aron: You mentioned those two styles, which lead me to a thought about strategy. All the big Indian service providers increasingly find the need to swim upstream, cross-sell and up-sell, and intervene at a more strategic level with a client because the IBMs and Accentures are coming downstream and hugely increasing their supply footprint in India. So what are the challenges for a company like Wipro? How does learning play into meeting those challenges? How does learning play into helping Wipro intervene at a higher strategic level and up-sell and cross-sell services and take it beyond labor arbitrage?

Bhaduri: I think that is a terrific question. The opportunity really lies in first of all looking at the ‘consumerization’ of technology, which basically means that that there is no such thing as business-to-business selling any more. Eventually there is a customer, a consumer, somewhere at the end. So the quicker you are able to visualize that, the more your technology is going to become consumer friendly and, therefore, easier to sell.

Business is no longer going to lie in silos. Let’s say you are talking about healthcare or mobile technology or entertainment. The moment you start thinking of an intersection of all three, you have a huge opportunity for a new kind of a business. What it also means is [that] we as service providers need to be able to understand that unmet need of the consumer we can address. It is important to understand what is happening in all the adjacent technologies surrounding your system. How can something which is happening in automobiles give me a better insight in terms of developing something for a client in consumer electronics?

Ravi Aron: What you said just now is about drawing insights from best practices in another industry — absorbing it deeply and then applying it back to strategy formulation in your company’s context. It has often been said that managers whose focus has been principally on operation and execution metrics tend to limit their learning to information acquisition and tangible skill acquisition. [However,] what you said are about insight, synthesis and deep understanding of trends that you can reformulate for your own industry. What has been your experience in moving people away or beyond just the acquisition of skills and information towards developing insight through reflection and other issues that may be relevant here?

Bhaduri: The managerial job at the end of the day is also about getting stuff done. So there is no doubt that execution is always going to be at a premium. However, when you look at what am I going to execute against — that strategy requires reflection. So the manager or the leader or an employee at any level in the organization has to have the ability to get alternative ideas and to reflect on them, because without that reflection no change actually happens; you don’t get insights. The more you are able to look at sharper details and the more you are able to look at patterns, you then turn back and… find a business opportunity.

Sometimes that kind of insight can be either serendipitously arrived at or it could be structured so that people are trained to look for certain things. The whole notion of leadership development is going to move beyond tangible pieces which people know and get enough training in. [It will move] into the intangible space, which is reflection, creating meaning, coaching people, developing talent — all of which is really around observing, giving feedback, sharing ideas and not jumping in with answers. The role of the leader is really about asking questions. So that is a shift. A lot of managers are really good at giving the answers. How do we teach them to ask different questions?

India Knowledge at Wharton: To take that point a little further, in a global market when you have people from a lot of different cultures who are interacting, how do you tailor your corporate learning efforts in ways that culture doesn’t become an impediment? Do you find that certain cultures, for example, are more collaborative or more teamwork oriented and some are much more competitive? And, if that’s the case, how do you manage the relationship between culture and learning?

Bhaduri: It is not something where we have been able to make huge headway. Going forward, [there are] two things we will need to tap into. One is around multi-geography. How can we leverage the nationality differential to build differential approaches, and [for] learning and development? The other piece is… how do we leverage a multi-generational workforce to look at different styles of learning and what is it that we can do better through technology, through exposure? Is there a matrix one can create to say that if nationality equals this and the age cohort is equal to this — [will] this work well? We haven’t really found one. But as we do more and more work trying out alternatives, it is going to throw open patterns. It’s still very elementary days and very early days. We haven’t really reached any insight I can share.

Ravi Aron: A recent report by a management consulting firm said about 25% of India’s engineers are probably employable in a premier services delivery company and the rest are not. They [were said to be] lacking in many skills. Wipro has been progressive in actually identifying intelligent people with a flair and aptitude for thinking and analytical skills even though they may not be engineers and in creating an in-house training and learning program of between one and four years — to create your own skilled workforce. Tell us a little bit about the thinking behind that and where you see that going forward.

