Georges F. Doriot, an educator and a founder of the modern venture capital industry, is the subject of a new exhibition and website at Harvard Business School, where he spent 40 years.
The charismatic professor taught business and leadership in his celebrated Manufacturing course to nearly 7,000 students. He realized his dream of establishing the first Master of Business Administration program in Europe by helping establish the European Institute of Business Administration.
Doriot learned the art of bringing science and industry together in World War II, where he was responsible for the creation of new products for the welfare of American soldiers. For decades, as president of American Research & Development Corporation, an early venture capital firm founded in 1946, he fostered the development of startup companies that focused on emerging technologies from computers to pacemakers.
The exhibition, at Baker Library on the HBS campus, features selections from the Georges F. Doriot Collection—on permanent loan from the French Cultural Center, Boston—that reveal the ideas and ideals of a man who played a pioneering role in the emergence of the postwar entrepreneurial economy.
See the online exhibition Georges F. Doriot: Educating Leaders, Building Companies.
Georges F. Doriot, photographed around 1955. Courtesy Baker Library, Harvard Business School.