An interview with Professor Gary P. Pisano of Harvard Business School about a groundbreaking project bringing together faculty, researchers, and students to probe issues in health care management.

From the Harvard Business School publication, Working Knowledge.

Wendy Guild Swearingen: How did the initiative come to be?

Gary P. Pisano: It was clear there that there was a huge set of interesting and important management issues going on that were not being addressed elsewhere, and that we were in a good position to address. Public policy issues were being addressed quite well in other parts of the university, but the management issues were not. So we took action on a series of things to move this along.

There were really four prongs of the approach that we talked about. One was research. The next was course development, actually creating courses. The third was a doctoral program, and fourth was executive education.

On the research front, we tried to create momentum through various informal means such as discussions, seminars, things like that. So we started a seminar series where people could come in and present their work in front of people who have dealt with those problems. In health care there are a lot of specialized institutional problems that one really has to understand and get around to be able to do good research, and there are big opportunities to leverage efforts across faculty. Since 1997, faculty at HBS have launched quite a few new research projects focused on health care.