Director, MIT Center for Digital Business
Schussel Family Professor, MIT Sloan School

Erik Brynjolfsson is an award-winning researcher, educator, entrepreneur, and author.  He serves as the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School, Chairman of the MIT Sloan Management Review, and a Director of public and private companies.  He lectures worldwide on business strategy and performance, pricing models and intangible assets and he teaches courses on the Economics of Information.

Professor Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure the productivity contributions of information technologies.  In related work, he identified the dominant role of organizational capital and other intangible assets in determining the performance of firms.  His research also provided the first quantification of the value of online product variety, often known as the ‘Long Tail’, and debunked the myth of ‘frictionless commerce’ by comparing online and offline retailers.  Brynjolfsson also developed a change management tool, the Matrix of Change, created pricing and bundling models for information goods, and assessed the optimal strategies for supplier networks and business ecosystems.  His recent work examines the social networks revealed by digital information flows, such as email traffic, and their relationships to information worker productivity.  Brynjolfsson’s research has appeared in leading science, economics and management journals.  It has been recognized with nine Best Paper awards and five patents.  Businessweek has profiled him one of five ‘ebusiness visionaries’ and a reader’s poll by Optimize ranked him as one of the world’s two most influential academics.

Brynjolfsson is the author or co-editor several books including Understanding the Digital Economy, Intangible Assets, and Strategies for eBusiness Success, and editor of SSRN’s Information System Network.  He has served on the Editorial Boards of numerous academic journals as well as Time magazine's Board of Economists and the Academic Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Professor Brynjolfsson holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences and a PhD from MIT in Managerial Economics.  He founded three companies and taught two of the first courses on Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge-based Systems at Harvard University.  From 1996-1998, he was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and from 2004-5, he was Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School.  His papers can be found at http://digital.mit.edu/erik

Erik joins the LEF Advisory Board with effect from 1 April 2011.