From 2007 to 2025, the Creating Emerging Markets (CEM) project, coordinated by Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna through Harvard Business School’s Business History Initiative, assembled a digital oral history archive of senior leaders from firms, NGOs, and cultural sectors across 35 emerging-market countries.Footnote 1 The collection, which includes 196 long interviews, bilingual transcripts, and hundreds of short video clips, was designed as an open teaching and research resource to document leadership, institutional change, and firm-level strategies in rapidly transforming economies. The project is distinctive for its historical focus, as the interviews cover the entire careers of the interviewees. Following a funding decision by the School, no further interviews were added after December 2025. The archive was then transferred to Baker Library’s Special Collections and Archives for long-term preservation and continued public access. The website, the transcripts of the interviews conducted for the project, and supporting materials remain accessible and downloadable, as do the almost 600 short video clips that can be used in the classroom and for other purposes. The provision of full, searchable transcripts and video clips for free online provides a much higher level of public accessibility than many older physical oral history archives.
Origins and Evolution
The CEM project had its origins with a conversation in 2006 between Geoffrey Jones and Sven von Appen, a prominent Chilean shipping entrepreneur. Von Appen had heard Jones speak about the importance of business leaders and policymakers understanding history. Von Appen lamented to Jones that that was certainly not the case in Chile. This caused a discussion of why this was the case. It became apparent that Chile had remarkably few business archives that were open to researchers, limiting any ability to learn from the history of business in that country. The idea emerged of creating an archive that could capture the memories of the contemporary generation of business leaders and provide an accessible primary source for learning from recent business history.
Jones led a pilot project in which historian Andrea Lluch conducted a set of audio interviews in Argentina and Chile during 2007 and 2008. Lluch, an Argentine, held the Harvard Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Business History, and was subsequently granted two further years as a Research Fellow to work on the oral history project. Von Appen facilitated introductions to long-serving leading figures in the Argentine and Chilean business communities, who typically avoided public interviews for reasons of confidentiality. Lluch’s first interview was with Tomás Hudson, a prominent Argentine business leader in the chemicals industry, on December 17, 2007. It took place at Harvard Business School’s office in central Buenos Aires. Over the following two years, a total of 21 audio interviews were eventually conducted and transcribed in Spanish with accompanying English translations. These and all subsequent Latin American interviews in Spanish were translated by the same Argentina-based team led by Mariana Donadini. The pilot was judged a success in gaining access to prominent figures who rarely talked openly about their careers. Harvard Business School ended the pilot in the wake of the 2008/2009 global financial crisis and resulting financial pressures.
In 2012, Jones relaunched the project after the foundation by Dean Nitin Nohria of the Business History Initiative at the Harvard Business School. Appendix 1 shows the subsequent evolution of the CEM project by year and home country of interviewees. It includes one interview, subsequently incorporated by CEM, undertaken by an earlier Harvard Business School project with the Nigerian business leader Hakeem Belo-Osagie. Appendix 2 lists all the business leaders interviewed for the CEM project, provides their industry, and the date of their interview. It is sorted by region and country.
In 2016, Harvard Business School Strategy professor Tarun Khanna joined Jones as co-director of CEM. Jones and Khanna shared long-standing research interests both in business in emerging markets and in the importance of history in informing theory in management and international business.Footnote 2 They also shared a conviction about the future importance of digital materials in teaching and research. The project, which was rebranded CEM at this time, became an experiment in creating a new digital archive that was intended to transform teaching and research on business in emerging markets.
The project evolved significantly over the course of the 2010s. It moved from audio to video recordings to increase the impact of the material and to generate unique data of great use in classrooms. The project also expanded geographically. By December 2025, CEM had grown into an archive of 196 lengthy interviews, most of them on video, with leaders or former leaders of firms and NGOs from 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Voices that would have fallen silent with the passage of time—by December 2025, 22 interviewees had already passed away—have been preserved.
CEM employed several criteria to select the business leaders to be invited for interviews. As a starting point, interviewees needed at least three decades of experience in business. The aim from the beginning was to capture how businesses and business systems had changed over time. Most developing countries experienced rapid economic and social change since the 1970s, including a transition from extensive state intervention to more market economies, and the project sought to capture these changes from the perspective of business. The interviews aimed to address pivotal moments of transition in each region. Typically, interviews began by exploring the family and early life of business leaders and then proceeded chronologically as they built their careers. There was no template of questions, although certain themes were recurring. These themes included innovation, raising finance, the role of family and succession, government relations, responding to crises, international growth, corruption, and the responsibility of business to society.
