Author: Fiona Murray

Fiona Murray is the Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor Entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Associate Dean of Innovation and Co-Director of MIT’s Innovation Initiative. For the past several years she has also served as Faculty Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and has over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship education and research. She started her career with a degree in chemistry from Oxford and moved to the US for a PhD from Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Since joining MIT’s Sloan School, Fiona has collaborated closely with the School of Engineering and the Deshpande Center working with students and faculty to take a disciplined approach to transforming their ideas into impact. Through the iTeams course she has worked with numerous founders and commercialization teams, as well as with MIT’s leading science and engineering faculty. An expert on the history, policies and dynamics of innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystems, Fiona engages around the world with policy-makers and entrepreneurs to bring a more systematic approach to their entrepreneurial activities in universities, medical centers and beyond. As part of this engagement, she is a founder and serves as a co-director of the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP). Fiona’s research focuses on the design of effective innovation and entrepreneurship policies and programs including competitions, accelerators, intellectual property rules. Some of her most widely read scholarship focuses on the role of women in science, commercialization and entrepreneurship. Most recently she has been examining the powerful role of large corporations as well as  philanthropists in shaping universities and their surrounding entrepreneurial ecosystems. Her work has been published widely in journals as diverse as Science, Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine as well as economics and management journals.