Bogdan Prokopovych

Interviewer: Can you tell us about the Isenberg course you developed as a 2022 PIT Faculty Fellow? 

Bogdan Prokopovych: The course that developed while I was a fellow with PIT was Social Entrepreneurship, which aligns with my research interests and teaching interests. Another course that I'm teaching, and I'm using materials that I refined thanks to PIT, is Foundations of Sustainable Enterprise. So let me say that there's no physical artifact based on this project. It's more about ideas. When we teach entrepreneurship, we always encourage students to start with ideas because, realistically, few people will go into production, but there'll be quite a few people who work in any sector that will work with entrepreneurs. By teaching them all these tools that I use when teaching social entrepreneurship, it makes students better and more socially aware as managers, government workers, funders, researchers, data scientists, etc. So we hope it helps enable them to step in the shoes of entrepreneurs and think about the constraints that entrepreneurs face. One of our constraints that we deal with is that our students have all necessary tools—accounting, finance, etc.. But very often you need something that directly creates value, which is a technology. And that's why the idea of interdisciplinary collaboration is very important for entrepreneurs.

We would like our students who have all those tools to work with students in computer science or engineering. But then there is the question of how do you develop a team? How do you help people who speak different languages, and not necessarily English and Ukrainian, but the language of science and the language of finance or business, and have them collaboratively work together? And that's why I think PIT was very very helpful, because my colleagues and I have seen what some of the other fellows have done. We shared our syllabi and ideas and we learned from each other. We also ended up applying for funding for a project together. So the next question is: How do we get people who are very intelligent, capable, and have ideas, but who have very little time, to exercise their agency? How do we help people to get from idea to the next step? And that's the biggest gap, right? So, for example, one of the challenges that I see when we run a social entrepreneurship contest, we see some ideas that some student teams developed, and then I will compare them to some of the teams that were developed in my class, by students. And you know, there's a range of quality, range of different levels of commitment. But there are always like 2 or 3 projects that you think, “Oh, why didn't you participate in that contest,”? But it's like they didn't think it was good enough. So, how do we navigate the landscape of ideas? We know how to use Google Maps to navigate the physical space, but how do we navigate the landscape of ideas that are in different levels of development? 

So one of the constraints is getting people to work together from different disciplines. How can we “marry” them together? And another constraint is, how do we get people from the stage where they think, “oh, that's a problem we need to solve,” how do we get them to the next more defined idea? And that's where my interest in ideation came in. Usually, the typical way to do ideation that has always been done in an incubator space, in an accelerator space, you hand out sticky notes and people take a bunch of ideas and put them on a board. But then we have all these technologies that are being developed, and very often we are just not using them. Even though the idea can be good, the technology is not helpful. This was pre-ChatGPT—before generative AI, in my eyes, became mainstream. In my class we have used this database IP.com’s InnovationQ. It's a database that has been developed and used by universities, and what it does is it runs semantic analysis of the patents so you can find more similar patents and less dissimilar patents.

In my class, we've run this exercise where everyone does this type of searching. Students would have some kind of entrepreneurship and sustainability-related problem, like micro-mobility, and they look for related patents to help them define the problem. This exercise shows them how you start with a funnel that can really go into deep, deep levels of expertise.? It really shows them how the depth increases so fast once you start looking into the problem. The same company, IP.com, also had another product that they started developing. And that was using a methodology which I, there's an acronym that I’m forgetting, and it was interesting because it was developed in the Soviet Union. So they looked at how we can have some kind of model that is trained on the patents that helps you define your problem. But once you define the problem based on that model, it kind of gives you suggestions for improvement. 

