Robert D. Austin Fellow

Robert D. Austin is a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council and contributor to Cutter Consortium's Business Technology Strategies practice. He is a regular speaker at the annual Cutter Summit and a former editor of Cutter Benchmark Review.

Dr. Austin is Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, Canada. Previously, he was Associate Dean of MBA Programs and Professor of Managing Creativity and Innovation at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. Dr. Austin has also served as CEO of the CBS-SIMI Executive Foundation, a top provider of nondegree executive education in northern Europe. He is the current Chair of Harvard Business School's executive program for CIOs and a former HBS Professor in economics, financial reporting, IT, and operations management for MBAs and executives. Dr. Austin also serves on the advisory boards or boards of directors of several IT industry firms and advises major corporations worldwide. Before joining HBS, he was a technology manager at the Ford Motor Company.

Dr. Austin's research deals with IT management and, more specifically, management of knowledge-intensive activities with a particular focus on innovation. His most recent book is Adventures of an IT Leader, coauthored with Cutter Fellow Richard Nolan and Cutter Consultant Shannon O'Donnell. Dr. Austin is also coauthor, with Cutter Senior Consultant Lee Devin, of Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, the groundbreaking management book that explains why and how the metaphor of directing a theatre ensemble offers a powerful new approach for innovating by iteration and introduces a collaborative model for strategy formation, product development, and other creative business activities that the typical "supervising the factory floor" management model cannot achieve.

Dr. Austin is author or coauthor of four other books: Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations; Creating Business Advantage in the Information Age (coauthored with Lynda Applegate and Warren McFarlan); Corporate Information Strategy and Management (also coauthored with Applegate and McFarlan); and The Broadband Explosion (coedited with Stephen Bradley). He earned his PhD in management and decision sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation received the Herbert A. Simon Award. He holds a master's degree in industrial engineering from Northwestern University and bachelor's degrees in engineering and English literature from Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He can be reached at raustin@cutter.com.