Nurturing the seeds of innovation
In business, one well-prepared conversation can change everything. Rebecca Kantar ’14 knows how that works. During a trip to Silicon Valley with other Harvard students, she sat down with a mentor to get advice on her young start-up, BrightCo. She left that meeting with a verbal commitment for seed funding. “I was in shock when I got back to the bus,” she recalls with a laugh. Serendipity will always play a role in entrepreneurship, but it takes far more than a fortuitous meeting to translate an idea into reality. For Kantar, that one moment was backed by months of network building, ideation, and careful pitch preparation. Here in Cambridge, an ever-expanding web of support, through teaching and advising, is helping students create new networks, gain hands-on experience, and ultimately make a difference in the world. “In entrepreneurship, if you learn the process it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll succeed,” explains Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and...