Dorothy Leonard, the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration, joined the Harvard faculty in 1983 after teaching for three years at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught executive courses on a wide range of innovation-related topics such as designing work groups, structuring new product development and technology transfer for corporations such as Kodak, AT&T, and Johnson & Johnson as well as at Harvard, M.I.T. and Stanford University.  She has spent years investigating the experience-based ability to comprehend really complex relationships and make expert decisions quickly.

Dorothy is the author of:

    Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom, with Walter Swap (Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

    When Sparks Fly: Igniting Creativity in Groups, with Walter Swap (Harvard Business School Press, 1999)

    Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 1995 and in 1998).

She is also published in the Strategic Management Journal and Harvard Business Review and has written dozens of field-based cases used in business school classrooms around the world.

Dorothy is in demand internationally for her talks on corporate creativity, innovation, product development processes, entrepreneurial teams, tacit knowledge management, technology strategy and commercialization.

Professor Leonard’s research interests fall into three broad, interacting categories:

    Group/team creativity and innovation;

    The identification, capture and recreation of experience-based expertise;

    The culture of a learning organization.

She is continuing to expand on the topic of Deep Smarts (the topic of the latest book co-authored with husband Walter Swap). Since writing the book, the co-authors have created a diagnostic of deep smarts and have been testing it in various situations. They have also been expanding upon their characterization of deep smarts as their research has revealed a couple of important additional elements. Professor Leonard is also refining the process of identifying and capturing (in so far as it is possible and desirable) the elusive but often valuable tacit knowledge held in the heads (and sometimes the hands) of organizational experts. This process is especially important to organizations that are in danger of losing critical knowledge as key employees retire or move on to other positions. However, by their very nature, deep smarts cannot be wholly captured or transferred in any text or oral form. Therefore, they must be re-created through an actively managed learning program.

Business, Innovation, Education Professionals, Creativity, Education Industry, Education, Culture Leadership,