Paul McManus

As an educator, I work to empower a new generation of innovators, builders, and leaders to go beyond business-as-usual and create the businesses-of-the-future that will reinvent local economies, revitalize local communities, and restore local ecosystems. In Advisory roles, I operate within the intersections of the SDGs and take an active role in working with innovators, impact investors, IGOs/NGOs and public institutions to uncover “wicked opportunities” for transformational innovation and put catalytic capital to work in new venture initiatives for sustainable development.As a Fellow of the Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute, I contribute to the creation and delivery of improvisational learning experiences that spark generative dialogue, promote engaged discourse and explore, reframe and advance the role of business in creating lasting prosperity, advancing societal goals, and addressing global challenges.In my capacity as Faculty Director for Action Learning Programs, I support Questrom faculty and our external partners in the design, development, and delivery of course-based, real-world projects that serve our mission of preparing business students to be innovative, effective and ethical leaders dedicated to creating value for the world.Through my field-based, translational research programs, my students engage with external partners to explore pressing questions, generate new knowledge, and advance real-world practices. Currently, our focus is on ex-ante/ex-post challenges related to the syndication and deployment of catalytic/blended project financing for Regenerative Economic Cluster/Bioregional Development Projects in the Global South.My teaching embraces the full range of the Strategic Arts with a focus on strategic innovation and Transformation. It is grounded in Futures-/Systems-/Design-Thinking, builds foundational capabilities and competencies in Contextual/Situational Awareness, and advanced skills in Experiment-based Decision-Making and Agile Implementation. My current curriculum development efforts explore emerging forms of improvisational and collaborative learning, novel pedagogies that push the frontier of online, collaborative learning-at-scale, as well as the creation of GenAI-enabled real-time learning systems.