Robert D. Austin: Difference between revisions

Danish academic

Robert Daniel Austin^[1] (born 1962) is an innovation and technology management researcher and professor at Ivey Business School.^[2] He is best known for pedagogical innovations in the teaching of technology management, for his “artful making” research,^[3] which examines business innovation through the lens of art practice, and for his research documenting the neurodiversity employment movement.^[4]

Austin received bachelor’s degrees in English Literature and Engineering from Swarthmore College in 1984, a master’s in Industrial Engineering and Management Science from Northwestern University in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Management and Decision Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1995 under the supervision of Patrick Larkey.^[5] His doctoral thesis was the recipient of the Herbert A. Simon Doctoral Dissertation Award for Behavioral Research in the Administrative Sciences.

From 1997 to 2009, Austin was a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, working primarily in the area of Technology and Operations Management.^[6] He joined the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) faculty in 2007. He has also spent time as a manager at the Ford Motor Company (1986-1995), a member of the executive team of a startup subsidiary of Novell (1999-2000), the CEO of an executive education foundation (2010-2011), and dean of the faculty of business administration at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton (2011-2013). He moved to Ivey in 2016.

He is the (co)author of more than 100 published articles, cases, and notes, and ten books.

• Austin, Robert D. Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, New York: Dorset House, 1996.
• Austin, Robert D. and Lee Devin. Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2003.
• Austin, Robert D., Nolan, Richard L. and Shannon O’Donnell, Adventures of an IT Leader, Harvard Business Review Press, 2009.^[7]
• Austin, Robert D., Devin, Lee, and Erin E. Sullivan, “Accidental Innovation: Supporting Valuable Unpredictability in Creative Process,” Organization Science, September/October 2012 vol. 23 no. 5, 1505-1522.^[8]
• Austin, Robert D. and Thorkil Sonne, “The Dandelion Principle: Redesigning Work for the Innovation Economy,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2014.^[9]
• Austin, Robert D. and Gary Pisano, “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 2017.
• Austin, Robert D. and Helen Lang, “The DAO Hack: A Blockchain Dilemma,” Ivey Publishing, 2020. ^[10]