Michael E. Porter

Voted the most influential living strategist by the Strategic Management Society

Michael E. Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School. A University professorship is the highest professional recognition that can be awarded to a Harvard faculty member. In 2001, Harvard Business School and Harvard University jointly created the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, dedicated to furthering Professor Porter’s work.

Professor Porter, the author of 17 books and over 125 articles, is a leading authority on competitive strategy and the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions. He received a B.S.E. with high honors in aerospace and mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He received an M.B.A. with high distinction in 1971 from the Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar, and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1973.

Teaching

Professor Porter's ideas on strategy are the foundation for modern strategy courses, and his work is taught at the Harvard Business School and at virtually every business school in the world.

Professor Porter’s current course at Harvard is a University-wide graduate course, Microeconomics of Competitiveness, which is also taught in partnership with more than 65 other universities from every continent using curriculum, video content and instructor support developed at the Institute.

Professor Porter also created and chairs Harvard Business School's program for newly appointed CEOs of billion dollar corporations. The New CEO Workshop, given twice each year, is focused on the challenges facing new CEOs in assuming leadership, setting their agenda, and addressing issues such as strategy, board governance, communication, and setting time and values. His article with Jay Lorsch and Nitin Nohria, ‘Seven Surprises for New CEOs’ (October 2004), describes some of the learning from this body of work.

In addition to his Harvard courses, Professor Porter speaks widely on competitive strategy, competitiveness, health care, and related subjects to business and government leaders throughout the world.

Strategy

Professor Porter’s core field is competitive strategy, and this remains a primary focus of his research. His book, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, was his first book-length publication on strategy. The book is in its 63rd printing and has been translated into 19 languages. His second major strategy book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, was published in 1985 and is in its 38th printing. His book On Competition (1998) includes a series of articles on strategy and competition, including his award-winning Harvard Business Review article 'What is Strategy?' (1996).

Professor Porter’s next major book on strategy is expected to be completed in the academic year 2006-2007.

Competitiveness of Nations and Regions

Professor Porter's 1990 book The Competitive Advantage of Nations was motivated by his appointment in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan to the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness. This book initiated his second major body of work, which addresses competitiveness and economic development of nations, regions, and cities. The book presents a new theory of how nations compete, and their sources of economic prosperity. It has led to many other publications with a special focus on the role of clusters, or geographic concentrations of related industries that occur in particular fields. These ideas have guided economic policy throughout the world.

National Competitiveness. Building on The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Professor Porter has published books about national competitiveness on New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, and most recently Japan. His book Can Japan Compete? (2000) challenges long-held views about the Japanese economic miracle and offers a new path for that nation's future. It was selected as one of the top three non-fiction books of 2000 by The Economist.

Professor Porter co-chairs the Global Competitiveness Report, an annual ranking of the competitiveness and growth prospects of more than 100 countries released by the World Economic Forum.

Clusters. Professor Porter’s ideas on clusters, first introduced in 1990, have given rise to a large body of research on cluster-based economic development along with hundreds of public-private cluster initiatives throughout the world. Professor Porter’s research on clusters is summarized in “Clusters and Competition: New Agendas for Companies, Governments, and Institutions” in On Competition (1998) and other publications listed in his curriculum vitae.

Regional Competitiveness. Professor Porter has extended his work on competitiveness to sub-national regions. He led the Clusters of Innovation project (2002) which studied five major U.S. regions, developing new theory, new sources of data, and new methodologies for fostering innovation and prosperity in regional economies. Growing out of this research was the Harvard Cluster Mapping Project, which provides rich data on the economic geography of U.S. regions and clusters on a special web site. Professor Porter’s article ‘The Economic Performance of Regions’ (2003) summarizes some of the important findings from this data.

Innovation. Professor Porter is co-author (with Professor Scott Stern and others) of a body of work on the sources of innovation in national and regional economies, including The New Challenge to America's Prosperity: Findings from the Innovation Index (1999), 'The Determinants of National Innovative Capacity' (2000), and 'Measuring the 'Ideas' Production Function: Evidence from International Patent Output' (2000).

Related Topics. Professor Porter has led studies on the role of private capital investment in competitiveness, including Capital Choices (1992) and Lifting All Boats (1995). He has also written on competition policy, including 'Competition and Antitrust: Towards a Productivity-based Approach to Evaluating Mergers and Joint Ventures' (2002).

Competition and Society

Professor Porter's work on economic development gave rise to his third major body of work: the relationship between competition and society.

Inner City Economic Development. Professor Porter has conducted extensive research on economic development in America's distressed inner city neighborhoods, beginning with the Harvard Business Review article 'The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City'. In 1994, he founded The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), a non-profit, private-sector organization to catalyze inner-city business development across the country. Professor Porter is Chairman of the ICIC, a national organization that works in numerous cities. The ICIC has conducted extensive research and practiced extensively in this field, and a bibliography of work is available on the organization’s website.

Rural Development. In 2004, Professor Porter published a study commissioned by the Economic Development Administration on rural development, ‘Competitiveness in Rural U.S. Regions: Learning and Research Agenda.’ This study marks a new stream of work on economic development in sparsely populated rural regions which have weak economic performance relative to urban areas.

The Natural Environment. Professor Porter has examined the relationship between competitiveness and the natural environment. His Scientific American essay, 'America's Green Strategy', showed that economic competitiveness and environmental improvement could and should be complementary. This essay triggered a body of literature and new policy thinking, including publications by Professor Porter: ‘Green and Competitive’ (1995), 'Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship' (1995), and 'National Environmental Performance Measurement and Determinants' (2002). The so-called “Porter Hypothesis” has been much studied in subsequent literature.

