Week 2 Lesson 2 Podcast

Welcome to Week 2, Lesson 2. In this module I’m going to ask you to read several interesting pieces. First, I’d like to have you think about the role of government and private enterprise in creating sustainable businesses and what, what is the, what’s the distinction between the two. Where does government stop or start and where does private enterprise begin?

And I’m going to have you do that by reading three different business case studies. The first is called, "Social Entrepreneurs: Correcting Market Failures." This is a very interesting piece, very descriptive. You don’t have to do any analysis of this piece. I want you to think about how these entrepreneurs identified markets that were failing, in other words, failing to serve the needs of many, many of the people, and how they identified entrepreneurial ways of correcting those market failures.

The second article or case study is Burt’s Bees, which is a kind of a quirky company. Many of you perhaps have used their products, the lip balm, perhaps other products that Burt’s Bees makes. I’d like you to understand a little bit about how two very non-business school professionals identified a market, created it, and actually made quite a lot of money doing it. So Burt’s Bees is another one of those articles which I think gives a good case history of a company that was very successful and being sustainable at the same time.

The third article is a case on DuPont and their Freon Products Division and this is, again, I want you to read it from a point of view of overview, not doing much analysis of this case, but just how did DuPont identify, or how was the problem identified for DuPont and how do they react to it and what was their strategy in, in coping with this rather complicated confluence of R & D, product markets, customers, and government regulation. So these are three different case studies of how government and private enterprise interact.

In this, in this week also I’d like you to go back to the supply chains you drew in Week 1 and actually try to go about correcting the, or correcting some of the market failures that might have been identified by you and by others in those supply chains given, of course, our readings for this week and learning how perhaps some of those corrections might occur through government actions, through taxes or regulation, or through perhaps trading systems. So I’d like you to sort of comprehend how other companies have done it and then try to fix the problems that you’ve now drawn in your supply chains.

So thank you very much and we’ll talk to you soon.