Entrepreneurship Faculty

Fiona Murray, Faculty Director, Martin Trust Center

The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship faculty is comprised of renowned thought leaders, dedicated researchers, experienced entrepreneurs, and engaging instructors. The breadth of perspectives and specialties they provide ensures a solid, well-rounded exposure to entrepreneurial concepts.

Our 10 tenured and tenure-track faculty members make significant contributions to the academic dimensions of entrepreneurship through their cutting-edge research and high-profile publications. They are complemented by an additional 19 senior lecturers/practitioners who are proven entrepreneurs. Their close ties to the new-venture community provide students with excellent networking opportunities and marketable real-world skills.

Browse our Martin Trust Center faculty list below.

Noubar Afeyan

A technologist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, Noubar Afeyan has cofounded and helped build more than 20 successful life sciences and technology startups during the past two decades. He was founder and CEO of PerSeptive Biosystems, a leader in the bio-instrumentation field. After PerSeptive's acquisition by Applera Corporation, he was senior vice president and chief business officer of Applera, where he initiated and oversaw the creation of Celera Genomics. Currently, Afeyan serves on a number of public and private company boards.

Howard Anderson

Howard Anderson is the founder of The Yankee Group and the co-founder of Battery Venture Capital. At MIT Sloan, he teaches New Enterprises, Companies at the Crossroads, Managing in Adversity, and High Technology Sales and Sales Management. Anderson sits on several high technology boards in the communications, computing, and advanced materials industries.

Bill Aulet

Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, whose mission is to educate and nurture the leaders who will make startup companies successful. Aulet, an alumnus of MIT Sloan, became a senior lecturer at the business school in 2005. In addition to his work in general innovation-based entrepreneurship, he has had a focus on positioning MIT Sloan and its students for success in the clean energy sector.

Michael A. Cusumano

Michael Cusumano specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship in the computer software industry, as well as automobiles and consumer electronics. He teaches courses on the software business, strategic management, and technological innovation and entrepreneurship. Cusumano has published eight books.

Jim Dougherty

Jim is Co -Founder of Madaket Health. He has had a 30 year career in building IT enabled business services solutions and companies. He served as a three time CEO, CAO and GM of a Divisions at Lotus. He has been over 15 Boards of Directors. He is a Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and the Boards of Trustees at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Jonathan Fleming

Jonathan Fleming has been in the investment business for more than 20 years, starting and financing growth companies in the United States, Europe, and Israel. He is a general partner of Oxford Bioscience Partners, an international venture capital firm specializing in life science technology based investments, with offices in Boston and Connecticut. Fleming has also co-founded Medica Venture Partners, a venture capital investment firm specializing in early stage healthcare and biotechnology companies in Israel.

Joseph G. Hadzima

Joseph Hadzima is a media source for information on entrepreneurship, startup phase companies, business plans, venture capital, corporate governance, and intellectual property strategy. He has been involved in the founding of more than 100 companies as an investor, director, counsel, employee, or entrepreneur, and has advised entrepreneurs, high-growth businesses, and venture capitalists. Hadzima is a founding judge of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and has taught the popular IAP course "Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans" since 1989.

Peter Kurzina

Peter Kurzina has 33 years of experience providing workout, turnaround, interim, and crisis management to a wide variety of companies. Kurzina was president and chief operating officer of Fanny Farmer Candy Shops, interim president of Vermont Castings Stove Company, and president of Westville Homes Corporation. He provided similar leadership roles to a number of other troubled companies in the manufacturing, distributing, textile, men's clothing, and service industries.

Valentin Livada

During his career, Val Livada has combined expertise in the areas of strategic planning and organizational dynamics, with a detailed knowledge in the areas of innovation, product development and R, D & E management. Livada founded Weybridge Partners in 1996 as a network of formal and informal associations of practitioners and organizations focused on the creation of innovation ecosystems. The network includes business and technology consultants, venture capitalists and angel investors, academics, entrepreneurs, and lawyers, in the United States and abroad.

Richard M. Locke

Richard Locke, deputy dean at MIT Sloan, has been a consistent voice for integrating social and economic concerns into curriculum and research. His teaching case on Nike's response to non-government organization (NGO) pressures to address the labor standards of Nike contractors was selected for teaching at MIT Sloan's 50th Anniversary Convocation. His work has also had an impact on Nike's business practices, helping the company to integrate reporting and auditing labor conditions with its quality improvement efforts.

