Research

Erik Noyes & Tom Davenport · Harvard Business Review · November 2025

Generator director Erik Noyes and Generator Fellow Tom Davenport interview prominent venture capitalists to document a transformation three years in the making: with global private AI investment topping $252 billion, AI now shapes virtually every stage of tech investing, from how startups are conceived and pitched to how they are built and funded.

Christoph Winkler, Basel Hammoda, Erik Noyes & Marco Van Gelderen · Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy (SAGE) · 2023

A top-downloaded publication. Published within months of ChatGPT’s release, this article mapped what generative AI would mean for how entrepreneurship is taught, and it set the agenda a wave of scholarship has followed. Its central claim has aged well:

Luke Stein, with Bowen, Price & Yang · SSRN working paper · 2024

Can AI underwrite fairly? Generator faculty member Luke Stein and co-authors ran an audit experiment: real loan applications, experimentally varied race and credit scores, and the leading large language models as underwriters. The models recommended more denials and higher interest rates for Black applicants than for otherwise-identical white applicants. A simple instruction to make “unbiased” decisions eliminated the approval gap. Twice honored by the American Real Estate Society and covered by The Mortgage Note and Public Citizen, the study shows both the risk and the fixability of AI bias in high-stakes decisions.

Kristi Girdharry & Erik Noyes · The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Leading in the AI Era” · 2025

Invited into the Chronicle’s flagship report on AI leadership, Girdharry and Noyes make the structural argument: AI collapses the boundaries between disciplines faster than universities can redraw their org charts. Knowledge organized in departmental silos, they argue, cannot answer questions about ethics, entrepreneurship, creativity, and work that arrive already interdisciplinary.

Erik Noyes & Kristi Girdharry · AACSB Insights · December 2024

The Generator’s founding argument, made to the global business-school community. Noyes and Girdharry contend that AI transformation in higher education is too consequential to delegate to vendors, IT departments, or committees that have never taught with the tools.

Xinghua Li · Green AI Summit at Harvard University · October 2024

Can AI save the planet, and who decides what counts as saving it? At Harvard’s Green AI Summit, media studies scholar Xinghua Li examined the utilitarian assumptions built into AI-driven sustainability solutions, bringing a critical humanities lens to a panel spanning sustainable agriculture, urban planning, energy management, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Her contribution draws on a career studying how media and markets shape environmental desire, including her book Environmental Advertising in China and the USA: The Desire to Go Green (Routledge).

Jeffrey Shay & Tom Davenport · MIT Sloan Management Review · February 2026

Generator Fellow Tom Davenport recently published a map of the AI startup landscape in MIT Sloan Management Review. The taxonomy sorts AI ventures into six species: originators building foundation models, explorers probing agentic and quantum frontiers, infrastructure builders, enhancers, optimizers, and experimenters, “by far the largest cohort.” For founders and investors alike, it’s a field guide to knowing what kind of AI company you’re actually looking at, and how to bet on each.

Jeffrey Shay, Donna Kelley, Mahdi Majbouri & Tom Davenport · Harvard Business Review · August 2025

Generator Fellow Tom Davenport recently published an HBR playbook for growth-minded founders: how AI compresses customer discovery, accelerates operations, and lets small teams scale like big ones.

Faisal Hoque, Tom Davenport & Erik Nelson · MIT Sloan Management Review · April 2025

Generator Fellow Tom Davenport recently published an MIT Sloan Management Review case for a different kind of leader in the AI age, one who pairs technological fluency with organizational judgment.

Kristi Girdharry · Minding the Campus · July 2025

A provocation aimed at the reflex to prohibit: what becomes possible when a university meets AI with curiosity instead of fear? Girdharry sketches an engaged, critical, and experimental institutional posture toward AI.

Kristi Girdharry & Davit Khachatryan · Double Helix · 2023

The pedagogy-first primer. A writing scholar and a statistician team up to explain how generative pretrained transformers actually work, so that faculty in any discipline can move past mystique and design assignments that foster responsible, meaningful use. Interdisciplinarity in method, not just in name.

Randy Bean & Tom Davenport · Harvard Business Review · January 2026

Generator Fellow Tom Davenport recently published new HBR survey evidence on how executives are deploying and rethinking AI heading into 2026: where investment is flowing, where returns are real, and where expectations are being reset.