Robert D. Austin Fellow

Robert D. Austin is a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council and Cutter’s Business-IT Strategies, Enterprise Risk Management & Governance , Measurement & Benchmarking , and Social Networking practices. He is also Director of Cutter’s Innovation & Enterprise Agility practice. Dr. Austin served as Editor of Cutter Benchmark Review and is a regular speaker at the annual Cutter Summits.

Dr. Austin is Professor of Managing Creativity and Innovation at the Copenhagen Business School and Associate Professor (currently on leave) at the Harvard Business School (HBS), where he has taught economics, financial reporting, IT, and operations management to MBA students and executives. He cochairs HBS’s executive program targeted at CIOs and teaches IT modules in other executive programs. Currently, Dr. Austin serves on the advisory boards or boards of directors of several IT industry firms, and he advises major corporations worldwide. Before joining HBS, Dr. Austin was a technology manager at the Ford Motor Company.

Dr. Austin’s research deals with IT management and, more generally, management of knowledge-intensive activities with a particular focus on innovation. He is the author of several books, including Adventures of an IT Leader (coauthored with Cutter Fellow Richard L. Nolan and Cutter Consultant Shannon O’Donnell); 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 (coauthored with Applegate and Deborah Soule); Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (coauthored with Cutter Senior Consultant Lee Devin); and The Broadband Explosion (co-edited with Cutter Fellow Stephen Bradley).

Dr. Austin 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 consulting@cutter.com.

Rob Austin on Innovation

on Innovation Mapping

on the Innovation Team

For more by Robert D. Austin:

• Unlearning and Learning in the Innovation Economy
• Innovation: The New IT Mandate
• Summit 2007 Keynote: Learning from Expert Innovators Around the World