Fiona Murray

Associate Dean, MIT Innovation Initiative

Site: CDL-Oxford

Fiona Murray is the Associate Dean of Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship, and an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is also Faculty Director of the MIT Legatum Center for Entrepreneurship and Development, and the co-director of MIT’s Innovation Initiative. She is one of the founding faculty of the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Development Program.

She serves on the British Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology and has been awarded a CBE for her services to innovation and entrepreneurship in the UK.

Murray is an international expert on the transformation of R&D investments into innovation-based entrepreneurship that drives jobs, wealth creation, and regional prosperity. Her work takes a multi- stakeholder approach to consider how to effectively link university research at the innovation horizon with entrepreneurs, risk-capital providers and in turn with large corporations and governments. This perspective has taken driven her interests in several different arenas.

First, many of her current activities focus on supporting public and private sector organizations to link with entrepreneurs and universities for mission-driven challenges. This is reflected in her work at MIT in the MIT Innovation initiative – especially supporting the community whose mission emphasizes security and defense. Outside MIT, she works closely with the UK Ministry of Defence as well as with a range of US organizations.

Second, the role of inclusion in innovation is a key pillar of her engagement at MIT – reflected also in her recent scholarship and writing. Fiona has emphasized the ways in which women and under-represented minorities can be more effectively engaged in innovation ecosystem, and the ways in which different approaches to evaluating early-stage ideas can overcome the unconscious bias that she has documented in entrepreneurial funding. Her work is widely published in a range of journals, including Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, American Journal of Sociology, Research Policy, Organization Science, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Murray received her BA ’89 and MA ‘90 from the University of Oxford in Chemistry. She subsequently moved to the United States and earned an AM ’92 and PhD ’96 from Harvard University in engineering and applied sciences.