Alumni & Friends : Alumni Profiles

Pioneering a Better World

Lynda M. Applegate
Ph.D. '87, Management Information Systems

As the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Lynda M. Applegate has the opportunity to work on some of the most pioneering research and development in business today.

Much of that work stems from her primary appointment in the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, and Lynda traces her interest in the discipline, in part, to her experience at the Eller College.

“Some of the work we were doing when I was at The University of Arizona was the initial effort that launched the Group Systems collaboration product. It was a very innovative program, and so my entrepreneurial activity started from being part of that launch. It was a time for really thinking about entrepreneurship as an academic discipline,” Lynda notes.

“I was part of the team that built the first decision room and did some of the early research there,” Lynda notes. “That type of pioneering, where you marry technology and important areas of business—areas where executives and businesses can use technology to solve important problems and make important decisions—was fundamental to my thinking about the impact of technology on industries, businesses, and markets.”

Today, Lynda is channeling much of that thinking abroad, helping to launch the Global Entrepreneurship Knowledge Network to deliver entrepreneurial education around the world and facilitate online the exchange of information and ideas between international executives, researchers, and educators. “We’re working with universities in different parts of the world to create a research environment where faculty can do joint research on entrepreneurship and innovation.” The power of the initiative lies in its potential to vastly improve the quality of life for populations around the world. “We’re focusing on emerging markets,” Lynda explains, “so they can begin to develop their own innovations and reap the benefits of the economic development rather than having others come in and reap the economic benefits.”

When she’s not hopping a plane to Sao Paolo, Brazil (the first focus of the executive education initiative due to launch this summer), Lynda excels in all the other duties of professorship at one of the nation’s leading business schools. She has authored or co-authored four books, contributed chapters to a dozen more, and written numerous articles published in top journals such as Journal of Operations Research, Management Information Systems Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, and Journal of Organizational Computing. In 1999 she was awarded Harvard Business School’s Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching and in 1992 earned the School’s Berol Award for research excellence.