University of Oxford

Marc Ventresca

Courses

MBA / Executive MBA: Technology & Innovation Strategy
MBA / Executive MBA: Strategy Implementation
Executive MBA: Entrepreneurial Leadership and Strategy
MSc in Management Research: Innovation, Organisations and Markets

Expertise

Organisation theory and strategy
Institutions, organisation and industry emergence
Knowledge and information-intensive industries, including higher education and media
Social entrepreneurship and social innovation
Economic sociology of strategy
Sociology of official statistics

Overview

Marc Ventresca is an organisational and economic sociologist who teaches technology, strategy and organisation theory at Saïd Business School with a focus on innovation and on how new markets get built. He is a Fellow of Wolfson College, a Fellow of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), and affiliated with the Rothemere American Institute and Italian Studies at Oxford (ISO).

Marc plays a lead faculty role in research and teaching initiatives focused on innovation and entrepreneurship. His research investigates governance innovation among global financial markets, entrepreneurial leadership in knowledge- and -information-intensive organisations, and emerging ecosystem services markets. He is an associate of the research programme on Governance, Accountability and Innovation (GAIn) and supervisor to three DPhil students and informally to several postdoctoral fellows. He is founding convenor of the research seminar series ‘Strategies, Institutions and Practices at Saïd’ (SBS). He works across the boundaries of InSIS, the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (OxCEI) - with contributions to the MBA induction ‘Day of Conversations on Social Innovation’ and Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford. 

At Oxford, he is contributing faculty to the Innovation Plus programme, a teaching partnership between the Saïd Business School and graduate student training in the Division of Materials, Physical and Life Sciences. He is a core faculty member for the Goldman Sachs 10K Women Entrepreneurs Programme in the Oxford-Zhejiang University collaboration. He is an advisor to five startup companies founded by recent Oxford alumni and also to the ‘Inspiring Women in Leadership and Learning’ initiative at Oxford. 

Beyond Oxford, he serves on several journal editorial boards and is a regular reviewer for the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Oxford University Press. He contributes to scholarly and professional activities in the American Sociological Association, the Academy of Management and the European Group for Organisation Studies. He holds appointments as Research Associate Professor of Global Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School and as Senior Scholar at the Vinnova Center for Innovation Media Ecosystems, Stanford University. He is an Affiliated Faculty member at University of California Irvine's Center for Organizations Research, at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, and at the Mediterranean School of Business, Tunis Tunisia.

After taking his BA in political science at Stanford University he worked at the US Congressional Budget Office. He returned to Stanford for graduate degrees in education policy analysis and organizational and cultural sociology. Before joining the Saïd Business School, he served on faculty at the Kellogg School of Management and Department of Sociology, Northwestern University for nine years. He has been visiting faculty at the University of Illinois, Stanford University School of Engineering (Center for Work, Technology and Organizations), the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research, the University of California at Irvine and the Copenhagen Business School.

He is active in executive education for firms and agencies such as Allergan, British Energy, BMW, Citizens Information Service, El Pollo Loco, League of Women Voters, the US Navy 3rd Fleet, Standard Chartered Bank and Zurich Insurance. He has served as external asessor at Erasmus University, EM Lyon Business School, IESE Barcelona, London Business School, Tanaka Business School at Imperial College, the Judge Institute at University of Cambridge and the Copenhagen Business School.