Farley Deepens Its Faculty Bench
The Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation continues to grow its faculty ranks and broaden entrepreneurship education for Northwestern students. In recent months, Farley has welcomed eight new faculty members who bring experience and proficiency in areas such as entrepreneurial leadership, startup financing, and tech product management.
“We’re delighted to expand our team with such an accomplished group,” said Hayes Ferguson, director of the Farley Center. “Their diverse backgrounds and expertise deepen the bench of an already outstanding faculty teaching Farley students.”
Jen Baker
Adjunct Lecturer
Class Taught: How Communication and Relationships Create Innovative Leaders (and Innovative Design)
Q: What is one of the biggest challenges facing entrepreneurs today?
A: With the sheer number of entrepreneurs out there, they need to consider how to distinguish themselves from all the others. They also need to understand how to provide a true “so what? and so why?” in their pitches as opposed to a “simply want to do.”
Anya Cheng
Adjunct Lecturer
Class Taught: Tech Product Management
Q: What is the most important lesson you hope students take away from your class?
A: I hope students become strategic thinkers focused on solving the right problem rather than finding a solution. For example, Google “organizes the world’s information” while YouTube “allows everyone to share videos and find audiences” and Amazon “helps people get good products with reasonable prices fast.” They all solve a clear and big problem. If you solve the wrong problem, then the solution won’t be useful for the customers no matter how awesome it is.
Rob Chesnut
Adjunct Lecturer
Class Taught: Tech Ethics and Business Integrity
Q: What is the most important lesson you hope students take away from your class?
A: To think about business differently. The old world where businesses were expected to focus simply on making money is gone. Employees, consumers, and communities now expect businesses to operate in a way that’s fundamentally good for the world and for a variety of stakeholders. In this new world, businesses aren’t forced to choose between doing what’s right for the bottom line and what’s “right.” Today, operating with integrity can be wind at your back and drive your business to even greater financial success.
Mert Iseri
Adjunct Lecturer
Class Taught: Principles of Entrepreneurship
Q: What is one of your favorite recent innovations?
A: ChatGPT, or generative AI, is simply the biggest enabler of progress since the invention of fast and reliable internet. It opens up the world for anyone to learn and build anything. It’s already changing the world, and I’m excited to use the OpenAI platform to build intelligent applications together.
Leonard Lee
Adjunct Lecturer
Class Taught: Strategies for Financing New Ventures
Q: What is the single most important lesson you hope students take away from your class?
A: Enrolling investors in your business is akin to enrolling anyone to invest in you. This applies to job interviews, turning managers into champions, or anyone else who is taking a risk to back you.
Harrison Shih
Adjunct Lecturer
Class Taught: Tech Product Management
Q: What is the single most important lesson you hope students take away from your class?
A: In Tech Product Management, we focus heavily on what it takes to be successful in the modern professional landscape beyond just the more traditional roles to which previous generations have aspired. The class is catered toward helping students build confidence, context, and familiarity with key concepts of product management as a foundation. I hope students walk away with more options than they entered with, knowing they can take their diverse skillsets and contribute to all kinds of ventures, big or small, and across any field.
Tyler Wanke
Adjunct Lecturer
Class Taught: NUvention: Medical
Q: What is one of your favorite recent innovations?
A: I am a big fan of Cardiosense and their CardioTag technology. It’s a wearable medical device that noninvasively measures pressures within the heart to identify and prevent heart failure exacerbations. The technology combines electro-mechanical sensors with deep learning to provide visibility into cardiac function that was previously only possible with invasive catheters. The underlying technology was developed at Northwestern in Dr. Mozziyar Etemadi’s lab and the founding team was a combination of NUvention alums, Northwestern researchers, and Northwestern Medicine physicians. Last year, the company secured an FDA breakthrough device designation and raised more than $15 million from VCs.
Ian Wiese
Adjunct Lecturer
Class Taught: NUvention: Energy
Q: What is the single most important lesson you hope students take away from your class?
A: Think bigger, which means to start taking a more holistic analytical approach to problem-solving and operating both on a personal and professional level. I’ve seen major innovations in the metallurgical extraction space precipitated by insights offered by soil scientists and agronomists. There are byproducts coming out of the aerospace industry that can be almost directly repurposed into electric vehicle batteries. Mechanical engineers can make meaningful strides in the chemical engineering development of water treatment powders by using the “first principles” they learned as undergraduates and applying them in unique ways. All of these examples were only possible by breaking out of the traditional siloed thinking, taking a more holistic view of the world, and not artificially limiting oneself to predefined systems.