A second criterion for the selection of interviewees was that they needed to be highly impactful. This was a subjective measure, but the project sought advice from Harvard Business School’s regional research centers (located in Buenos Aires and subsequently Montevideo, Johannesburg, Dubai, Mumbai, and Shanghai, with offices elsewhere in their respective regions) and from other regional and industry experts. The definition of highly impactful broadened over time. The original 21 interviews in Argentina and Chile were focused primarily on the leaders of the large, diversified business groups that were prominent in those countries. Over time, the interview base extended to include, for example, highly impactful NGOs and people employed in cultural industries such as cinema. A series of interviews with prominent figures in India’s cinema, including Shyam Benegal and Shabana Azmi revealed, among other things, the extent of the sexism and racism in the industry.Footnote 3 Also included were business leaders from impactful small and medium enterprises, such as eco-tourism businesses in Costa Rica and medium-sized but innovative businesses, such as the SEKEM social enterprise led by Helmy Abouleish, based around organic farming in Egypt.Footnote 4 Whatever the industry, the interviewee was always a founder, long-term leader, or former leader. Relatively few professional chief executives were interviewed.
A considerable effort was made to interview female business leaders. In almost every country, glass ceilings and other obstacles led to acute gender imbalances among business leaders. Yet there were remarkable exceptions that Jones and Khanna thought important to capture and celebrate. The original 20 interviews in Argentina and Chile included only 1 woman, Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat. By December 2025, 51 of the 196 interviewees were women. They included business leaders such as India’s Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the founder of the country’s largest biopharmaceutical company, and Zia Mody, a founding and senior partner of a leading law firm in India.Footnote 5 The collection also included interviews with Güler Sabancı, the former head of one of Turkey’s largest diversified business groups, Shinta Widjaja Kamdani, the owner of one of Indonesia’s largest business groups and one of the few female chief executives in that country, the prominent Argentine wine entrepreneurs Susana Balbo and Laura Catena, and María Emilia Correa, the co-founder of Sistema B, a Latin American organization promoting new economies and B Corporations.Footnote 6 Among the more remarkable female social entrepreneurs were Melek El Nimer, the creator of multiple NGOs to relieve the plight of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and Amina Laraki Slaoui, the President of a nonprofit organization based in Morocco that specialized in responding to the healthcare and educational needs of people with disabilities, including the elderly.Footnote 7
Business leaders from a wide cross-section of emerging countries at different stages of development were interviewed, but it was not possible to cover every country. The reasons were primarily logistical and financial. It was logistically challenging to conduct video interviews in international locations. In order to assemble high-quality local camera crews and coordinate with interviewees, the project needed a local support base. It made particular use of Harvard Business School’s network of global research centers, but they were clustered in certain locations. It also benefited from the support of local institutions where Harvard-affiliated faculty were teaching or where former visiting fellows held academic positions. Important examples included the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. As the project never paid for the travel of faculty to conduct interviews, for years the CEM project depended on conducting interviews in countries where Harvard Business School faculty had already planned visits for their own teaching and research.
During the COVID pandemic, the project developed an innovative hybrid method of interviewing whereby faculty on the School’s campus interviewed business leaders in their homes on Zoom. Cameras recorded the interviewee and interviewer in both locations, and a seamless video was achieved. While different time zones provided a constraint, the use of the hybrid method enabled a significant expansion of interviews with business leaders based in Africa and the Middle East.
Business leaders based in China were not included in the project primarily for logistical reasons. The project aspired to interview in the language that interviewees felt most comfortable with. For example, most of the Latin American interviews were in Spanish, and some of the Brazilian interviews were in Portuguese. One interview was also conducted in Turkish. However, Harvard Business School lacked sufficient Chinese-language capabilities for faculty to conduct a full program of interviews in Mandarin or other Chinese dialects, and the project lacked the resources needed for translation and video subtitling. The same constraints meant that no business leaders from francophone Africa were interviewed, except for Morocco and Tunisia, where a number of leaders agreed to be interviewed in English.
CEM interviews typically took the form of conversations rather than using a Question-and-Answer style format. The interviews were primarily conducted by Harvard Business School faculty. As of December 2025, 27 Harvard Business School faculty had conducted interviews, 8 former faculty, and 3 faculty members from other Harvard schools. Careful preparation of interviews, incorporating guidance from Jones and Khanna, was a consistent factor, along with applying standard oral history techniques: being efficient and professional in recording, while remaining unobtrusive with the equipment, starting at the beginning of an interviewee’s career and proceeding chronologically, asking open-ended questions, listening attentively without interruption, and creating an environment where the interviewee felt comfortable responding fully. To explore scaling, experiments were also conducted with other interviewers, including research associates, MBA students, and non-Harvard faculty, but it emerged that the optimal interviews were most often conducted by Harvard Business School faculty who had the expertise and confidence to conduct lengthy and probing interviews with very senior business leaders. For the most part, tenured faculty were asked to conduct the interviews rather than their junior counterparts.
