Professor of Leadership and Innovation,
Stockholm School of Economics, 
Harvard Business School,
and Politecnico di Milano

Author, Harvard Business Press and MIT Press

Advisory Board, European Innovation Council, European Commission

(Photo courtesy by Carla Sedini)

Roberto Verganti is Professor of Leadership and Innovation at the Stockholm School of Economics, where he co-directs "The Garden - Center for Design and Leadership". He is also in the faculty of the Harvard Business School where he teaches Integrated Design, and he is co-founder of Leadin'Lab, the laboratory for LEADership, Design and Innovation, at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano. He has been a visiting scholar at the Copenhagen Business School and at the California Polytechnic University. At Politecnico di Milano he has been the founder and first director of the School of Doctoral Programs (with more than 800 PhD students) and of the Alta Scuola Politecnica (the school on Multidisciplinary Innovation for top 2% master students). Roberto serves on the Advisory Board of the European Innovation Council of the European Commission.

Roberto’s research focuses on how leaders and organizations create meaningful innovations. He explores how to nurture radically new visions, and make those visions come real, by engaging people.  His studies lie at the intersection between leadership, design and technology management. In his research Roberto combines methodologies of in-depth analysis of cases with experimentations with pioneering firms, in a variety of industries and contexts.

Roberto is the author of "Overcrowded. Designing Meaningful Products in a World Awash with Ideas", published in 2017 by MIT Press, and of “Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating what Things Mean” published by Harvard Business Press in 2009. “Design-Driven Innovation” has been selected by BusinessWeek as one of the Best Design an Innovation Books of 2009, and by the Academy of Management for the George R. Terry Book Award as one of the best 6 management books published in 2008 and 2009. It has been translated in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Persian, Russian and Portuguese.

Roberto has issued more than 150 articles, on scientific journals, including Management Science, Research Policy, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He has also extensively published on the Harvard Business Review, including the articles “Innovating Through Design”, “Which Kind of Collaboration is Right for You”, “Designing Breakthrough Products”, and "The Innovative Power of Criticism" all printed on HBR. He has been featured on The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Financial Times, BusinessWeek and Forbes.

Roberto, together with his team of likeminded researchers-consultants, has served as an advisor to executives and senior managers at a wide variety of manufacturing and service firms including Ferrari, Ducati, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Gucci, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Johnson & Johnson, Zappos, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Nestlè, L’Oréal, ABB, Bausch&Lomb, Prysmian, Tetrapak, ARUP, SKY NewsCorp., Deloitte. He has also helped national and regional governments around the world to conceive design and innovation policies.