Emily Cox Pahnke
Associate Professor of Management and Organization
Why this course
Entrepreneurship continues to be a driver for business school attendance, but there is more to building a business than traditional entrepreneurial frameworks and skillsets. Professor Pahnke’s course asks students to adopt a broader mindset and look beyond the walls of the firm to analyze their assumptions, personal values and motives for entrepreneurship.
The energetic and experiential pedagogy encourages creativity and uses challenges that students see in their daily lives – including homelessness, water shortages, climate change and global health - to imbue students with a sense of agency to create the world they envision.
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Course Highlights
Course Objectives:
How are you going make the world better in the ways that you think are important? Grand Challenges for Entrepreneurs provides tools to better understand the big problems the world faces and to identify, design and implement effective solutions. In class you'll learn about a wide variety of grand challenges. Using the lens of entrepreneurship, you will also learn frameworks and tools including design thinking, business models and execution strategies to better understand these problems and potential solutions.
This class will be useful to students who want to start their own organizations as well as those who are making decisions about where to volunteer, which companies to work for and where to donate money to support causes they care about. Ultimately, this class will help you understand how to assess whether organizations are effectively addressing problems you care about.
Biography
Emily Cox Pahnke is an associate professor of Management and Organization and the Lawrence P. Hughes Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Her research at the intersection of innovation, entrepreneurship, and finance, focuses on how social networks- relationships between individuals and organizations- affect innovation and performance. Professor Pahnke’s research has been published in top management journals and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, a Schulze Distinguished Professorship, and the Kauffman Foundation. She was recognized as the Emerging Scholar by the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the Academy of Management and serves on the editorial board of numerous journals.
Professor Pahnke holds a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University and M.B.A. and B.S. degrees from Brigham Young University. Professor Pahnke has won numerous teaching awards including the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching award.