So, for example, this is an idea that we worked on in class. We used that tool to explore social innovation in the context of access to drinking water in Western Massachusetts. So we researched what's the problem here with the water access? And there are some problems here, but not as bad as in some other parts of the country. And here's the prompt that the students had to work with: develop an idea to solve the social problem of improving access to clean drinking water. And you put in place some geographic boundaries of Western Massachusetts and then do some very basic research. Some of the students may know some details about the problem, but a lot of them know very little about clean water access. They also read some news articles to learn about the main attributes of the social problem. The population affected, nature of the problem, there's a whole methodology that goes into that and then you start articulating the problem in 2-3 sentences. And then once they’ve articulated the problem, they run the IQIdeas tool. So they put in a description of the problem and it gives them suggestions. They realize, “Oh, it's garbage. Let's go back to redefining the problem." This experience showed them that it is very important to carefully define the problem, and, in terms of learning outcomes, that’s very interesting. Well, then comes the ChatGPT, and I ran the same activities with ChatGPT, and asked students to do a very similar kind of work. And again, this was the first semester, I think, when ChatGPT became live.

Interviewer: When ChatGPT became an entity. 

Bogdan Prokopovych: An entity, exactly. I remember, like, it was less like this. Oh, I forgot to mention using this tool led students to the territory where they had no specialized knowledge, right? Like engineering. Again, of course, the IQ-Ideas model is trained on scientific literature and patents. Whereas ChatGPT was not, because it's more general I think one of the findings was it saved students time. It's easier to define the problem, and it's less specialized. And what we could see in the classroom setting, how it plays out is that it actually does improve the problem definition. I have some international students who are less confident about their command of English. They have other strengths, but for them it's much harder to  articulate things in English than it would be for someone from the US. ChatGPT speeds it up for them. And this activity became an institutionalized practice within this course that I teach. So that's kind of like what I applied with to PIT@UMass and where I ended up with it. And again, one of the useful things about PIT is the relationships with colleagues that were developed: we shared ideas,and we submitted applications for funding. We care about social entrepreneurship, but we work in different fields.

Interviewer: I'm partially surprised by ChatGPT performing so well. To a certain extent I would have thought that there would have been some shortcomings with respect to domain-specific knowledge, and things like that that arise from moving from a highly specialized system to the more general purpose. 

Bogdan Prokopovych: Right! So if you think of some problem that you're working on in your narrow domain, you'll be able to figure out that the output is a bunch of garbage. Whereas for my students, students at the undergraduate level, a lot of them are generalists. And to be honest, those generalists, they will be the ones who will go and find an expert who’ll be able to help them. So I think it helps them verbalize the problem. It helps them to see the forest for the trees. And then, once they know what trees there are in the forest, they can actually say, “let's go find a person with a PhD” in whatever field they need.

Interviewer: That's been a recurring theme in these interviews, as the importance of this kind of interdisciplinary work. In particular, I like how you phrase that as speaking different languages. I think that's a really important point that you're getting at.

Bogdan Prokopovych: Yeah, if you think about when you work on the cutting edge of science, it's very difficult to speak the language of finance. If we step back again, one of the topics we covered in class is innovation, right? Social innovation. If you think about MRNA vaccines, well now we all speak that language and can kind of explain what it is. But if you think about the specialized knowledge that went into developing it is much harder. But that knowledge has to be explained to people who would think that's a promising technology at some point to fund it. Actually, during my PhD studies, I was funded by NSF to work with a venture capital fund, which was nonprofit, and was funding this cutting edge technology like drugs or something, robotics. And the problem was, again, how do we get those scientists to know how the funding cycles work, and how do we help those scientists explain the impact of their inventions? And the idea is that you're not trying to capture just the fiscal side, the revenue, you want to also capture the social impact. And the social impact is calculated completely differently. It's much easier to get the fiscal numbers from the company’s books. But the social impact you calculate is based on certain assumptions—very strong assumptions—and those assumptions may change. You can calculate the problem of clean drinking water in Western Massachusetts but it is very different from the problem in sub-saharan Africa, in Central Asia, in Ukraine. But there could be organizations like the Gates Foundation, etc. that fund all these things and they would like to have an image of what's the social impact we've created there. What's the social impact? And that's one of the interesting challenges that would make social entrepreneurship unique.

Interviewer: What were some of the overall public interest-centered issues you were trying to address by developing this course and having students engage with these ideas? You’ve already articulated this idea of moving towards thinking through social impact really well, but I'm curious if there are any more you had in mind? 

