Venture Capital and Private Equity
This casebook contains cases and notes designed to provide an understanding of the history of the private equity industry's development and the workings of the industry today. By explaining the industry on a case-by-case basis, this text promises to address the critical question of whether gains made in recent years have been sustained and how firms will respond to the current opportunities and challenges.
Dr. Josh Lerner is a Strategic Advisor at Master Minds. He is a Senior Advisor at Grove Street Advisors, LLC. Dr. Lerner works with the firm in an advisory role with a particular emphasis on helping the firm and its clients identify and respond to key trends in the private equity industry. He is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in Finance and the Entrepreneurial Management. Dr. Lerner's research ... focuses on the structure of private equity and venture capital organizations and their role in transforming scientific discoveries into commercial products. Much of his research is collected in The Venture Capital Cycle, MIT Press, 1999 and The Money of Invention, Harvard Business School Press, 2001. Dr. Lerner also teaches doctoral courses on entrepreneurship and empirical methods in corporate finance, as well as executive education offerings.
Dr. Lerner serves as a Research Associate in the Corporate Finance and Productivity Programs and a Co-Editor of Innovation Policy and the Economy. In the 1993-1994 academic year, Dr. Lerner introduced an elective M.B.A. course on private equity and venture capital. He was a Venture Advisor at Zero Stage Capital. Dr. Lerner examined the impact of intellectual property protection, particularly patents, on the competitive strategies of firms in high-technology industries. He founded, raised funding for, and organized two groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research: the Entrepreneurship Working Group and the Innovation Policy and the Economy Group.
He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. Dr. Lerner recently led an international team of scholars in a study of the economic impact of private equity for the World Economic Forum. He is a Member of the Advisory Board of RBC Venture Partners and also for Zero Stage Capital. Dr. Lerner serves as a Harvard Business School's representative on Harvard University Patent, Trademark and Copyright Committee and the Provost's Committee on Technology Transfer. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and a B.A. from Yale College with a special divisional major which combined Physics with the history of Technology.