Licensing & Ventures Group

Michael J. Lenox

Academic Director and Associate Dean of the Batten Institute, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia; President’s Appointee

Michael Lenox is the Samuel L. Slover Professor of Business. He teaches and serves as the course head for the First Year “Strategy” core course. He is associate dean and academic director of Darden's Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He serves as president of the multiple-university Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS), a professional society of scholars from all disciplines studying the interface between business and sustainability.

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, the faculty director and founder of Duke’s Corporate Sustainability Initiative, and course head for the core MBA strategy course where he 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 and the degrees of bachelor and master of science in systems engineering from the University of Virginia. Professor Lenox has served as an assistant professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and as a visiting professor at Harvard University, Oxford University and IMD.

Lenox’s research has appeared in over 25 refereed academic publications and 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. His expertise 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 strategy. Lenox has also had a long-standing interest in the interface between business strategy and public policy as it relates to the natural environment. Recent work explores firm strategies and nontraditional public policies that have the potential to drive “green” innovation and entrepreneurship.

Education:

  • Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • B.S., M.S., University of Virginia