New Online Course: Owning Your Time

Are your days packed with meetings and obligations, yet the things that matter most keep getting pushed to “later”?

We’re excited to introduce Owning Your Time: Practical Tools to Reshape Your Relationship with Time, a new self-paced, online course designed to treat time as a leadership practice and an expression of your values. 

Through simple daily exercises, you will clarify what and who you value, experiment with small daily intentions, and learn to reframe responsibilities so that even in demanding systems, your time feels more intentional, aligned, and purposeful.

Untangling the Arts Ecosystem in Providence: Strengthening the “Creative Capital”

Guest blog by Sattam Alqadadi, Asyifa Isvari, Sunny Jiang, and Sumbul Siddiqui

Our team examined how to strengthen the arts and culture ecosystem in Providence, Rhode Island. Although Providence calls itself the “Creative Capital,” arts and culture are not fully integrated into the city’s economic development and infrastructure strategies. As a result, the sector remains under-supported and underutilized, limiting its potential to contribute to economic growth, civic identity, and community engagement. Providence is also at a pivotal moment: the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup presents an opportunity for the city to showcase and invest in its arts and cultural sector, potentially catalyzing greater visibility, collaboration, and support.

Tackling Learning Poverty in Sierra Leone’s Education System through the Lens of the PDIA

Guest blog by Irina Bilyalova, Orlando Carvajal, Vaiba Flomo, and Sonali Verma

We were four students brought together by a shared interest in solving real-world problems. Three from the Harvard Kennedy School and one from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. One of us was from the United States; three of us were international. At the start we were complete strangers and new to the PDIA practice, but over seven weeks. We became a team, excited to use the PDIA model to analyze problems in development.

Cracking the Code: Can Australia Sustain More Homegrown Unicorns?

Guest blog by Kumar Abhishek, Aurangzeb Badini, Rafael Letizio and Raja Muhammad Irfan Sadiq

In 2008, a Melbourne-based startup called 99designs set out to transform how businesses access graphic design. The platform connected companies with a global network of designers, quickly gaining traction and becoming one of Australia’s most recognized early tech startups. It had strong founders, global demand, and a scalable digital product; ingredients typically associated with high-growth technology firms. Yet despite its early promise, the company ultimately exited through acquisition by a U.S.-based firm in 2020. While the deal represented a successful outcome for founders and investors, it also reflects a broader pattern: many Australian startups create innovative products but struggle to scale independently into global technology giants from within the domestic ecosystem.

Breathing Through the Grey: Learning to Govern Air Quality in Punjab, Pakistan

Guest blog by Felipe Conceição, Vlad Dobrokhlib, Mallory Escobar González and Yamini Saxena

In Punjab, Pakistan, air pollution is not background noise. It is a defining feature of daily life, measured in school closures, hospital admissions, and years quietly subtracted from lifetimes. Residents of the province are losing an estimated seven years of life expectancy to chronic exposure to air quality that consistently exceeds both national and WHO safety standards. During peak smog episodes, nearly 14 million people face hazardous conditions. Children and older adults carry the heaviest burden; their face masks and inhalers are far more prevalent than they should be.

Apply to Implementing Public Policy!

If you work in public policy, you’ve likely experienced a familiar frustration: promising ideas that never quite translate into real-world impact. Policies are drafted with ambition and optimism, yet many stall during implementation or fail to deliver meaningful results. It’s a challenge shared by policymakers around the world—and one that’s becoming increasingly urgent as public problems grow more complex.

The Widening Gap Between Earnings and Living Standards in Panama

Guest blog by Daniel Lombana, LEG ’25

One lesson I take from the Implementing Public Policy program is the value of focusing on the problem, not on pre-set solutions. The PDIA and growth diagnostic approaches taught me that progress comes from identifying what truly constrains development and working through it step by step, learning as we go. Learning the concept of “binding constraints” has been extremely useful. 

PDIA Toolkit Available in Japanese!

BSC’s PDIA Toolkit has been used by practitioners and governments around the world to tackle complex challenges. To ensure this tool is accessible to as many people as possible, we have translated the toolkit into Arabic, French, German, Indonesian, Khmer, Portuguese, and Spanish. We are excited to announce that the toolkit is now available in Japanese.

The Luna 3 Mission: Seeing the Unseen Side of Economic Growth

Guest blog by Sanan Tapdigov, LEG ’25

As I reach the end of this marvelous journey with this wonderful team: professors, faculty staff, and teammates – I find myself looking up. Every human being, and perhaps every living creature, knows what the Moon is. Yet, every educated person also knows that from Earth, we only see 59% of its surface. The Moon, so familiar to us, only introduces itself partly. It wasn’t until 1959, when the Luna 3 spacecraft captured the first pictures, that we finally saw the “far side.” 

My journey during these last ten weeks was my personal Luna 3 mission. The Leading Economic Growth (LEG) course revealed the unseen side of economic growth to me. It allowed me to look at well-known concepts from a completely different angle, shedding light on the hidden complexities of leadership and development. 

From Redistribution to Capability-Building in China

Guest blog by James Pang, LEG ’25

Over the past ten weeks in the “Leading Economic Growth” course, my understanding of economic development has been fundamentally reshaped. Guided by the frameworks learnt from Professors Ricardo Hausmann and Matt Andrews, I have had a more nuanced, iterative, and context-specific approach to solving growth challenges. The central problem I examined—the uneven distribution of resources and productivity across regions in China—served as a living case study, and the program has guided me to analyze this issue step by step in real time and provided me with different perspectives to look into this issue, which I found very insightful.