Gary Pisano
Most large companies have an innovation budget, an innovation team, and an innovation vocabulary. What they do not have is an innovation strategy that connects any of it to how the business actually competes. The result is a decade of spending with no durable advantage to show for it, and a growing suspicion inside the C-suite that scale itself is the problem.
Gary Pisano is the Harry E. Figgie Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and helps large organisations turn innovation from a disconnected activity into a coherent strategy tied to competitive advantage.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Gary Pisano
- He gives leaders a framework for diagnosing why innovation investment is not compounding, and a language for fixing it at the level of strategy rather than process.
- His work on industrial commons, developed with Willy Shih in Producing Prosperity, explains how manufacturing and R and D decisions shape long-term competitive capacity, a lens most strategy advisors do not carry.
- The thesis of Creative Construction reframes scale as a potential innovation asset, which is directly relevant to incumbents under pressure from smaller, faster rivals.
- The 1997 Dynamic Capabilities paper he co-authored is foundational reading in corporate strategy; buyers get the person whose ideas their strategy team has already been citing.
- Board experience at Axcella Health and Celixir, plus advisory work across aerospace, biotech, pharma, medical devices, semiconductors and financial services, grounds the academic argument in operator reality.
Biography highlights
- Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; on faculty since 1988.
- Former Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Promotion and Tenure at HBS (2018 to 2023).
- Author of Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation (PublicAffairs, 2019) and Science Business (HBS Press, 2006); co-author of Producing Prosperity (HBS Press, 2012).
- Won the 2009 McKinsey Award for best HBR article for Restoring American Competitiveness with Willy Shih.
- Co-author of Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management (1997), one of the most cited papers in the management literature.
- PhD from UC Berkeley; BA in Economics from Yale.
Biography
Innovation spend in large organisations often grows faster than any measurable return on it. The reason is rarely a failure of execution. It is a failure to define what innovation is supposed to do for the business in the first place. This is the problem Gary Pisano has spent three decades unpicking at Harvard Business School.
As the Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Pisano has published over 100 scholarly articles and case studies and written six books. Creative Construction, his 2019 book, argues that large firms are not condemned to be outrun by start-ups. Scale is an asset when strategy, systems, and culture are set up to use it. The argument cuts directly against the disruption orthodoxy that has shaped a generation of boardroom thinking.
His earlier work reaches further back into the industrial architecture of competitiveness. Producing Prosperity, co-written with Willy Shih, shows how outsourced manufacturing hollows out the capability to invent. Science Business, his study of biotech, explains why a whole industry built on extraordinary science has struggled to translate it into sustained commercial performance. The 1997 Dynamic Capabilities paper, written with David Teece and Amy Shuen, is one of the most cited in the history of strategic management.
That research base is matched by three decades of direct advisory work across aerospace, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, semiconductors, software, and financial services, plus board seats at Axcella Health and Celixir. Leaders come to him when the innovation portfolio looks busy but the competitive position is not improving, and they leave with a sharper account of why.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation strategy
- Sustained innovation in large organisations
- Competitive strategy and dynamic capabilities
- Growth and the limits of scale
- Manufacturing, industrial commons and national competitiveness
- Science-based business models
- R and D and intellectual property strategy
Ideal for
- CEOs, CSOs and heads of strategy in incumbent firms losing ground on innovation
- Boards overseeing large R and D portfolios that are not compounding into advantage
- Executive teams in biotech, pharma, medical devices and advanced manufacturing
- Policy and industry leaders working on national competitiveness and supply chain capability
Audience outcomes
- A sharper diagnosis of why innovation spending is not producing durable advantage
- A working definition of innovation strategy that ties R and D choices to business strategy
- An argument for when scale helps innovation and when it quietly kills it
- A clear view of how manufacturing and process capability feed, or starve, future product innovation
- Language senior teams can use to challenge an innovation portfolio without defaulting to start-up envy
Talks
Why most innovation efforts fail to compound, and what it takes to align innovation with the competitive logic of the business.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between innovation activity and innovation strategy
- How to evaluate an innovation portfolio against a stated competitive position
- Where large firms consistently misallocate innovation resources
How incumbents can use scale as an innovation asset rather than treat it as a disadvantage to be apologised for.
Key takeaways:
- The conditions under which scale accelerates innovation
- The strategy, system and culture choices that separate sustained innovators from occasional ones
- How to structure disruptive innovation inside a large established business
The link between where things are made and where they can be invented next, drawn from the Pisano and Shih research on industrial commons.
Key takeaways:
- Why outsourcing decisions reshape long-term innovation capability
- What an industrial commons is and how it erodes
- Implications for corporate sourcing strategy and national policy