From May 19 to June 13, 2015, Professor Daniel A. Levinthal from the Wharton University of Pennsylvania will be a guest at LUISS as a visiting professor and will teach the course in Management, as part of the PhD Program in Business and Management.
Levinthal is Reginald H. Jones Professor of Corporate Strategy at the prestigious Wharton School, where he is also the current Chair of the Management Department. His research interests focus on industry evolution, organizational learning, technological competition. He has had a number of editorial roles at major academic journals and has an extensive publication record of over 40 articles and book chapters. Since 2010, he's editor-in-Chief of Organization Science, editor at Industrial and Corporate Change, and he's the Department Editor for Business Strategy at Management Science.
The substantive focus of the course at LUISS will be on the firm as a productive entity. "Among the sorts of questions we explore – explains Professor Levinthal – are the following: What underlies a firm's capabilities? How does individual knowledge aggregate to form collective capabilities? We also explore what our understanding of firms says about market dynamics and industry evolution, particularly in the context of technological change".
The objective of the course are: be conversant in some of the critical ideas and theories in the management literature on the topic of organization and industry evolution, particularly from a learning and evolutionary economics point of view; begin to develop research ideas as to how to extend and contribute to this literature; and improve abilities at critiquing and forming theoretical arguments.