Fiona Murray is an Associate Professor of Management in the Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She received BA and MA degrees from the University of Oxford in Chemistry before coming to the United States where she received her doctoral degree from Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research interests then moved away from the bench to the study of science commercialization, the organization of scientific research and the role of science in national competitiveness.

After a short time on the faculty of Oxford’s Said Business School Fiona joined the MIT Sloan School of Management where she studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship with an emphasis on the life sciences sector. Fiona is well-known for her work on how growing economic incentives, particularly intellectual property (IP), influence the rate and direction of scientific progress, particularly in the areas of genomics, stem cells, and mouse genetics. Fiona works with a range of firms designing global organizations working with a wide range of internal and external innovators (through traditional contracts and “Open Innovation” mechanisms) that are both commercially successful and at the forefront of science. She is also actively involved in policy debates over the appropriate use of IP and licensing in universities and more recently debates on when and when not to use patents to promoted discovery research in neglected diseases. She is also interested in new emerging organizational arrangements for effective commercialization of science including public-private partnerships, not-for profits, venture philanthropy, and university-initiated seed funding. In particular, Fiona has made an extensive examination of investments in a broad range of institutional arrangements to support scientific productivity both in the US and beyond in emerging science based nations such as China and India.

Her research has been widely published in a diverse range of scientific and social science journals including Science, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, Research Policy, Organization Science and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.