Daniel Isenberg is founding executive director of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Platform and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. From 1981-7 and 2005-9 Dan was a professor at the Harvard Business School. In the interim (1987-2005) Dan was an entrepreneur and venture capitalist in Israel and since 2009 has made investments in over two dozen technology startups in the US, Israel, Asia, and Africa, as well as three funds. Dan authored Worthless Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value (Harvard Business Review Press 2013) and over 30 digital and print articles on entrepreneurship in the Harvard Business Review. He has been featured in the Economist, Forbes, NPR, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, etc. Dan has been a pioneer in the concept and development of entrepreneurship ecosystems, Scale Up® Ecosystem methodologies, and the Scalerator®, and Dan and colleagues have founded and directed Manizales-Mas, Scale Up Milwaukee, Scale Up Rio, Scale Up Atlantic Canada,  Scale Up Guatemala, and ScaleratorNEO. Dan has conducted World Economic Forum events at Davos, Africa, Europe, Latin America and China, and from 2015-2017 was an associate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Growth Lab. In 2012 Mikhail Gorbachev awarded Dan the Pio Manzu Award for “Innovations in Economic Development.” At Babson Executive Education, Dan created the 3-day program, Driving Economic Growth Through Scale Up Ecosystems.

Dan holds the Ph.D. degree in social psychology from Harvard University. He lives in Watertown and in his home town of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he co-organized the MBL Symposium on Histones and Chromatin, and has four grown children and two grandchildren. Dan enjoys salsa dancing (On2), collecting wine, art and fishing; nevertheless, he is most excited about spending time with his kids and his grandchildren, helping his devil investments grow, and being continually surprised by what entrepreneurs around the world can accomplish. @danisen disen@babson.edu disen2@gmail.com