Dorothy Leonard, the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration, joined the Harvard faculty in 1983 after teaching for three years at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She has taught MBA courses in managerial leadership, manufacturing, strategic capabilities, new product and process development, technology strategy and technology implementation. At Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, and for corporations such as Kodak, AT&T, and Johnson & Johnson, she has conducted executive courses on a wide range of innovation-related topics such as designing work groups, structuring new product development and technology transfer during new product and process development.
Professor Leonard's major research interests and consulting expertise are in organizational innovation, technology strategy and commercialization; she is currently studying the generation, identification and management of knowledge assets in companies. She has also focused her research in the following areas: creating and exploiting knowledge-based assets; the power of tacit knowledge; and enhancing group creativity.
She has consulted with and taught about innovation for governments and major corporations, and serves on the corporate Board of Directors for American Management Systems and for Guy Gannett Communications. Professor Leonard's numerous publications appear in academic journals, practitioner journals, and in books on technology management. She has also written dozens of field-based cases used in business school classrooms around the world. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation