Stefan Thomke Keynote Speaker

Stefan Thomke, an authority on the management of innovation, is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He has worked with firms on product, process, and technology development, customer experience design, operational improvement, organizational change, and innovation strategy.

Professor Thomke is a frequent conference speaker and advisor to global business leaders. He has taught and chaired executive education programs on innovation, R&D management, product & service development, and operations, both at Harvard Business School and in company programs around the world. He chairs the General Management Program (GMP) at HBS and has been a core faculty member of many executive education programs, including the Advanced Management Program (AMP), and the global Senior Executive Leadership Program (SELP) in Dubai, Mumbai, and Shanghai.

He also chairs Leading Product Innovation, which helps business leaders revamp their innovation systems for greater competitive advantage. He was faculty chair of HBS executive education and research in South Asia and has served on advisory and supervisory boards of start-up and established companies. Previously, Thomke was faculty chair of the MBA Required Curriculum and faculty co-chair of the doctoral program in Science, Technology and Management. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching at HBS, a finalist for the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award, and author of the bestselling article in MIT Sloan Management Review.

His research and writings have focused primarily on the process, economics, and management of business experimentation. He is a widely published author with more than one hundred articles, cases and notes published in books and leading journals, such as:  California Management Review, European Business Review, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Organization Science, Research Policy, Sloan Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and Scientific American. He is also author of the books Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), Managing Product and Service Development (McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2006), and Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

Professor Thomke holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering, Master’s degrees in Operations Research and Management (MBA equivalent), and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was awarded a Lemelson-MIT doctoral fellowship for invention and innovation research. He has also received honorary degrees in Economics (Doctorate from the HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management) and Arts (Master’s from Harvard University).

Speaking Topics

• Why Some Companies Are More Innovative Than Others
• The Power of Business Experimentation
• Best Practices in Innovation Management and Product Development