The major exception to this practice was in Latin America. After leaving the School, Lluch continued to undertake most of the interviews in Latin America. She retained an affiliation with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University throughout the CEM project. The 60 Latin American interviews in the collection are a major asset, not least because very little, if anything, has been published in English about many of the interviewees, despite their prominence in their own countries and region.
It is important to note that the selection of interviewees was not representative in a formal statistical sense. Rather, it reflected subjective assessments of impact, as well as the willingness of the interviewees to engage in an open discussion of their careers, which would be made available on the web. There was considerable bias toward family members, except in Africa, where executives were more prominent. In addition, to avoid providing a Harvard platform for miscreants, people who were suspected of ethical or legal transgressions were excluded, creating a bias toward more virtuous figures. However, there were several cases where past inappropriate actions emerged after people were interviewed, or they engaged in inappropriate actions after they were interviewed. Their interviews were not taken down, but their CEM pages were updated by reports that documented their actions. An example included the interview with Sanjay Bansal, whose Ambootia tea company in India experienced severe financial distress in the 2020s, leading to his own exit from the business.Footnote 8
Interviewees were asked to review their interview transcripts before they were finalized. They were asked to keep any edits to a minimum and primarily confined to correcting factual inaccuracies. In most cases, very few changes were made to the transcripts that remained close to the full video interview. There were a very limited number of exceptions when more extensive editing was undertaken by the interviewee. These cases included Ghana-based Sam Jonah and Colombia-based Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo.Footnote 9 In these and similar instances, a disclaimer was added to the transcript to say that the text had been “edited by the interviewee, who has introduced some changes into both questions and answers, while preserving the topics and main ideas included in the original conversation.”
The CEM interviews were never conceived as being stand-alone. The web page holding each interview contained, in addition to a summary of each interview, a guide to additional sources of information. These might be books and journal articles, newspaper articles, or YouTube videos featuring the interviewee. The idea was to create a wide-ranging resource for researchers, teachers, and others using the site. Interview content was tagged by geography and topic, and transcripts could be searched by word. The CEM site also included links to all major collections of oral histories on business in emerging markets, including the Hong Kong Heritage Project, the National Archives of Singapore, and the Godrej Archives and Tata Central Archives in India.
The project, which had to be renewed every year by Harvard Business School’s Division of Research and Faculty Development, was run on a tight financial budget. Travel expenses to conduct interviews were not reimbursed. The administration of the project was conducted part-time by the small staff of the Business History Initiative until 2018. As the project was scaled, a full-time Research Associate became essential. A series of remarkable people, including Rachel Comunale, Morgan Spencer, Makena Binker Cosen, Maxim Pike Harrell, and Muskaan Soni, subsequently served in that role. They played a critical coordinating role with the multiple parties engaged in the project, including the offices of the faculty interviewers and the interviewee, foreign camera crews, and Baker Library’s Special Collections and Archives team, led by Laura Linard and Rachel Wise, where interviews were eventually held. The project’s RAs had an equally critical research role, conducting research on potential candidates, supporting faculty in preparing for interviews, and processing content afterwards, including identifying potential video clips, and making them. The project’s Research Associates led the promotion of the database on social media and elsewhere, and co-authored articles and cases with faculty.
The Impact of the CEM Project
The CEM project was conceived from the beginning as a public goods project. The transcripts of interviews were fully accessible on the project website. They could be downloaded by anyone with an internet connection and used in research and teaching without permission. Most Latin American interviews were conducted in Spanish and transcripts are available in both Spanish and English translation, while the few Latin American interviews conducted in English had a Spanish translation. In his book Oral History in Latin America, David Carey, a prominent Latin Americanist professor in the Department of History at Loyola University, Maryland, described the project as “an impressive model for multilingual collections.”Footnote 10
A considerable effort was made to diffuse knowledge about CEM and encourage its use. A LinkedIn page was launched. By December 2025 it had over 4,500 followers. There were regular posts about new interviews and other topical matters related to the project. A large selection of video clips was featured on the Harvard Business School YouTube channel.Footnote 11 By December 2025, the CEM playlist featured 99 video clips, which had collectively achieved 550,000 views. The final YouTube clip featured Brinda Somaya, a renowned Indian architect and urban conservationist, who discussed her work of creating socially conscious architecture.Footnote 12 Between 2022 and 2024, Maxim Pike Harrell, the CEM project Research Associate, published a regular blog with Harvard Business School’s Business and the Environment Initiative, which highlighted the rich material the project had gathered on the subject of business and sustainability.Footnote 13 Regular electronic newsletters were also circulated, tailored to specific regions: Latin America, MENA, and Africa. The Latin American newsletters were in Spanish.
