Fundación Damm Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Academic Area:
Strategy
Teaching / Research Interests
Mailing Information
Duke University: The Fuqua School of Business
100 Fuqua Drive
Durham, NC 27708
Bio
Sharon Belenzon is the Fundación Damm Distinguished Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy area at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His work examines how businesses shape and are shaped by the innovation ecosystem. He studies why corporations invest in science, why this engagement has declined, and how that shift is transforming the sources of technological progress. His research documents a structural change in the American innovation system: corporate labs once advanced frontier science, but their role has eroded as universities and startups have become the main engines of discovery. This redistribution of inventive activity creates new dependencies between firms and the science base. It also raises a policy challenge—how to sustain the translation of research into market innovation when the actors generating knowledge differ from those commercializing it. In related projects, Belenzon studies how organizational structures and ownership models affect firms’ ability to innovate and compete. He compares how companies across advanced and emerging economies adapt their internal organization to local innovation systems and institutional constraints. His research has appeared in Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Research Policy, and Journal of Law and Economics. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University’s Nuffield College, and received the 2007 Kauffman Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the NBER.