[MUSIC PLAYING]

TARUN KHANNA: Some years ago my family and I found ourselves

in the hot, sultry southern Indian city of Chennai.
And I had to find a solution for some medication
that a family member needed to maintain at a very cool temperature.
So I called the front desk of the hotel, and asked them,
could you get me an ice pack?
TARUN KHANNA (CARTOON): I need an ice pack for medication.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
TARUN KHANNA (CARTOON): No, no, no.
Ice pack, not-- you don't know what that is?
TARUN KHANNA: Imagine my surprise when people--
about seven or eight years ago-- didn't know what it was.
But very helpfully, we all embarked on a collective wild goose chase
in the city of Chennai, calling up pharmacies, calling up
hospital outpatient places, et cetera, looking for an ice pack.
In the end, I didn't even get an ice pack.
I computed how much time was spent and sort of
multiplied the time that was spent by the time value of money, if you will.
And decided that we had spent 800 rupees, which was about $40
in those days.
And that was 20 times the value of the ice pack.
The same thing if I had done in Boston, walked down to the corner store.
The ratio of the time value of money spent
in getting the ice pack to the ice pack would have been one to one.
And to me, that difficulty of executing something--
in this case, something as simple as getting an ice pack--
is what this course is about.
In other words, you want to do something, something meaningful,
something that leads to an amazing enterprise that
might make you fabulously rich or make you feel like Mother Teresa or Mahatma
Gandhi because you solved the big problem.
All that in my mind comes under a big tent version of entrepreneurship.
But to do that, you have to navigate a lot of institutional constraints
arising out of missing services in the environment,
so-called institutional voids.
Each of these missing institutions represents
an opportunity for an entrepreneur.
How do you solve problems that matter to you and to society around you
when you are in this incredible area of constraints?
You could become the entrepreneur that provides that service,
not just for yourself, but for others.
And you'll see this play out many times--
the act of creatively solving a problem that matters to a large group of people
amidst the constraints imposed upon those people
by the developing countries.
I think it's incredibly exciting.
I've been doing this as a Professor at the Harvard Business
School for the last 20 plus years, and having an absolute blast.
And I invite you to join me in this course
so that we can all learn how to do this better.
It's fun, it's useful, and it's important.