Distinguised Speaker - Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
KATHLEEN M. EISENHARDT is the Stanford W. Ascherman M.D. Professor at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She is also a visiting faculty member with INSEAD’s Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise area.
Professor Eisenhardt’s work centers on strategy and organization, especially in technology-based companies and high-velocity industries. She has worked extensively in both research and consulting with a variety of firms, ranging from telecommunications, Internet, software, computing, biotech, and semiconductor to agribusiness and solar power. She is a co-author of Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos (Harvard Business School Press), winner of the George R. Terry award for outstanding contribution to management thinking and named one of the top 10 business and investing books by Amazon.com. Professor Eisenhardt also has published in a variety of academic and management journals. She was the first author featured in Harvard Business Review’s OnPoint collections.
Professor Eisenhardt’s research focus is on strategy and organization in technology-based firms, both ventures and established corporations. She is currently studying the use of "simple rules" heuristics in strategies, creation of synergies in multi-business corporations, building alliance portfolios and finding business models by entrepreneurial firms, and successful R&D collaborations between large corporations.
She has received the career Scholarly Contribution Award from the Academy of Management as well as from the Organization and Management Theory division. She has also received numerous awards including the Irwin Award for her contributions to the field of strategy, the ASQ Scholarly Contribution award for the most influential paper five years after publication, and Strategic Management Society's Schendel Best Paper prize. She was recently named the most cited research author in the domain of strategy and organization studies in the past 25 years. Professor Eisenhardt also consults at senior levels on strategy and organization for a variety of global corporations and entrepreneurial firms.
Professor Eisenhardt is a member of Strategic Management Society and INFORMS, and has been elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management and Strategic Management Society. She has served on the editorial boards of ASQ, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, and Strategic Management Journal. She has also served as a Fellow of the World Economic Forum (Davos) and a Fellow of the Clinton Global Initiative, as a board member of MWH Global, an international engineering design and construction firm, and as a member of GM’s Science and Technology Advisory Board. Eisenhardt received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (Brown University, cum laude and with honors). She holds an M.S. in computer science. Her Ph.D. is from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. She also holds several honorary degrees.