The HKS Management, Leadership, and Decision Sciences Faculty (The MLD Area) invite all HKS degree program students to join us for our Shopping and Welcome Event on Monday, August 28th from 5:00 – 6:15pm in the Allison Dining Room, (Taubman Building 5th floor).
Should you have questions, please contact MLD Area Administrator, Greg Dorchak at greg_dorchak@hks.harvard.edu We hope you will join us on August 28th!
Please note: This event is not meant to be a substitute for the regularly scheduled MLD course shopping sessions taking place during the day on 8/28 and 8/29 at which you will hear in much greater detail about the fall and January courses.
The New World Social Enterprise Fellows Program is an innovative, “next-generation” incubator for highly effective social change. It draws upon the insights and expertise of the world’s top social enterprise practitioners, and the research and teaching strengths of Harvard University to home in on what works—and leave out what doesn’t—to train students to launch and figure out plans to scale-up new social ventures, propose new innovations for existing programs and organizations, and, ultimately, create far-reaching solutions for the world’s most pressing social problems.
The incubator will include HKS course work, intensive co-curricular workshops, and a strong experiential component.
The pilot cohort will be comprised of up to ten exceptional second year and mid-career Harvard Kennedy School students with an established commitment and desire to change the world through social enterprise. The core objective of the program is to arm students with the theoretical and practical knowledge to succeed in and strengthen the field of social enterprise.
In addition to HKS curricular studies, participants will:
Attend regular co-curricular sessions focused on mastery topics throughout the school year;
Interface with a cadre of international social entrepreneurs, major foundations, and sector leaders;
On a needs-basis, be eligible for an award of up to $5,000 during the academic year; and
Be eligible for a post-graduate job placement with a major institution, city, or social enterprise stakeholder or post-graduate funding of a start-up based on satisfactory completion of the program requirements and a competitive awards process.
The Fellows Program and Incubator has an exceptional capacity to give students the skills, experiences, peer networks, and operating knowledge needed to effectively tackle society’s most complex issues and lead social change in new and existing ventures across the nonprofit, government, and business sectors.
Jorrit de Jong, lecturer in public policy, listens to a student group work through an issue. photo credit: Bryant Renaud
Cities and towns across America face myriad challenges — from crime and criminal justice policy to educational and transportation infrastructure — but perhaps none as visible and visceral as so-called “problem properties.” Boarded up houses and fenced up vacant lots represent urban blight, deflating property values and spawning a number of health and security concerns. Even small to mid-size cities are experiencing this reality as the economy struggles to recover from the Great Recession.
The problem of poorly-maintained properties is exacerbated by city governments encumbered by bureaucratic silos, which are simultaneously struggling with decreasing public revenues. But the Massachusetts towns of Chelsea, Fitchburg and Lawrence are re-engaged in the challenge with support from Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) student teams deployed through the Innovation Field Lab spring module. Co-taught by Jorrit de Jong, lecturer in public policy, and Joe Curtatone, Innovations in American Government Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the mayor of Somerville, the seven week module offers students the opportunity to do real work on real problems in real settings and to learn firsthand about the practice of public sector innovation.
You should expect to get your hands dirty if you take a management, leadership, and decisions science (MLD) course at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Learning-by-doing is a key pedagogical component of the majority of MLD area courses at HKS. Running a range from personal case analyses, “live” case and negotiation simulations, simulated-client projects, to fieldwork for real clients and organizations, MLD students learn by experiencing for themselves real world lessons in management, leadership, teamwork, and decision making.
On the scaffold of classroom curriculum, and with the guidance of faculty and support from their peer teams, students work to address challenges in complex areas like negotiation, government innovation, operations management, social organizing, philanthropy, and municipal budgeting. The learning students achieve by engaging the curriculum and working in real and challenging contexts is often transformative for them, but the simultaneous positive impact students make has become a major part of the mission of the Kennedy School. Read More
The Management, Leadership, and Decision Sciences Area at the Harvard Kennedy School is launching a new website to enhance visibility, communication, and learning. Suggestions and contributions from Area faculty are welcome.
In this age of deep societal challenges and growing complexity, when government at all levels is tasked with implementing a wide and growing range of policies to ensure and improve the public good, public managers and those working with governments can find it very difficult to move the needle on important programs and policy initiatives.
With her course MLD-125 What Works in Public Sector Management, Professor Elizabeth Linosintroduces graduate students to the central elements of public management and policy implementation, with a focus on three core challenges that public managers face: managing programs; managing people; and managing change. A sampling of the questions explored in this course include:
How can governments use data and evidence to improve program performance and what do you do when the data is bad?
How do we reduce administrative burdens in government and why does it matter?
How can we recruit, retain, and support frontline workers?
What are the big dilemmas around algorithmic decision-making, nudging, participatory government, and other innovations that an effective public manager should consider?
Using academic theory from public management, real-world case studies, and a series of guest speakers who work in and with government, students will learn about the barriers and opportunities to make a difference through government. While most of the cases studied will focus on federal, state, and local government challenges in the U.S., Linos draws on best practices and studies from around the world.
Elizabeth Linos
Dr. Elizabeth Linos joined HKS in July 2022 as the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor for Public Policy and Management. Linos is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College with majors in Government and Economics. She earned her PhD in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2016, and went on to spend 5 years as Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley
Between college and graduate school, Linos worked directly in government as a policy advisor to the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, focusing on social innovation and public sector reform. While pursuing her doctorate, Linos spent two years as Vice President, Head of Research and Evaluation at the Behavioral Insights Team – North America, working with government agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. to improve programs using behavioral science and to build capacity around rigorous evaluation. In 2021 she was appointed, and now remains, a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution.
Linos’ research focuses on how to improve government by focusing on its people and the services they deliver. Specifically, she uses insights from behavioral science and evidence from public management to consider how to recruit, retain, and support the government workforce, how to reduce administrative burdens that low-income households face when they interact with their government, and how to better integrate evidence-based policymaking into government. To those ends, Elizabeth founded and now directs The People Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government with a mission to empower the public sector by producing cutting-edge research on the people of government and the communities they are called to serve. For more information, follow the work of The People Lab on Twitter.
MLD-125 will be offered in the spring semester. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.
Event on Monday, August 28th from 5:00 – 6:15pm in the Allison Dining Room, (Taubman Building 5th floor).