Shari Loessberg

Shari Loessberg is an experienced entrepreneur in established and emerging markets. She has particular experience in emerging-market venture capital fund formation, entrepreneurship in emerging economies, and the evolving issues and standards of corporate governance in the United States and abroad. She currently oversees MIT Sloan's Global Entrepreneurship Laboratory course.

Matt Marx

Drawing on his own experience working in both Silicon Valley and Boston startups, Matt Marx studies systematic, institutional barriers to the growth of new ventures. His current research focuses on the implications of employee non-compete agreements, which are ostensibly used to protect trade secrets, but may also impact interorganizational and cross-regional mobility, utilization of expertise, and the ability of small companies to attract talent. In other work, he examines strategy formation in new ventures as well as the allocation of equity among co-founders.

Fiona E. Murray

Fiona Murray is an international expert on the transformation of investments in scientific and technical innovation into innovation-based entrepreneurship that drives jobs, wealth creation, and regional prosperity. She has a special interest in how policies, programs and relationships between academia and industry can be designed to accelerate the productive role of universities in their local entrepreneurial ecosystem. These include intellectual property issues as well as broader programs that enable technology transfer and commercialization.

Katherine Rae

Katie’s expertise is in building internet based businesses and communities. She enjoys all phases of company development: from idea and team formation, to product development and business building. She was the head of Product for Microsoft Startup Labs, SVP of Product at Eons, VP of Community and Communication at Lycos. She holds and MBA from Yale University and a BA in Biology from Oberlin College. She has three awesome kids that keep her thinking about what the world needs next.

Edward B. Roberts

Founder and Chair, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

Edward Roberts is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the chair of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. He is an expert in advanced technology management and entrepreneurship, a serial high-tech entrepreneur, and a leading angel investor.

Imran Sayeed

Imran Sayeed has more than 13 years of experience in software and services. He has written and spoken extensively in leading industry conferences and trade journals over the last 10 years on entrepreneurship, e-business, and technology.
Sayeed led netNumina from a 15-person startup to a leading technology strategy and consulting firm that raised more than $25M from leading venture capitalists and strategic investors and was named one of Computerwold‘s top 100 emerging companies in 2000.

Edgar H. Schein

University of Chicago, BPhil ‘46; Stanford University, BA ‘48, MA ‘49, Social Psychology; Harvard University, PhD ‘52, Social Psychology

Joel Schindall

Professor Schindall re-joined the MIT faculty in June of 2002 after a 35 year career in the defense, aerospace and telecommunications industries. His research includes the invention and development of a nanotube-enhanced ultracapacitor which holds the promise of being superior to electrochemical batteries as a means of efficient regenerative electrical energy storage, and he has also supervised research on dynamic simulation and reliability analysis of complex safety-critical systems.

Michael Schrage

Michael Schrage holds research appointments at MIT Sloan's School Center for Digital Business and Imperial College's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group in London. His research and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of models, prototypes and experiments as collaborative media for managing innovation opportunity and risk. He's consulted on innovation issues for firms including Google, IBM, Procter&Gamble, Microsoft, BP, Siemens, British Telecom, Mars and NASDAQ.

Scott Stern

Scott Stern explores how innovation - and the production and distribution of "ideas" - differs from more traditional economic goods, and the implications of these differences for business and public policy. Stern's research, which is often focused on the life sciences industries, explores the intersection between industrial organization and the economics of technical change.

Reed Sturtevant

Reed Sturtevant's career spans 30 years in the software industry and includes company formation, technology strategy, engineering management, product management, and software development. Reed is a Managing Director at Project 11 Ventures which invests in and coaches early stage startups.

Catherine Tucker

Catherine Tucker specializes in understanding how the huge amounts of data generated by the ICT revolution can better guide marketing and advertising decisions. She also thinks about the privacy concerns that such data raises and how firms and policy makers can best address these privacy concerns. Finally, she has also done substantial research into how healthcare IT and how the digitization of patient data is transforming the healthcare sector.

James M. Utterback

James Utterback delves into the emergence of dominant product designs and studies how to develop products in keeping with a company's overall strategy. He also probes how to move concepts effectively to market. His book, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), looks at the creative and destructive effects of technological change on the life of a company.

Andrew Wolk

Andrew Wolk launched Root Cause, an action tank for the social sector by developing and promoting entrepreneurial social-sector leadership. Wolk's Social Entrepreneurship course is a semester-long project in writing a social venture business plan to explore such topics as private/public partnerships, earned income, corporate social responsibility, cause-related marketing, venture philanthropy, and social capital markets.