Faculty
Pierre Azoulay is the International Programs Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
His research focuses on the impact of different funding regimes on the rate and direction of scientific progress. He is also part of a large team surveying management practices and culture in scientific laboratories on a large scale. His latest projects examine the complex relationship between risk and return in scientific research.
At MIT Sloan, he teaches courses on competitive strategy, technology strategy, and platform strategy, as well as a PhD class on the economics of ideas, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
He holds a Diplôme d’Études Supérieures de Gestion from the Institut National des Télécommunications, an MA from Michigan State University, and a PhD in Management from MIT.
Featured Publication
"Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship."Azoulay, Pierre, Benjamin Jones, Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda. American Economic Review: Insights Vol. 2, No. 1 (2020): 65-82. Download Paper.
Qiu, Shumin, Claudia Steinwender, and Pierre Azoulay. Research Policy Vol. 54, No. 1 (2025): 105147. Also NBER Working Paper 30772.
Azoulay, Pierre, Joshua L. Krieger, and Abhishek Nagaraj, Working Paper. May 2024. Also NBER Working Paper #32474.
Azoulay, Pierre, Shumin Qiu, and Claudia Steinwender, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6977-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2024. Also NBER Working Paper #32468.
Azoulay, Pierre, Misty L. Heggeness, and Jennifer Kao, MIT Sloan Working Paper 5926-19. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2023. Also NBER Working Paper #27943.
The race for dominance in the AI marketplace hinges on who controls its complementary assets, researchers assert.
As artificial intelligence takes off, all companies should be thinking about value creation, value capture, and value delivery.
Studies show startups with older founders are more likely to succeed.
“There are ideas that you can only have once you’ve been around and you’ve had a real job."
"One reason that immigrants do better is that they locate in places that are growing fast and the earnings potential are high."
Programs designed to stimulate “one-in-a-thousand ideas, much less one-in-a-million ideas” are all but immune to cost-benefit analysis.
This business process improvement course introduces a structured approach to design and customer analysis processes that draws on important trends that have become essential to successful innovation in today’s businesses: the digitization of all business processes; the blending of product and service into integrated solutions; considerations around environmental sustainability; and the use of globally-distributed teams.
Over the past two decades, some of the most profitable and successful firms are those that have adopted a digital platform model—a platform strategy whereby the company allows two or more disparate groups to interact over a platform to co-create value; for example, website developers and users on Akamai, recruiters and employees on LinkedIn, and drivers and customers on Uber. In this program, participants eager to develop or launch a digital platform approach will learn why and how their business strategies may need to be revised to be successful.