Philanthropy and Corporate Social Responsibility. Professor Porter has devoted growing attention to philanthropy and especially the role of corporations in society. His Harvard Business Review article with Mark Kramer, 'Philanthropy's New Agenda: Creating Value' (1999), offers a new framework for developing strategy in foundations and other philanthropic organizations.

Professor Porter’s Harvard Business Review article, 'The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy' (2002), addresses how corporations can create more social benefit by integrating their philanthropy with their business context. A forthcoming article in the Harvard Business Review tackles the strategic underpinnings of corporate social responsibility.

With Mark Kramer, Professor Porter co-founded the Center for Effective Philanthropy, an organization dedicated to creating concepts and measurement tools to improve foundation performance. He also co-founded FSG-Social Impact Advisors, an international non-profit firm that provides advice and innovative ideas about social strategy impact to foundations, corporations, and social service organizations.

Health Care

Since 2001, Professor Porter has devoted considerable attention to a fourth body of work on competition in the health care system. His Harvard Business Review article with Elizabeth Teisberg, ‘Redefining Competition in Health Care’ (2004), stimulated a dialog in many countries. His joint book with Professor Teisberg, Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results (Harvard Business School Press), is the American College of Healthcare Executives 2007 James A. Hamilton book of the year. Professor Porter is currently playing an active role in catalyzing health care reform in the United States and other countries including Holland, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Advisor to Business and Government

Professor Porter has served as a strategy advisor to top management in numerous leading U.S. and international companies, among them Caterpillar, DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Royal Dutch Shell, Scotts Miracle-Gro, SYSCO, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

Professor Porter is also a senior strategy advisor to the Boston Red Sox, a major league baseball team.

Professor Porter currently serves on the board of directors of two public companies, Parametric Technology Corporation and Thermo Electron Corporation. He has also advised numerous community organizations on strategy, including WGBH public television and others.

Professor Porter is also a counselor to government. He plays an active role in U.S. economic policy with the Executive Branch, Congress, and international organizations. He chairs the selection committee for the annual Corporate Stewardship Award of the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Professor Porter is a member of the Executive Committee of the Council on Competitiveness, a private-sector organization made up of chief executive officers of major corporations, unions, and universities, and has provided intellectual leadership for a number of the Council's major programs.

Professor Porter has also advised national leaders in numerous countries including Armenia, Ireland, Nicaragua, Peru, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. He has personally led major studies of economic strategy for the governments of such countries as Canada, India, Kazakhstan, New Zealand, Portugal, and Thailand. Currently, he is leading a national economic reform initiative for the country of Libya.

Professor Porter’s thinking about economic development for groups of neighboring countries has led to a long-term initiative within Central America, including the formation of the Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development (CLACDS), a permanent institution based in Costa Rica.

Professor Porter has also assisted many state and local governments in enhancing competitiveness. In his home state of Massachusetts, Professor Porter's work led to a new economic strategy, beginning with the report The Competitive Advantage of Massachusetts (1991). This effort resulted in new legislation, numerous state initiatives, and the creation of Governor William F. Weld's Council on Economic Growth and Technology, which Professor Porter chaired. Professor Porter has also advised Governors and private-sector leaders on economic policy in states and regions such as Basque Country, Catalonia, Connecticut, Mississippi, New Jersey, and South Carolina.

Honors and Recognition

The awards and honors won by Professor Porter include Harvard's David A. Wells Prize in Economics (1973) for his research in industrial organization. He received the Graham and Dodd Award of the Financial Analysts Federation in 1980. His book Competitive Advantage won the George R. Terry Book Award of the Academy of Management in 1985 as the outstanding contribution to management thought.

He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management in 1988 and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1991. In 1991, he received the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award for outstanding contribution to the field of marketing and strategy, given by the American Marketing Association. Professor Porter was honored by the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1991 for his work on Massachusetts competitiveness.

In 1993, Professor Porter was named the Richard D. Irwin Outstanding Educator in Business Policy and Strategy by the Academy of Management. He was the 1997 recipient of the Adam Smith Award of the National Association of Business Economists, given in recognition of his exceptional contributions to the business economics profession. A Fellow of the International Academy of Management since 1985, he received that group's first-ever Distinguished Award for Contribution to the Field of Management in 1998.

In 2001, the annual Porter Prize, akin to the Deming Prize, was established in Japan in his name to recognize that nation's leading companies in terms of strategy.

The Academy of Management recognized Professor Porter with its highest award, for scholarly contributions to management in 2003.

In 2005, Professor Porter became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Medal (presented by the American Agricultural Economics Association). He was also honored as the recipient of the 2005 Distinguished Contributor to Case Research and Teaching by the North American Case Research Association. In 2005, Professor Porter was honored by the South Carolina legislature for his efforts in assisting and promoting economic development and competitiveness in that state.

Professor Porter has received five McKinsey Awards for the best Harvard Business Review article of the year, including an unprecedented three first-place awards.

Professor Porter has received honorary doctorates by the Stockholm School of Economics; Erasmus University, the Netherlands; HEC (Hautes Ecoles Commerciales), France; Universidada Tecnica de Lisboa, Portugal; Adolfo Ibanez University, Chile; INCAE, Central America; The University of Deusto (Basque Country); The University of Iceland; Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; Johnson and Wales University, United States; and Mt. Ida College, United States.

Professor Porter has also been awarded national honors including the Creu de St. Jordi (Cross of St. George) from Catalonia (Spain) and the Jose Dolores Estrada Order of Merit, the highest civilian honor awarded by the Government of Nicaragua.