Bogdan Prokopovych: So, in most of the classes that I teach, we would work on the development of the problem definition, and then we go through how we would develop a business model,and then, once we know what the business model is, the question becomes is how do we measure the impact? Revenue impact or social impact? And again, for social entrepreneurship for sustainable enterprises, how do we measure environmental impact? What are the traditional business practices used to measure those things, right? I had a student who was in the sustainable enterprise class, and she was very interested in working for a social venture, an excellent student, she developed an interesting project, but at the end of the day she ended up working in a private equity field. At the same time, I’m sure that the employer of the student is better off, and our society is better off, just because a student like her went and worked in a private sector company and made the company and her colleagues  aware of all those things. These days every enterprise, every event, should have a social element where we do not think about it in terms of just traditional business metrics. I think courses like this can help students learn about these tools that entrepreneurs can use to develop concrete, pragmatic, and practical solutions that would address stakeholders’ interests. Very often, we can talk high-level language about the need to solve an environmental justice problem, but at the same time we need to have a concrete solution. And that's where I think disciplines like this help students see that there are entrepreneurial tools that've been used to develop business models or help improve business models.This course shows that we can actually use those entrepreneurship tools to help solve social problems that society wants to solve, helping them go from idea to reality. 

Interviewer: When you think of public interest technology, what comes to mind? When you think of PIT, what do you think about? 

Bogdan Prokopovych: For me, public interest technologies are the technologies that help carry out, or implement, the social mission of organizations. Technology is the platform that brings a lot of us together, and PIT helps us elaborate on how that technology helps us better deliver that social value. For example, can we use those generative AI tools to teach better, to be more productive, to study better? And when I saw the call for applications from PIT@UMass, that’s what attracted me. Because that's how I see technology helping us make the society better off.And I think that emphasizing that aspect of PIT is super important. We take lots of things for granted in our lives. I went to India over the break and you can use your iPhone to monitor air quality. So here it is usually between 20 and 50, when we had the fires in Canada, it was 250, and we canceled soccer for my kids. When we landed in India, it was around 500, and between 450 and 500 throughout the time we stayed. So here we take clean air for granted and that's where I think initiatives like PIT are helpful because they emphasize for incoming students, for folks who study something in depth, that there's the public interest in what they do. Just hopefully, we'll lead them into the productive areas of knowledge that can provide a positive social impact.

Interviewer: What has drawn you into wanting to work with PIT@UMass?

Bogdan Prokopovych: I think the mission of PIT, and the whole idea of PIT, is something that I do: it focuses on issues I am interested in, and once you learn more about the initiative, you learn more about people and what they are doing and that draws you in. And so here, where I see the fit is that all these people who were involved in PIT@UMass, we are driven by similar interests. Even though we represent different disciplines, at the same time, we have a common mission, but approaching it from different angles. Even though we may represent different disciplines, but, at the same time, we serve a common mission. We are just approaching it from different angles. Having PIT as a platform was attractive to me, as someone who is teaching at Isenberg, as it made me appreciate things that I didn't know before and hopefully has helped my PIT colleagues learn about some of the things related to social entrepreneurship that we do in Isenberg.

Interviewer: Were these kinds of principles—this idea of thinking through social impacts—a part of your own education and training? 

Bogdan Prokopovych: It's an excellent question. I'm Ukrainian, I was born in the Soviet Union. I've experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chernobyl disaster, and now we have war aged against Ukraine. ll these events generate social needs There is a silver lining, if there can be a silver lining with the aggressive and terrible war, is that you actually see a lot of good in people, in what people do. Think about how many people volunteered to help refugees. A lot of it is, if we think in terms of social entrepreneurship, how can we help those organizations deal with those missions better? And so there's a personal kind of connection there. Once I started my PhD, I ended up working with someone who had been working on social entrepreneurship. There's a lot of literature that studies things like microfinance and its impact on the poor. And that's why I think it's helpful to have initiatives like PIT. They help us take all that knowledge and ask questions like, if we take the traditional entrepreneurship tools that have been out there for quite a while, can we add things like ChatGPT to make them better? Or can we use these tools to address issues outside of the usual business metrics? I think everything we do probably has a personal connection—a personal interest that was sparked by personal experience, personal knowledge, or some encounter. And then there's professional training that could also have direct influence.