#86 Professor Tyler Wry: Combining Social Impact and Management to Study Hybrid Ventures at Wharton
After an interview with Professor Tyler Wry, the CompanyRoots team was given unparalleled insight into the vast depth of the business world, specifically relating to social-impact driven enterprises. Wry is an Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton school and studies hybrid ventures and how they impact our society. Prof. Wry has also been quoted in the New York Times, Forbes, and the Atlantic, and has also earned several awards for highly acclaimed academic and research papers.
From a young age, Prof. Wry had always demonstrated his interest in entrepreneurship. He started many ventures throughout high school and his first year of undergrad at the University of Alberta. He reminisces that he was always able to raise money and did well, though his ventures never received much traction to scale large enough to the point of making significant profit. However, through each of his experiences, Wry recalls enjoying the process and learning a lot. Concurrently, he worked with very money-minded people from which he developed a distaste for the methods of traditional entrepreneurship. He wanted to utilize a business platform beyond the sole purpose of generating profit.
Wry credits a lot to one of his mentors, Gary MacPherson, who started a Canadian Center for Social Entrepreneurship. From MacPherson, Wry gained a lot of valuable advice on how business could be “a force for good,” and that enterprise and social impact could work in harmony. Wry went on to complete his masters with a doctorate concentration on the issues of social responsibility and social enterprise. Upon graduation, he was later hired by Wharton and has been teaching courses on entrepreneurship and researching social business ethics since then.
In a Forbes interview, Wry once stated “An entrepreneurial mindset is about embracing a pain point as an opportunity to create novel and productive solutions.” Elaborating on this forward-thinking mindset, Wry says that all pain points may not have grand and social implications – but they are still valuable business opportunities. He continues, “Lots of pain points are not just big for traditional entrepreneurship solutions, but can be targeted very well with social entrepreneurship solutions.”
In relevance to the current pain-points in our nation, Wry says that COVID-19 could present a multitude of opportunities where corporations and firms should play a positive role in helping the economy recover. With the main reasoning stemming from moral imperative, Wry also mentions that large corporations have the power to normalize things and by re-integrating people into the workforce, they would be laying a large stepping stone in creating a progressive society that could work hand-in-hand with the business world.
For new entrepreneurs looking to form social enterprises, Wry says that there’s no magic formula for finding the balance between making profit and doing social good. “It’s so rare to find a model that maximizes two things simultaneously,” Wry says. He goes on to explain that there will always come a point down the road where one must decide on scaling the company and making profit or staying true to the social mission, and addresses that “being mindful that trade-offs exist and grappling with tensions by thinking systematically of assessing and managing impact” is the best way to balance a social enterprise.
For the current generation of high school students and college students looking ahead to make a positive impact in society, Wry notes that educating oneself on key terms, methods, and ideologies is very important. Later, these will help develop an understanding of two sides to a debate and applicability into daily lives. Creating the right skill sets and being well-versed on relevant topics bolsters students for the future when they need to build from past knowledge. Additionally, having a lot of meaningful conversations with other ambitious people discussing social issues can generate ideas which lead to solutions. “One cannot whistle an entire symphony on their own,” Wry says. Finding a team that can become a solid support system will facilitate those looking to make impactful change, even if each step taken is still small at the start.
You can watch the full interview here.
Interviewers: Rahul Kavuru and Sourish Jasti
Author: Neha Jampala
Editor: Ayan Lateef
Graphic: Sraavya Penumudi
Video Editing: Chinmay Korapati