Faculty and Research

Lee Fleming is the Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1998. He designed and teaches the course “Inventing Breakthroughs and Commercializing Science”, which integrates business, science, engineering, and medical students from across the university in multi-disciplinary science commercialization projects. He has also taught Technology and Operations Management, Managing Innovation and Product Development, Building Green Businesses, executive education courses in innovation and product development and intellectual property, doctoral courses and seminars reseach methods and innovation, and a university seminar in Applied Statistical Methods.

Dr. Fleming earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Davis. He then spent seven years at Hewlett Packard Company in research, design, manufacturing, and application engineering. He has published in Hewlett Packard’s technical literature and holds two patents in the area of custom integrated circuit testing. During his time at Hewlett Packard, Dr. Fleming earned an M.S. in Engineering Management from Stanford University in the Honors Cooperative Program. He received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Stanford. He also completed an M.S. in Statistics during his doctoral years. Prior to college, Dr. Fleming performed as a professional musician and while in college, competed on the U.S. National Cycling Team.  He still competes in cycling and nordic skiing and enjoys ski mountaineering.

Dr. Fleming’s research investigates how managers can increase their organization's chances of inventing a breakthrough, through types of collaboration, the integration of scientific and emprirical search strategies, and the recombination of diverse technologies. His current work develops the strategic implications of inventor collaboration networks at the individual and regional level of analysis, the influence of non-competes on inventor mobility and knowledge flow, and author disambiguation of the patent inventor database (supported by NSF grant 0830287).

Dr. Fleming’s research has appeared in Management Science, Administration Science Quarterly, Research Policy, Organization Science, Industrial and Corporate Change, Strategic Management Journal, and the Harvard Business, California Management, and Sloan Management Review practitioner journals. His awards include the best student paper in the Academy of Management technology division, the Richard R. Nelson Prize of 2005 (with Olav Sorenson), and the 2007 Accenture Award for the best paper in California Management Review (with Matt Marx). He is currently the department editor of entrepreneurship and innovation (with Kamalini Ramadas) at Management Science and a Senior Editor at Research Policy.

Curriculum Vitae