Ralph Katz

Ralph Katz is a Senior Lecturer in Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Katz is also a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship management at Northeastern University’s College of Business.

For more than 35 years, he has been carrying out extensive management research, education, and consulting on how to build, lead, and sustain the innovation process, with a particular interest in the management and motivation of technical professionals and high-performing groups and project teams. During these years, Katz has conducted numerous workshops and seminars on innovation and R&D management in many organizations, and has worked with them to improve their management and leadership of innovation, including their practices, processes, and cultures. Among his more recent clients are major industrial corporations, including Procter & Gamble; Lockheed Martin; Goodrich; EMC; Nokia; Novartis; Medtronic; Tetra Pak; Master Foods, Inc.; Ciba Specialty Chemicals; and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. He teaches in two MIT Sloan executive programs and leads the Management of Technology and Innovation executive program at Cal Tech. For more than 10 years, he led the Management of Technology and Technical Professionals courses at IBM’s Corporate Technical Institute. Katz has taught in the executive programs of many other universities and was a visiting scholar at INSEAD in Paris during the 2003–04 academic year.

His most recent book is The Human Side of Managing Technological Innovation, second edition (Oxford University Press, 2004). In 1981, Katz was awarded the New Concept Award by the National Academy of Management for “Most Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Organizational Behavior.” He also was the 1986 recipient of R&D Management Journal’s Best Paper Award and the 1990 and 1991 recipient of the Academy of Management TIM Division’s Best Paper Award. In 2004, his paper in the IRI-sponsored journal, Research-Technology Management, was selected as the Holland Award Winner for that year’s most significant and original contribution to the field of research management. Katz serves on many journal editorial boards and was the research and development/innovation and entrepreneurship departmental editor for Management Science from 1991 to 2001.

Katz holds a BS in mathematics and physics from Carnegie Mellon  University and an MBA and a PhD from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.