Description

Business in Global Society Fellowship on Call for Proposals: Structuring Business Ownership

Invitation for Academic Researchers

Harvard Business School (HBS) invites proposals for the 2025–2026 Business in Global Society Fellowship on Structuring Business Ownership.

Launched in 2022, the HBS Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS) Fellowship brings leading scholars and practitioners to the HBS campus in Boston, MA, to work on collaborative projects that advance our understanding of key issues in those areas where business and society overlap and occasionally collide.

Ownership is foundational in a capitalist economy, influencing access to capital, resource control, and governance. Fellows will collaboratively explore how different structures of enterprise ownership can empower businesses to achieve broad organizational objectives, address pressing societal challenges, and support human values in the 21st century. The 2025–2026 BiGS Fellowship will concentrate on emerging models of business ownership, exploring how variations in ownership structures can shape or advance a range of broader societal goals.

Fellowship Structure

The 2025–2026 BiGS Fellowship is a non-residential program designed to foster collaboration between academic researchers and industry practitioners, with the goal of producing significant academic and practical outputs. Through a series of workshops on the HBS campus throughout the academic year and ongoing collaborative efforts, participants will work together to address the central research question (see below) and contribute to a final edited volume or special journal issue. The Fellowship culminates in a capstone conference that gathers all participants to finalize their contributions and share their findings with a broader audience.

The 2025–2026 BiGS Visiting Fellowship consists of:

• Up to ten Visiting Research Fellows who will collaborate throughout the year with up to ten Executive Fellows, who represent a variety of industry perspectives

• Three on-campus intensive workshops:

1. September 10 – 12, 2025: Two-day workshop, preceded by evening reception, to plan outputs and assign roles

2. January 21 – 23, 2026: Two-day workshop, preceded by evening reception, for presentation of ongoing research and findings

3. May 11 – 15, 2026: One-week workshop to host the capstone conference and finalize a volume of conference proceedings 

• Ongoing collaborative work between workshops

• Collaborative output will include an academic conference and an edited volume of conference proceedings, with visiting fellows also encouraged to collaborate on additional case studies, teaching materials, and other academic and practitioner-oriented deliverables.

Research Focus

Working with a faculty team led by HBS professors Nien-hê Hsieh, Ethan Rouen, and Debora Spar, the 2025–2026 BiGS Fellowship will bring together up to ten scholars and ten practitioners to jointly address a common research question:

What models of contemporary enterprise ownership most effectively realize broad organizational objectives, address pressing societal challenges, and support human values in the 21st century?

Each academic researcher will be asked to propose a specific project or paper that contributes to this broader question, and which can be meaningfully addressed during the Visiting Fellowship and published as a single article in a jointly edited volume of conference proceedings.[1] Together, the research projects should accelerate and support understanding of the underexplored but important role ownership design can play in business management, filling a crucial gap in business and management scholarship. Proposals may focus on but are not limited to topics such as:

• Comparative Analysis of Ownership Forms: Understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of different ownership structures across business contexts and institutional environments.
• Steward and Trust Ownership: Examining how responsible ownership models, where shareholders retain control but have no claim to profits, influence business performance and societal outcomes.
• Foundation Ownership: Investigating the structure, operational efficiencies, and societal contributions of foundation-owned businesses.
• Worker Cooperatives: Exploring the benefits and challenges of worker-owned enterprises, including an exploration of contrasting forms of worker ownership.
• Political Economy of Ownership: Examining how varying models of business ownership shape and are shaped by the political economy of home or host countries.

[1] Fellows will be permitted, and encouraged, to submit their findings to external publications as well.

Fellowship Logistics

The fellowship offers up to ten (10) Vis