Thanks to a generous gift from David Roux, followed by a critical top-up from the the Cashins<\/strong> I started a project at HBS in 2014 to write case-histories of Transformational Medical Advances<\/a>. The case histories were meant to complement to my obsession with Productive Knowledge (as I now call it) but I had no clear idea of what I’d actually do with them.\u00a0 About five years later, after accumulating a respectable stash of the histories, I tried peddling them to book publishers. No one had any interest.\u00a0 Then in summer of 2019, the then HBS Dean graciously proposed I return “home” for a year (but just one!) to teach the case histories as a course. I jumped, unhesitatingly, at the suggestion; but then came the anxieties:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Who would take a new course offered by a new and unknown instructor?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n How was I going to teach case-histories, spanning decades, with no protagonist, and no decision point?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n I frantically rewrote the histories in a way I prayed might be teachable. (I had figured out, following Jan Rivkin’s suggestion a possible model..)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n By year’s end, after six month of scrambling — and under Covid lock-down I had: 1) Submitted more than a dozen rewritten or entirely new cases. 2) Written up a syllabus (downloadable pdf<\/a> and posted here<\/a>) and a conceptual course note<\/a>. 3) Produced a dodgy marketing video (embedded below and linked here<\/a>)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n It started badly\u2026. Really really badly. I had hoped to attract 30 students, but just about a dozen registered. The first “shopping period” class stank. Enrollment dropped in half.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Then it all changed.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n