The project organized conferences that assembled researchers, educators, and practitioners to discuss the CEM interviews and what could be learned from them. The conference program began in 2014 with one titled “Business History in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: Integrating Course Development and New Research,” which was held on Harvard Business School’s campus. In 2016, a conference on “Oral History, Business History, and Business Archives” was held in India at the Harvard Business School’s India Research Center in Mumbai. The conference brought together business historians, business archivists, and business practitioners to discuss the role of oral history in the growth of business history in India. In the same year a conference on “Capturing Contemporary Latin American Business History: Oral History & Digital Resources” was held in Santiago, Chile. The full-day event was focused on how the new materials generated by the CEM project could transform research and teaching in management studies and business history in Latin America. In 2017 another conference was held in Mumbai entitled “Creating Emerging Markets: Lessons from History” which brought together practitioners, archivists and historians. In 2019 a conference held at Harvard Business School titled, “Seeking the Unconventional in Forging Histories of Capitalism,” which explored how the CEM database was generating new insights into entrepreneurship, economic growth, and the impact of market liberalizations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. That same year, a conference was held on “Business and Education” at the Santiago office of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, in which the findings of the CEM project provided a global framework to discuss the present and future role of business philanthropy in Chile, and the type of education which should be supported. DRCLAS was a steadfast supporter of the CEM project throughout its entire history.
After a hiatus during the COVID epidemic, a conference on “Using Oral History in Research” was held in 2023 on Zoom, exploring the ways oral history, including the interviews undertaken by the CEM project, could be used in research. Finally, in 2024 a conference on “Oral History and Business in the Global South” focused on the intersection of oral history, business, and the Global South, offering a unique space for interdisciplinary discussion.
Harvard Business School collected extensive data on the usage of the CEM database. The data showed a progressive increase in the number of visitors to the site. The number of annual visitors reached 47,735 in 2020. Thereafter, it grew from 51,884 in 2021, 64,118 in 2022, 87,005 in 2023, and 90,233 visits in 2024. Throughout these years, CEM was either the second or the third-most visited Harvard Business School website out of a total of eighteen for Initiatives and Special Projects. Visitors came from over one hundred countries in these years, although there was a concentration in a number of locations. In 2024, for example, the United States accounted for 25.08 per cent of visits and India 21.55 per cent. The following eight countries in order of number of visits were South Africa (6.13%), Kenya (4.03%), Pakistan (3.61%), Nigeria (2.86%), Canada (2.22%), Colombia (2.21%), the United Arab Emirates (1.91%), and the Philippines (1.73%). However, there were wide variations each month and between years in the homes of visitors, symbolizing the wide geographical impact of the project.
Transcript downloads also showed a progressive upward trajectory. In 2020, 3,182 transcripts were downloaded. This subsequently increased to 3,481 in 2021, 3,750 in 2022, 4,427 in 2023, and 4,317 in 2024. People who downloaded interviews were asked to identify their purpose. In 2024, nearly half of the manuscripts downloaded were for general interest. A further 18 percent were downloaded for research for a scholarly article, 14 percent for a book, 7 percent for a dissertation, and 5 percent for teaching material. Transcript downloads were again widely distributed geographically, but with developed countries more strongly represented than in the visitor numbers. In 2024 the top ten countries for downloads were the United States (31.06%), Bangladesh (9.84%), India (9.43%), Japan (5.28%), Italy (3.52%), Britain (3.27%), South Africa (2.57%), United Arab Emirates (2.34%), Colombia (2.22%), and Canada (2.06%). China ranked eleventh with 1.46 percent.Footnote 14
Publications from the CEM Project
The CEM database stimulated and was employed in multiple academic publications in the business history, economic history, and management literatures, and employing multiple methodologies. The diversity of outlets was a deliberate strategy by Jones and Khanna both to demonstrate the multiple methods that could be employed to exploit the interviews, and to diffuse knowledge of the CEM database to diverse academic communities. Taken collectively, the interviews provide rich evidence on why and how management practices in emerging markets diverge from those in developed economies, and deliver rich, qualitative evidence for historical analysis.
