Thomas R. Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; Peter O. Crisp Faculty Chair, Harvard Innovation Labs; and Unit Head of the HBS Entrepreneurial Management faculty.
Previously, Eisenmann was Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the Harvard MS/MBA-Engineering Sciences Program, and the Roberts Family Fellows Program for Harvard College students focused on technology and innovation. Eisenmann, author of the book Why Startups Fail, teaches the MS/MBA core course Designing Technology Ventures. In past years, he served as Chair of Harvard's MBA Elective Curriculum—the 2nd year of the MBA Program—and as course head of The Entrepreneurial Manager, taught to all 900 1st-year MBAs.
With colleagues, Eisenmann has created fourteen MBA electives and MS/MBA courses, including Making Markets, which focuses on marketplace design; Launching Technology Ventures; Scaling Technology Ventures; Entrepreneurial Sales & Marketing; Product Management 101, in which students specified and supervised development of a software application; January Term Startup Bootcamp for first-year MBAs; Avoiding Startup Failure; and Managing Networked Business, which surveyed strategies for platform-based businesses that leverage network effects. He twice co-led a Harvard Innovation Lab course, Cultural Entrepreneurship in New York City, in which students from across Harvard spent a winter break week in New York exploring new ventures in fashion, food, and fine arts, and co-led four similar winter break trips to study entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.
