Executive Biography
Professor Lenox is the Samuel L. Slover Professor of Business at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. He is Associate Dean and Executive Director of Darden's Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Prior to joining Darden in 2008, Professor Lenox was a professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business where he served as the area coordinator for Fuqua’s Strategy Area and the faculty director and founder of Duke’s Corporate Sustainability Initiative. At Duke, he coordinated and taught the core MBA strategy course and was runner-up for the Chrysler faculty teaching award on multiple occasions. He received his Ph.D. in Technology Management and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 and the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. Professor Lenox joined Fuqua after three years as an assistant professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Professor Lenox pursues two distinct yet related research streams. The first is in the domain of technology strategy and policy. He is broadly interested in the role of innovation and entrepreneurship for economic growth and firm competitive success. In particular, he explores the sourcing of extramural knowledge by firms and its impact on firm innovation examining mechanisms that facilitate the absorption of extramural knowledge. The second stream is at the interface of business strategy and public policy. This works draws upon emerging scholarship on the institutional, or non-market, strategies of firms and explores the prospects for industry self-regulation—both the incentives firms have to self-regulate and the institutions created by firms and other stakeholders to facilitate self-regulation. In particular, Professor Lenox is interested in firm strategies and non-traditional public policies that have the potential to reduce firms’ impacts on the natural environment.
Professor Lenox’s research has appeared in over twenty refereed academic publications. His research has appeared in leading journals including Management Science, the Strategic Management Journal, the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and Research Policy. He has been invited to present his research at numerous institutions including Oxford University, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Professor Lenox has been cited in a number of media outlets including the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Economist, the Dow Jones Newswire, and the Associated Press.