Books
The earliest publications from the project drew on Lluch’s pilot interviews in Argentina and Chile. They provided the basis for a collaborative project comparing the economic and business history of Argentina and Chile. Although the two countries are neighbors, their historiographies remained primarily national rather than comparative. Yet there were remarkable differences between the countries. In the early twentieth century Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, with a well-developed business system, while Chile was much poorer. By the early twenty-first century Chile had become an economic success; the country joined the OECD in 2010 as the first country from Latin America represented in that body. Meanwhile, Argentina had experienced decades of hyper-inflation, debt defaults, and political instability. In 2011, Jones and Lluch published an edited book, El Impacto Histórico de la Globalizacíon en Argentina y Chile: Empresas y Empresarios, which compared the economic and business histories of the two countries. It was informed by the insights obtained from the CEM interviews, and the final chapter on developments from the 1980s drew extensively on the interviews.Footnote 15 An English language edition, The Impact of Globalization on Argentina and Chile, followed in 2015.Footnote 16
The major book that was based entirely on the CEM interviews was Jones and Khanna, Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind, which was published in 2022. The book was published in India, and due to a quirk in the publishing industry, is currently only available there. It was explicitly aimed at South Asian audiences. The book was based on short excerpts from the interviews organized around themes such as managing families, innovation, contesting corruption, challenging gender stereotypes, and promoting inclusion, with editorial introductions highlighting key themes. The framing of the book highlighted the achievements of entrepreneurs and their families who built businesses to “last,” in contrast to the recent popular image of a get-rich-quick entrepreneur who built a company, took it public, and then perhaps contributed to charity. The business leaders who were featured, including Ratan Tata, Anu Aga, Adi Godrej, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Devi Shetty, and Rahul Bajaj, built, to general acclaim and acknowledgement, organizations that are seen as forward-looking and innovative, while subscribing to a code of ethics and contributing to the betterment of society. The authors show that their stories were less about building a get-rich-quick organization and much more about triggering foundational and institutional change in society.Footnote 17
The CEM interviews were also used as part of the empirical evidence for books written by Harvard Business School faculty. The political scientist Meg Rithmire’s book, Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia, published in 2023, offered a novel analysis of the complex and often unstable relationships between business elites and political elites in authoritarian Asian regimes. Rithmire conducted interviews for the CEM project in Southeast Asia and made extensive use of interviews with Dato’ Sri Prof. Dr. Tahir and Shinta Widjaja Kamdani in Indonesia and Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala in the Philippines in her book.Footnote 18 Jones’s Deeply Responsible Business, a study of the history of values-driven entrepreneurs also published in 2023 drew extensively on CEM interviews. These included interviews with business leaders in organic farming in Egypt and India, who were influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy of Anthroposophy, and with two of the pioneers of the B Corps movement in Latin America, Maria Emilia Correa and Pedro Tarak.Footnote 19
Journals
The CEM interviews provided empirical evidence for both conceptual and theoretical contributions and research articles. Among the former, Gao, Zuzul, Jones, and Khanna, “Overcoming Institutional Voids,” published in Strategic Management Journal in 2017 used 69 CEM interviews as a basis to explore the importance of reputation in facilitating corporate longevity in emerging markets.Footnote 20 The study combined induction and deduction to propose reputation as a meta-resource that allowed firms to activate their conventional resources. Reputation was conceptualized as consisting of prominence, perceived quality, and resilience, and the study developed a process model that illustrated the mechanisms that allowed reputation to facilitate survival in ways that persisted over time. As of December 2025, the article has attracted 559 citations according to Google, making it the single most impactful publication to date using the CEM database.
A second conceptual article by Austin, Davila, and Jones on “The Alternative Business History” was also published in 2017 but was aimed more at the business history community. The article proposed that the distinctive contexts of emerging markets, marked by long periods of foreign domination, extensive state intervention, institutional inefficiencies or institutional voids, and extended turbulence, led to a set of business responses and organizational forms fundamentally different from those found in the West. CEM interviews were used to support these different characteristics, including the greater importance of entrepreneurship over managerial hierarchies, the prominent role of diversified business groups, extensive informal and illegal business and corporate strategies designed to respond to political and economic turbulence.Footnote 21
The research articles employing the CEM interviews covered a range of topics and methodologies. The article by Jones and Andrew Spadafora on “Creating Ecotourism in Costa Rica, 1970–2000” published in 2017, proposed that the country’s success as one of the world’s leading ecotourism destinations was a “co-creation” process driven primarily by small entrepreneurs, rather than just natural resources or government action.Footnote 22 While Costa Rica’s biodiversity and climate were necessary factors, the authors argue, they were not sufficient to explain the emergence of the ecotourism industry. The country’s preeminence was a result of active effort by small entrepreneurs, who were mostly expatriate Americans. The research was motivated by Jones’s research on the history of green entrepreneurship, which led to the publication of his book Profits and Sustainability in 2017.Footnote 23 As part of this research, Spadafora, the Research Associate on that project, conducted extensive audio interviews with eco-tourism entrepreneurs in Costa Rica. Four interviews, with Jim Damalas, Jack Ewing, Michael Kaye, and Bary Roberts, were deemed to be so foundational and comprehensive that a decision was taken to make formal transcripts and incorporate them into the CEM database. The information and insight from these four entrepreneurs were fundamental to making the article’s argument.
