[MUSIC PLAYING]
TARUN KHANNA: Some years
ago, my family and I
found ourselves in the hot, sultry
southern Indian city of Chennai.
And I had to find a
solution for some medication
that a family member needed to
maintain at a very cool temperature.
So I called the front desk
of the hotel and asked them,
could you get me an ice back?
Good morning, I need an
ice pack for medication.
Ice.
No, no, no, ice pack, not ice.
Ice pack?
You don't know what that is.
OK.
Imagine my surprise when people
about seven or eight years ago
didn't know what it was.
But very helpfully, we all embarked
on a collective wild goose chase
in the city of Chennai, calling
up pharmacies, calling up
hospital outpatient places, et
cetera, looking for an ice pack.
At the end, I didn't
even get an ice pack.
I computed how much time was
spent, and sort of multiplied
the time that was spent by
the time value of money,
if you will, and decided that we had
spent 800 rupees, which was about $40
in those days.
And that was 20 times the
value of the ice pack.
The same thing if I had done in Boston,
walked down to the corner store,
the ratio of the time
value of money spent
in getting the ice pack to the ice
pack would have been one to one.
And to me, that difficulty
of executing something,
in this case something as
simple as getting an ice pack,
is what this course is about.
In other words, you want to do
something-- something meaningful,
something that leads to
an amazing enterprise that
might make you fabulously
rich, or make you
feel like Mother Teresa
or Mahatma Gandhi
because you solved a big
problem, all that, in my mind,
comes under a big tent
version of entrepreneurship.
But to do that, you have to navigate
a lot of institutional constraints
arising out of missing
services in the environment,
so-called institutional voids.
Each of these missing
institutions represents
an opportunity for an entrepreneur.
How do you solve problems that matter
to you and to society around you
when you are in this
incredible area of constraints?
You could become the entrepreneur
that provides that service,
not just for yourself, but for others.
And you'll see this play out many times,
the act of creatively solving a problem
that matters to a large
group of people amidst
the constraints imposed upon those
people by the developing countries.
And I think it's incredibly exciting.
I've been doing this as a
professor at the Harvard Business
School for the last 20 plus years,
and having an absolute blast.
And I invite you to
join me in this course
so that we can all learn
how to do this better.
It's fun, it's useful,
and it's important.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
