Gary P. Pisano
Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration
Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development
Gary Pisano is the Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School where he currently serves as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1988.
Over the course of his career, Pisano has explored fundamental questions about how organizations innovate, learn, compete, and grow. His research and consulting have spanned a broad range of industries including aerospace, automobiles, apparel, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, entertainment, financial services, semiconductors, software, specialty chemicals, and web services.
Pisano has published over 100 scholarly articles and case studies on such topics as technology and operations strategy, competitive strategy, intellectual property, the management of innovation, organizational learning, commercializing science, business model design and innovation, global competitiveness, and corporate growth. His co-authored article “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management” (Strategic Management Journal, 1997) is one of the most highly cited papers in the field of management over the past two decades and was instrumental in launching a new capability-based framework for strategy. Pisano has written six books, including his latest, Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation. Throughout his career, Pisano’s work has won numerous awards including, Strategic Management Society’s Best Paper (2003) and Strategy + Business best books (2006, 2019). He is a two-time winner of the McKinsey Award (2009, 2019) for the best article published in Harvard Business Review, and the inaugural winner of the Clayton M. Christensen Prize (2020) for his work on innovative cultures. In 2020, he received the Greenhill Distinguished Services Award from the Harvard Business School.
At Harvard, Pisano has taught MBA, executive, and doctoral courses, and has mentored a number of doctoral students. He has created a new MBA course on corporate growth strategies. He is also the co-creator and co-chair of two new executive programs, “Driving Profitable Growth” and “Strategic Agility for Turbulent Times.”
In addition to his academic research and teaching, Pisano serves as an advisor to senior leaders at leading companies around the world and has been a director of both public and private company boards. Professor Pisano currently serves on the board of directors of Axcella Health and Generate Biomedicines.
Professor Pisano received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in economics from Yale.
Press / Media
by Amy Bernstein, strategy+business, Summer 2007
A leading student of the biotech business describes the problems holding the industry back, and how it can overcome them.
By Rebecca Knight, Financial Times, May 11 2007
Robert Huckman has spent a good portion of his career working to improve medical care in the US. As a consultant in the private sector, he advised healthcare companies on their merger and acquisition strategies. And as an academic, he has done groundbreaking work on the efficacy of surgeons and surgical teams.
"There's a lot we can do in terms of thinking about improving medical care that doesn't have to do with adding technology," says Prof Huckman. "We can organise existing practices more efficiently and more productively."
Huckman's most important finding – about the importance of teamwork in the operating room – came in a paper he wrote with a Harvard colleague, Gary Pisano.
The two professors analysed the work of heart surgeons in Pennsylvania who practice at more than one hospital. They found that the death rates from comparable procedures performed by the same surgeon can differ as much as fivefold at different hospitals. The majority of the time, patients did better in the hospital where their surgeon performed more operations.
He says the results indicate that the surgeon's interactions with his or her team of nurses, profusionists, anaesthetists and technicians are critical to the outcome of the surgery.
by Stephen Heuser, Boston Globe, May 6, 2007
Biotechnology proponents rarely talk about the fact that the industry loses huge quantities of money. According to a new report from accountants Ernst & Young, the public biotechnology companies in New England collectively lost $1.3 billion in 2006, the highest loss of any region in the country.
Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano, author of the recent book ‘‘Science Business: The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech,’’ set out to answer a question that had long intrigued him: How could an industry invented and staffed by brilliant, capable people have such a dismal long-term financial record? And why do investors keeping throwing money into the ring? Pisano spoke to Globe biotechnology reporter Stephen Heuser.