In 2018, an article by Jones and Rachael Comunale entitled “Business, Governments and Political Risk in South Asia and Latin America since 1970,” used the CEM interviews to explore how business leaders have historically perceived political risk in Latin America and South Asia.Footnote 24 Using QSR-NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software package, the study developed a set of first-order coding to describe and identify different types of political risk cited by interviewees. Thirty-seven discrete examples of political risk were identified. The study then undertook repeated cycles of coding to develop a second order set of risk categories. Five categories of risk were identified across the two regions: corruption, excessive bureaucracy, macro-economic and policy turbulence, political instability, and violence. The analysis showed strong regional differences in perceptions and responses to risks. In particular, macroeconomic and political turbulence emerged as the biggest perceived source of risk in Latin America for the business leaders interviewed for CEM. In contrast, excessive bureaucracy was the greatest source of perceived risk in South Asia.
In 2019 an article by Prithwiraj Choudhury, Dan Wang, Natalie A. Carlson, and Khanna, “Machine Learning Approaches to Facial and Text Analysis: Discovering CEO Oral Communication Styles,” experimented with a new methodology to exploit the CEM database. The authors employed machine learning to facial and text analysis of CEM interviews.Footnote 25 The authors used both interview transcripts and videos and employed three different methods. These were unsupervised topic modeling of text data to generate new measures of textual variance, sentiment analysis of text data, and supervised machine-learning coding of facial images with a convolutional neural network algorithm, to examine oral communication by chief executives. Among other things, the study produced suggestive predictive results, including showing that chief executives who were more dramatic in expressing themselves were less likely to engage in major acquisitions.
As CEM evolved, the range of industries included in the interviews widened to include cultural and creative industries. In India, a portfolio of interviewees from the creative industries included the actress Shabana Azmi, the filmmaker Shyam Benegal, the theater director and actress Lillete Dubey, and the dancer and activist Mallika Sarabhai. Among the media entrepreneurs was Ronnie Screwvala, co-founder of the entertainment and media conglomerate, UTV Software Communications, and Aroon Purie, who founded the India Today Group, a large, diversified media conglomerate, in 1975. In 2021, an article by Sudev Sheth, Jones, and Morgan Spencer, entitled “Emboldening and Contesting Gender and Skin Color Stereotypes in the Film Industry in India, 1947–1991,” used the CEM interviews to explore gender and skin color stereotypes in the Indian film industry.Footnote 26 Bollywood was, and is, enormously important in world cinema, producing at least as many films as Hollywood, though at much lower levels of profitability. Yet written archival sources are almost non-existent, not least because between 1947 and the 1990s the government did not classify it as an “official industry.” Criminal gangs often used the industry to launder illegal money. As a result, oral history was especially important as a primary source. Using CEM interviews with prominent actors and actresses, combined with another oral history database developed by Sheth using a television talk show in the Hindi and Urdu languages, the article demonstrated how Bollywood privileged paler skin over darker skin, and presented women in stereotypical ways lacking agency.
The pharmaceutical industry has surprising parallels with more conventional creative industries. In 2021 Muhammad H. Zaman and Khanna published, “The Cost and Evolution of Quality at Cipla Ltd, 1935–2016,” which examined the history of Cipla, a pioneering pharmaceutical company in India.Footnote 27 In 2013 Khanna interviewed Yusef Hamied, who had taken over the company founded by his father, and later became a global celebrity for his role in defying Western multinational pharmaceutical companies in order to provide generic AIDS treatments and other drugs to treat poor people in the developing world. The article used this interview along with other interviews and primary material from Cipla’s corporate archives to show how the company was able to evolve towards producing drugs that met the quality standards of European and American regulators. The article argued that, along with a longstanding corporate culture of self-reliance rooted in nationalism starting from its inception in 1935, major factors in Cipla’s strategy included the early adoption and continued use of quality control technology, along with efforts to create global goodwill for affordable, high quality generic drugs during the AIDS epidemic.
Among the most interesting features of the CEM interviews was the extent to which business leaders engaged in social activities beyond the borders of their own firms. In 2021, Valeria Giacomin, Jones, and Erica Salvaj published an article entitled “Business Investment in Education in Emerging Markets since the 1960s,” which employed the CEM database to examine business investment in education in emerging markets since the 1960s.Footnote 28 The article used a sample of 110 people interviewed for the CEM database by October 2018 to create descriptive statistics concerning both engagement in education and motivation of business leaders. The study showed that more than three-quarters of the business leaders invested in education as a nonprofit activity. It emerged that there were three different types of motivations: values-driven, context-focused, and firm-focused. There were significant regional variations. In South and Southeast Asia, there was a preference for long-term investment in primary and secondary education. In Latin America and Africa, initiatives sometimes had a shorter-term connotation, but with high-profile projects in partnerships with foreign universities and international organizations.
