Daniel Isenberg

Daniel Isenberg (@danisen) 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, and in the interim (1987-2005) was an entrepreneur and venture capitalist in Israel. Dan authored Worthless Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value (Harvard Business Review Press 2013), published over 30 digital and print articles on entrepreneurship in the Harvard Business Review, and 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® methodologies, and the Scalerator®, and Dan and his colleagues have founded and directed Manizales-Mas, Scale Up Milwaukee, Scale Up Rio, Scale Up Atlantic Canada, Scale Up Panama, Scale Up Guatemala, and ScaleratorNEO. Since 2009 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, and has 4 grown children and 2 grandchildren. Dan enjoys salsa dancing (On2), jazz, collecting wine, fishing, and painting; nevertheless, he is most excited about spending time with his kids and his grandchildren, helping his startup investments grow, and being continually surprised by what entrepreneurs around the world can accomplish.