Bhaduri: Look at the share of the GDP that gets spent on education in India. It is about 4%. To do a reasonable job, that ought to be about 6%. Clearly, this gap has to be bridged by the private sector. The other piece is that having schools in itself is not enough because a number of the government schools in India are notorious for their shoddy education output.

We have been trying to intervene at multiple levels. We [have] a learn-and-earn program for four years during which time [students] get their degree in engineering from one of the premier institutes. So what you are trying to do is to increase the employability of the pool in which you are fishing. The second thing that we are trying to do through the [Azim Premji] Foundation is to develop the curriculum [and] coach teachers into being more effective. We do work in a large number of schools in the larger urban areas, but over a span of time we want to take it to [other] areas.

The third piece… is we have started [a] pilot in two states of India where we work with people who have a certain amount of skills. We not only bolster their technical skills but we also give them soft skills training. How do you attend and respond to an interview scenario? How do you articulate your ideas better? How do you come across as a confident person the employer feels [surer] about taking a bet on?

To make sure we are doing a good job of that we make a commitment to [employ] 25% of the people we are educating. That keeps the pressure on within our system to ensure that we are delivering quality because this is the set of people who are going to come back and work for us.

Ravi Aron: You have made a pretty strong case for why training [workers] and giving them an engineering degree pays off. But very often in Indian companies somebody from the CFO’s office, if not the CFO himself, will ask somebody from human resources, ‘What is the return on investment on learning? Show me the money.’ How should a chief learning officer respond?

Bhaduri: Some of the tangible measures of learning are really the unimportant ones. It’s a lot easier to measure those when you are talking [about] skills. The moment you talk about a philosophy — leadership is a philosophy with which you look at people, the organization and the society in which you operate – that philosophy is always going to be difficult to measure. But it is really that philosophy that helps people ultimately to find meaning in work. Or not find meaning in work. The reason why somebody comes into work is because work is an opportunity for us to really fulfill our dreams, to sharpen our own skills, to grow as human beings, and to try out and get exposure to a world, which one has not seen before.

Leadership is a method by which this happens. Therefore, each time that you interact with somebody in the organization, that experience can be either meaningful or not meaningful. The purpose of leadership development is to create a much higher purpose, which is to see… an economic purpose of the organization, which is important, but beyond that there is a social purpose and there is an impact on the community in which we operate. That’s ultimately going to be the differentiator between what is a good organization and what is not going to be a good organization because everybody is going to pay you a salary in return for work. There is no great insight in that.

But the one way you are able to go beyond that completely tangible output into the intangible is to look at… how it is making a difference in the community in which we operate. Those are really going to be the measures that will be sustained over a span of time. It’s going to be something that has to last beyond the quarterly results or the annual results. If I ask you for any firm, what [are] the quarterly results of that firm in 1990? You are not going to be able to tell me the answer. But did it make a difference in the world by doing something, which really made a shift? I’m sure everyone will know. And I think that’s really what one is talking about. It’s not just CSR (corporate social responsibility) — but it’s being able to give… each individual employee a canvas to make a difference. And that’s tough. But that is really the role of the leader.

India Knowledge at Wharton: I understand that Wipro has an interesting initiative based on consortium-based learning. Could you explain what that is and how well it has worked for the company?

Bhaduri: Sure. We have five or six companies with whom we partner. We have one consortium which works at the international level and we have a domestic consortium as well. These are all from different industries so you have companies as diverse as Rio Tinto or Schneider Electric. When our executives and these senior leaders come together, they get common inputs. That can give them a huge perspective because they get to see information and concepts not just from their own worldview but in that consortium somebody may have already used that same strategy. If there is information around how to do a product launch you would have completely different experiences of launching a pharmaceutical product [and] a cosmetics launch as compared to industrial products.

India Knowledge at Wharton: Abhijit, thank you so much for joining us today.

Bhaduri: Thank you very much for having me.