Josh Lerner

Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Finance and the Entrepreneurial Management Units. He graduated from Yale College with a Special Divisional Major which combined physics with the history of technology. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy, at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He then undertook his graduate study at Harvard's Economics Department.

His research focuses on the structure of venture capital organizations, and their role in transforming scientific discoveries into commercial products. (Much of his research is collected in The Venture Capital Cycle, MIT Press, 1999 and The Money of Invention, Harvard Business School Press, 2001.) He also examines the impact of intellectual property protection, particularly patents, on the competitive strategies of firms in high-technology industries. (His new book with Princeton University Press, Innovation and Its Discontents, addresses these issues.) He founded, raised funding for, and organizes two groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research-the Entrepreneurship Working Group and the Innovation Policy and the Economy Group-and is a Research Associate in the Corporate Finance and Productivity Programs and serves as a co-editor of their publication Innovation Policy and the Economy.

In the 1993-94 academic year, he introduced an elective course for second-year MBAs on private equity finance. In recent years, "Venture Capital and Private Equity" has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at Harvard Business School. (The course materials are collected in Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Casebook, John Wiley, 2000 and 2002.) He also teaches doctoral courses on entrepreneurship and empirical methods in corporate finance, as well as executive education offerings. He serves as the School's representative on Harvard University Patent, Trademark and Copyright Committee and the Provost's Committee on Technology Transfer.