Giacomin and Jones continued this theme with an article on “Drivers of Philanthropic Foundations in Emerging Markets: Family, Values and Spirituality” published in 2022. The article used the CEM interviews to examine the growth of business philanthropy in emerging markets. It employed 70 interviews from eighteen countries featuring business leaders linked to philanthropic foundations. The study used an abductive approach, involving reiteration between empirical data and theory, to introduce the concept of “spiritual philanthropy” as a new type of entrepreneurial ethics. Spiritual philanthropy drew on family traditions, culture, and religious values, and emphasized charitable giving and social responsibility. The authors suggested that, as business leaders in emerging markets were more directly exposed to dire social, educational, and health deprivation than their developed-country counterparts, they were more focused on delivering immediate benefits to communities in their home countries, and less inclined towards grandiose “world making” seen especially with large US-based foundations.
As mentioned previously, the CEM database included 51 interviews with female entrepreneurs. In 2022, Carlos Dávila and Lluch published “Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets: Female Entrepreneurs in Colombia since 1990,” which drew on this new empirical source for the case of Colombia.Footnote 29 The article demonstrated the increasing heterogeneity among the country’s entrepreneurs, with greater diversity in social class, educational level, and gender. The article explored the growing number of women entrepreneurs in the country in this period using the CEM interviews of Maria Emilia Correa, Sylvia Escovar, Beatriz Fernández, Leonor Melo de Velasco, and Lilian Simbaqueba. They were themselves notably diverse in their activities. For example, Fernández was the founder of Crepes & Waffles in 1980. This high-end restaurant chain became renowned for both the quality of its products and its attention to social and environmental responsibility. Simbaqueba founded LiSiM, one of Colombia’s microfinance companies in 1996 which grew as a pioneering company in financial technology and risk management, while Escovar served as President of Terpel, Colombia’s leading oil and gas company. In 2025 Lluch made extensive use of the CEM interviews in a book chapter on family business in Argentina.Footnote 30
Teaching Materials
The CEM interviews have been used to produce several teaching cases published by Harvard Business Impact Education. Each case was accompanied by a published Teaching Plan, which explained how to teach the case and provided the necessary background to instructors who were unfamiliar with the issues. While the cases could be purchased from Harvard Business Impact Education, access to the Teaching Plans was limited to faculty who had registered as educators.
Jones and Harrell made use of one of the CEM interviews as the basis for a case on the Egyptian social entrepreneur Helmy Abouleish, who, together with his father Ibrahim, built a successful organic farming business in the Egyptian desert from the 1970s, and engaged in major educational and cultural investments in that country, motivated by the philosophy of Anthroposophy and Islam. The case permits a discussion about the potential of social entrepreneurship to achieve meaningful economic and social change. The particular focus was on the potential of biodynamic agriculture to mitigate climate change.Footnote 31
Two other cases and accompanying Teaching Plans made use of CEM video clips. Cases by Jones, Khanna, and Wright on corruption and business and Jones, Khanna, Wright, and Spencer on innovation and business, consisted primarily of multiple short video clips which could be downloaded from the Harvard Business Impact Education website. As most case method instructors have little or no experience in using video material, the Teaching Plans need to discuss the issues raised by each video clip and how they could be organized to achieve an effective class.Footnote 32
Looking to the Future
The last interview was posted to the CEM website in December 2025, and the hosting of the site was transferred to Special Collections and Archives in Harvard Business School’s Baker Library. The Historical Manuscripts collection at Baker Library contains over 1,400 individual collections of personal papers and company records, documenting business enterprise across seven centuries, from the fourteenth century to the present day. The CEM database joins one of the largest archival collections on business and economic history in the United States. The CEM transcripts and video clips will remain fully accessible and available for use with no restrictions. The full video of the interviews will be accessible to researchers working in-person at Baker Library.
By December 2025, the CEM project had evolved from a pilot initiative into a major asset for global business history, offering an unparalleled window into the business evolution of 35 emerging market countries. Its integration into Baker Library’s Special Collections ensures that these 196 voices—representing decades of resilience, innovation, and social responsibility—are preserved for posterity alongside centuries of business records.
However, the true value of CEM lies not in its preservation, but in its continued application. The project has already proven to be a catalyst for diverse scholarship, enabling researchers to deploy methodologies ranging from qualitative historical analysis to advanced machine learning to explore institutional voids, reputation-building, and the rise of spiritual philanthropy. For educators, it has provided an opportunity to transform the classroom by providing authentic, multilingual perspectives that challenge Western-centric management paradigms.
As the global economy continues to navigate an era of profound institutional change and heightened social expectations, the CEM archive stands as more than a historical record. It is a living laboratory for understanding the “alternative business history” of the Global South. The project’s conclusion marks a beginning for the next generation of scholars and leaders who can use these narratives to build more inclusive, sustainable, and responsible business systems worldwide.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Andrea Lluch and Max Pike Harrell for their comments on an earlier draft of this article, and Muskaan Soni for compiling Appendices 1 and 2, and for her work on the project as a whole.
Financial support
The CEM project was funded by the Division of Research and Faculty Development at the Harvard Business School.
