Jan Rivkin is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration, the Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program, and a Professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. His research, course development, and teaching efforts examine the interactions across functional and product boundaries within a firm-that is, the connections that link marketing, production, logistics, finance, human resource management, and other parts of a firm. His work analyzes, first, how such interactions constrain managerial behavior and, second, how managers use cognitive devices and organizational design to cope with decisions whose ramifications span boundaries.
Rivkin currently teaches the course he developed, Advanced Competitive Strategy: Integrating the Enterprise. This elective course aims to improve students’ ability to integrate across the parts of the companies they will manage. Until recently, Rivkin taught and led the core strategy course in the first year of the MBA Program.
Rivkin received his PhD in business economics from Harvard. Earlier, he studied chemical engineering and public policy at Princeton and obtained an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics on a Marshall Scholarship.