Efosa Ojomo
Adjunct Lecturer in the Entrepreneurship Program, Expert-in-residence for the Zell Fellows Program
Efosa Ojomo was selected as one of 30 thinkers in the 2020 Thinkers50 Radar list, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age.
He researches and writes about how innovation can transform organizations and create inclusive prosperity for many. In January, 2019, alongside the late Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, he published the book, The Prosperity Paradox: How innovation can lift nations out of poverty. Christensen was the world’s foremost thinker on Disruptive Innovation and was a mentor to Efosa Ojomo.
Efosa leads the Global Prosperity research group at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, an innovation-focused think tank based in Boston and Silicon Valley. Over the past several years, his work has been published and covered by the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Guardian, Quartz, Forbes, Fortune, The World Bank, NPR, and several other media outlets.
He speaks and consults often on how organizations can develop a culture that fosters market-creating innovations, and has presented his work at TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Bank, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and at several other conferences and institutions.
His TED Talk on Innovation and Corruption has garnered over 2 million views.
In a Wall Street Journal review of The Prosperity Paradox, Rupert Darwall writes that the book provides “a better way to fight poverty” as it returns “the entrepreneur and innovation to the center stage of economic development and prosperity.”
Click here to view a list of some of Efosa’s published work.
Efosa graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in computer engineering and received his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Shorter Bio
Efosa Ojomo is currently the director of Global Prosperity at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, where he leads the organization’s research on how innovation can create prosperity. His most recent book, published alongside Professor Clayton Christensen and Karen Dillon is titled The Prosperity Paradox: How innovation can lift nations out of poverty. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (B.Eng) and Harvard Business School (MBA).
Entrepreneurship and Market Creation in Emerging Markets (ENTR-906-5)
Only 7% of people in the world live on more than $50 a day. This course is about learning the necessary entrepreneurial skills that will enable you create new markets that serve the remaining 93%, most of whom live in emerging economies. More specifically, this course has five goals. 1. To provide you with a lens that will help you see and assess the opportunities that exist in emerging economies. 2. To equip you with the relevant tools and frameworks to help you tackle the challenges unique to building a successful venture in emerging economies. 3. To walk you through the process, from start to finish, of developing an idea that can serve customers in emerging markets. 4. To introduce you to seasoned entrepreneurs, investors, and stakeholders in emerging market startup ecosystems who will provide feedback on your idea at the end of the class. 5. To practicalize your learning by having you work on a real market-creating project with real companies across emerging markets. This will help you develop your own entrepreneurial idea for emerging markets. In emerging markets, cost is often seen as the primary barrier preventing customers from purchasing (or consuming) a product. This course will introduce other barriers especially in the context of emerging markets and will also provide a framework for how students can design business models that take into consideration these additional barriers. From the first session to the last, the focus of this course will be on applying the skills, lessons, and frameworks you learn to develop market-creating ideas so that, at the end of the course, you have the confidence to present a viable business proposal to prospective investors.
