Johann Peter Murmann is Professor of Strategic Management and a director of the Institute of Management at the University of St.Gallen in Switzerland.
From 2006 to 2018 he was Professor of Strategic Management at the Australian Graduate School of Management and the UNSW Business School in Sydney. There he served as head of the Strategy & Entrepreneurship faculty unit (2007–2011), academic director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2008–2011), and academic director of the AGSM MBA (Executive) Strategic Management Year (2006–2011), leading a major redevelopment of the program. Before joining UNSW in 2006, he was on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (1997–2005).
He has held visiting positions around the world: research fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Germany (2001–2); visiting professor at Aalto University (then Helsinki University of Technology) and the University of Lille (2005); visiting fellow at Harvard Business School and the University of Paris East (2009); Visiting Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (academic years 2011/12 and 2012/13); and visiting scholar at Cass Business School in London and Fudan University in Shanghai (2014).
He received a BA in Philosophy with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master’s and PhD with distinction in Management of Organizations (1998) from Columbia University.
Research
Throughout his career, Murmann has studied systematically how firms gain and lose competitive advantage over long periods of time. His award-winning comparative study of the early history of the synthetic dye industry was published in 2003 by Cambridge University Press as Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology and National Institutions.
His historical research is driven by the conviction that managers, whose experience is necessarily focused on the firms they have worked for, can learn a great deal from how all the players in an industry gained or lost competitive advantage over time. By collecting data on successful and failed companies across many industries, he develops robust, evidence-based insights into what determines firms’ competitive success. Since 2017 his work has also focused on improving the foresight of companies by drawing on the collective wisdom of employees beyond top management.
His research appears in books and in journals including the Strategic Management Journal, Strategy Science, Organization Science, Industrial & Corporate Change, Research Policy, Research in Organizational Behavior, and the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.
Research areas: corporate foresight; collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds; the coevolution of firm capabilities, technology and national institutions such as universities and patent laws; firm strategies over the industry life cycle; alliances in global industries; and China.
Teaching
Professor Murmann has taught core MBA and Executive MBA courses in Strategic Management and the Management of Organizations, along with executive courses on General Management and Corporate Growth and a PhD course on evolutionary theories of organization. At the Kellogg School of Management he won the Chair’s Core Course Teaching Award.
Selected Awards
- K. William Kapp Prize, European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (with Guido Bünstorf)
- IACMR Best Macro Conference Paper Award, 2018 (with Zhijing Zhu)
- Carolyn Dexter Award, Academy of Management, 2009
- Joseph Schumpeter Prize, 2004
- Stanley Reiter Best Paper Award, Kellogg School of Management, 2004
- Stefan Schrader Best Paper Award, Academy of Management (Technology & Innovation Management Division), 1998 (with Michael Tushman)
He also edits websites on Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences (etss.net) and Economic Evolution (economic-evolution.net), and serves as a senior editor of Management and Organization Review.
See my full CV and publications for details.