Jan W. Rivkin is an Associate 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 strategy-making processes and organizational structure to cope with decisions whose ramifications span boundaries. His scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Management Science, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. Much of Rivkin's scholarly work uses simulations of complex adaptive systems to examine the theoretical implications of cross-cutting interactions. His empirical work on the topic employs a mix of large-scale statistical studies, field research, and case studies.
Most of those case studies appear in the course Rivkin teaches, Advanced Competitive Strategy: Integrating the Enterprise. This elective course, taught in the second year of the M.B.A. program, aims to improve students' ability to integrate across the parts of the companies they will manage. It gives students a body of concepts for thinking about cross-cutting interactions, a set of tools for making decisions with boundary-spanning implications, and in-class practice with such decisions. In support of the course and related research, Rivkin has completed case studies on Airborne Express, BMG Entertainment, Dell, Delta Air Lines, Husky Injection Molding Systems, Lycos, Ryanair, and Yahoo, among others.
Rivkin received his Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard. Earlier, he studied chemical engineering and public policy at Princeton and obtained a M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics on a Marshall Scholarship. Prior to pursuing his doctorate, Rivkin led case teams and managed client relationships at Monitor Company, a strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, he took a leading role in developing Monitor's competitive simulator, a product that permits managers to practice competitive moves in a computerized environment before executing them in the marketplace.
Rivkin and his wife live in Newton, Massachusetts with their two young sons.