Michael G Jacobides

Welcome to my home-page!

This page is designed to give you a brief overview of my research interests, publications, my teaching / executive development and consulting / thought leadership activities I have been involved with. I have been on the faculty of the London Business School, in the Strategic and International Management Area, since 2000. I am also a Senior Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, and teach Strategy at the Columbia Business School / LBS Global Executive MBA. This year, I will be based more in the US than Europe, as I have been appointed Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Business School.

I am also a Sumantra Ghoshal Fellow at the Advanced Institute for Management Research  (AIM). Through a generous grant from the AIM, a £30 Million ESRC / EPSRC initiative, I will be spending a good part of the next two years looking not only at how value chains evolve, but also at how profits migrate from one part of an industry to another; how firms can best manage in quickly changing environments; and how they can use effective organizational design to improve their capabilities.

I studied economics and organization in the Universities of Athens, Cambridge, and Stanford and hold an MA and PhD in Strategy from the Wharton School, where I have been on the faculty as an Adj. Professor of Information, Systems, Strategy and Economics and, more recently, a Senior Scholar at the Management Department. Before becoming a business academic, I also consulted with Ernst &Young (Paris), and was an internal consultant for Sanofi-Pharma (Paris), Titan Cement (Athens) and Guildhall & Cornhill Ltd (London), a financial consulting firm, part of Union Plc.

My work at the London Business School, where I am also the Chris Ingram Faculty Fellow, consists of both research, theoretical and empirical alike, and teaching, mostly at the executive level. My main research interests are in understanding firms´ scope; industry and value chain evolution (in particular, vertical scope), profit migration and rent distribution, and on how Information and Technology is changing all the above. As a Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Trust's Digital Transformations £1.1M programme, I am looking at how new technologies change firm and industry boundaries and strategic dynamics. I am also interested in organizational design, and in how firms can manage their boundaries, e.g through outsourcing, to build competitive advantage. More broadly, my research examines what explains the division of labour within and between organizations; and also the implications of this division of labour for firm- and industry-level capabilities. In short, I care about business architectures. My research has been published in the leading academic journals, such as the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Industrial and Corporate Change, as well as in industry publications, especially in Financial Services.

My teaching focuses on executives, both for our LBS or LBS / Columbia programmes, and working directly with major global corporations such as Pirelli SpA, Zurich Financial Services, Barclays Plc, PwC and EADS. I also work on applied research / consultancy projects, most recently with executives from McKinsey & Co. My teaching and executive development interests revolve around weaving strategic decision making in the organizational fabric of the firms I work with; in helping them identify the dynamics of their business environment & build their resource and capability positions; and in helping them cope with change. I also present in thought leadership events and facilitate senior executive meetings, as I am an ardent believer of blending theory and practice!