Private Innovation in the Public Interest

Professor Sukhun Kang was motivated to turn from a promising career as a computer scientist toward studying the biopharmaceutical industry after his family member was diagnosed with a rare cancer. Why don’t we have enough drugs for devastating diseases such as the one that afflicted his relative, and why can’t we make those that we do have more widely available? Sukhun’s research shows that the costs of administering programs designed to make cancer drugs available more widely to late-stage patients have prevented their uptake.  Companies instead tend to rush into drug development and distribution when there’s a big market and a relatively well-known mechanism of disease, even when there’s a lot of competition. Diagnosing diseases that afflict relatively fewer patients attracts few resources because the prospects for profitable treatments are narrow.   The result: We may not even know what medicines are needed.

Professor Diana Jue-Rajasingh has devoted her entire career to understanding why great products designed for low-income settings in places like her Alma Mater, MIT, are not adopted.   As co-founder of a distribution and marketing company called Essmart Global, she learned that distribution infrastructure and consumer education are essential – but not enough to assure uptake.  As a scholar, she found that local resistance arises from long-term exposure to practices that typically keep investment capital in the hands of expats who push tech products into “moral markets” that satisfy their own interests but don’t reflect what’s happening on the ground.  A long-term connection between product designers, distributors, local retailers, field advocates and low-income consumers is key to overcoming this resistance.  It’s a lot of work, but ultimately it’s critically important for overcoming global problems.

Professor Mark Desjardine is concerned about our generation’s obligations to preserve the environment for future generations – and the implications of them for corporations. What is sustainability, really? And how do companies deal with tradeoffs between short- and long-term value-creating goals? Mark’s answer to this question in part rests on insights about how advocates of different types can help managers to appreciate fully the ways in which their organizations can move toward solutions to pressing climate challenges.

Professor Andrew King devotes himself to the challenge of replicating the results of important empirical studies in the fields of ESG investing, sustainable finance, and corporate social responsibility. After discovering a raft of anomalies, he is now advocating for what he calls a “living conversation” in the journals on our findings. We need to publish more comments, more questions, and more methodological inquiries in a dialogue over important findings to assure their robustness and overcome the politicization of our work.

Catherine D’Amato is an internationally renowned leader in the food-security movement. Serving as CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank for three decades, she invented and reinvented a model through which the GBFB advocates for 190 smaller, community-based partners with suppliers, distributors, technologists, and – remarkably – governments. Consistently ranked as among the most important leaders in Boston, she describes the critical relationship between empathy for local neighbors and advocacy at scale for resources.