Author biography
Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at Harvard Business School, Faculty Chair of the School’s Business History Initiative, and Co-Editor of BHR. He researches the evolution, impact, and responsibility of global business. His recent books include Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership (2023) and the edited volume The Cambridge Companion to the History of Multinationals and Society (2026), co-edited with Sabine Pitteloud.
Appendix 1. CEM Interviews by Year
Appendix 2. CEM Interviewees by Country, Industry and Year of Interview
Appendix 3. Selection of Publications Employing CEM Interviews
Books
Geoffrey Jones, Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership (Cambridge, MA, 2023).
Geoffrey Jones and Andrea Lluch, eds, El Impacto Histórico de la Globalizacíon en Argentina y Chile: Empresas y Empresarios (Buenos Aires, 2011)
Geoffrey Jones and Andrea Lluch, eds, The Impact of Globalization on Argentina and Chile: Business Enterprises and Entrepreneurship (Northampton, MA, 2015).
Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna, Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind (Gurgaon, 2022).
Meg Rithmire, Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (New York, 2023).
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Gareth Austin, Carlos Dávila, and Geoffrey Jones, “The Alternative Business History: Business in Emerging Markets,” Business History Review 91, no. 3 (2017): 537–569.
Carlos Dávila and Andrea Lluch, “Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets: Female Entrepreneurs in Colombia Since 1990,” Business History Review 96 (2022): 373–397.
Prithwiraj Choudhury, Dan Wang, Natalie A. Carlson, and Tarun Khanna, “Machine Learning Approaches to Facial and Text Analysis: Discovering CEO Oral Communication Styles.” Strategic Management Journal 40, no. 11 (2019): 1705–1732.
Cheng Gao, Tiona Zuzul, Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna, “Overcoming Institutional Voids: A Reputation-Based View of Long-Run Survival,” Strategic Management Journal 38, no. 11 (2017): 2147–2167.
Valeria Giacomin, Geoffrey Jones, and Erica Salvaj, “Business Investment in Education in Emerging Markets Since the 1960s,” Business History 63, no. 7 (2021): 1113–1143.
Valeria Giacomin and Geoffrey Jones, “Drivers of Philanthropic Foundations in Emerging Markets: Family, Values and Spirituality,” Journal of Business Ethics 180 (2022): 263–282.
Geoffrey Jones, “Oral History and Business History in Emerging Markets,” Investigaciones de historia económica 20, no. 2 (2024): 1–4.
Geoffrey Jones and Rachel Comunale, “Business, Governments and Political Risk in South Asia and Latin America since 1970,” Australian Economic History Review 58, no. 3 (2018): 233–264.
Geoffrey Jones and Rachael Comunale, “Oral History and the Business History of Emerging Markets,” Enterprise & Society 20, no. 1 (2019): 19–32.
Geoffrey Jones and Andrew Spadafora, “Creating Ecotourism in Costa Rica, 1970–2000,” Enterprise & Society 18, no. 1 (2017): 146–183.
Andrea Lluch, “Entrepreneurship and Survival: Narratives and Voices of Argentinean Large Family Businesses,” in Global Family Capitalism : A Business History Perspective, ed. Paloma Fernández Pérez (London, 2025), 217–232.
Sudev Sheth, Geoffrey Jones, and Morgan Spencer, “Emboldening and Contesting Gender and Skin Color Stereotypes in the Film Industry in India, 1947–1991,” Business History Review, 95, no. 3 (2021): 483–515.
Muhammad H. Zaman and Tarun Khanna, “The Cost and Evolution of Quality at Cipla Ltd, 1935–2016,” Business History Review 95, no. 2 (2021): 249–274.
Harvard Business School Cases
Geoffrey Jones and Maxim Pike Harrell, “Helmy Abouleish: Making a Desert Bloom,” Harvard Business School Case 324-029, revised December 2025.
Geoffrey Jones and Maxim Pike Harrell, “Teaching Plan. Helmy Abouleish: Making a Desert Bloom,” Harvard Business School Teaching Plan 324-124, April 2024.
Geoffrey Jones, Tarun Khanna, and Nataliya Langburd Wright, “Corruption and Business in Emerging Markets.” Harvard Business School Case 319-054, October 2018.
Geoffrey Jones, Tarun Khanna, and Nataliya Langburd Wright, “Teaching Plan. Corruption and Business in Emerging Markets,” Harvard Business School Teaching Plan 318-055, February 2019.
Geoffrey Jones, Tarun Khanna, Nataliya Langburd Wright, and Morgan Spencer, “Innovation and Business in Emerging Markets.” Harvard Business School Case 319-110, revised June 2019.
Geoffrey Jones, Tarun Khanna, Nataliya Langburd Wright, and Morgan Spencer, “Teaching Plan. Innovation and Business in Emerging Markets.” Harvard Business School Teaching Plan. 319-111, April 2019.
