Michael A. Cusumano

Michael A. Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor and Deputy Dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously he held a joint appointment in the MIT School of Engineering, Division of Engineering Systems. Professor Cusumano specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship in computer software as well as automobiles and consumer electronics. At MIT, he has recently taught Platform Strategy & Entrepreneurship as well as Strategy & the CEO. During 2016–17, he was on leave as Special Vice President and Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiatives at Tokyo University of Science, where he founded the Tokyo Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center and designed a new mid-career Management of Technology curriculum as well as a new business school that merged the Graduate School of Innovation and the School of Management.

Cusumano received a BA degree from Princeton in 1976 and a PhD from Harvard in 1984, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Production and Operations Management at the Harvard Business School during 1984–86. He is fluent in Japanese and has lived and worked in Japan for more than eight years, with two Fulbright Fellowships and a Japan Foundation Fellowship for studying at Tokyo University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Imperial College, Tokyo University, Hitotsubashi University, the University of St. Gallen, the University of Maryland, and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He has consulted and lectured for approximately 100 organizations and is currently a director of two publicly listed companies: Orix Corporation in Japan and Ferratum Group in Europe. He is a former director of Patni Computer Systems in India (sold in 2011 for $1.2 billion) and Fixstars Corporation, a Japanese developer of high-performance software applications. He was recently a director of Zylotech, a predictive analytics company operating out of Cambridge, MA. He has served as editor-in-chief and chairman of the MIT Sloan Management Review and writes regularly on Technology Strategy and Management for Communications of the ACM. In 2009, he was named one of the most influential people in technology and IT by Silicon.com.