Courses

MBA / EMBA: Strategy & Innovation (core elective)
MBA / EMBA: Strategy Implementation
MBA Rethinking Business
EMBA: Entrepreneurial Leadership and Strategy
MSc in Management Research: Advanced Organisation Theory; Innovation, Organisations and Markets
Research degrees supervision

Expertise

Innovation strategy
Organisation theory
Market-building – pragmatics of system-building and entrepreneurship
Knowledge and information-intensive industries, including higher education and media
Research methods – archival analysis
Economic sociology of strategy

Overview

Marc J Ventresca is an organisational and economic sociologist at Saïd Business School, with research and teaching focus on innovation, organizations, and how new markets get built, and a Fellow of Wolfson College.  He has research affiliations as faculty fellow, Oxford Institute for Science, Innovation and Society; research associate professor of global public policy, NPS; affiliate, Center for Organizations Research, University of California, and senior scholar, Center for Innovation and Communication, Stanford University.

Marc plays a lead faculty role in research and teaching initiatives focused on innovation and implementation.  His research investigates diffusion of governance innovations in global financial markets and in U.S. higher education, market-building strategies in ecosystems services markets in Amazon Peru, and emerging models of venture funding and incubators, and entrepreneurial leadership in knowledge- and -information-intensive organizations.  He is founding convenor of the research seminar series ‘Strategies, Institutions and Practices at Saïd’ (SIPS).  He is lead faculty for the Science Innovation Plus initiative, a teaching partnership between Saïd Business School and the Division of Mathematics, Physical and Life Sciences that engages doctoral students and postdocs with MBA innovation and entrepreneurial activities.  He is a core faculty member for the Goldman Sachs 10K Women Entrepreneurs Programme in the Oxford-Zhejiang University  and Oxford-SWUFE collaborations. He works across the Centre boundaries at SBS, as founder and now co-convenor for the MBA induction ‘Day of Conversations on Social Innovation’ and previously as faculty lead for Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford.   He is an advisor to five startup companies founded by recent Oxford alumni, to Oxford Entrepreneurs, and also to the ‘Inspiring Women in Leadership and Learning’ initiative at Oxford. 

Beyond Oxford, he serves on 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 is active in executive education for firms and agencies such as Allergan, British Energy, BMW, Citizens Information Service, El Pollo Loco, GCSP, GMAC, IBM Global Business Practice, League of Women Voters, Mediterranean School of Business, the US Navy 3rd Fleet, Standard Chartered Bank and Zurich Insurance. He has served as external assessor 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.

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 Oxford, 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.

Research approach

Marc Ventresca's research uses strategy, economic sociology and cultural institutionalism to understand industry emergence and nascent markets, innovation, governance and entrepreneurial activity in knowledge-intensive industries.

Expertise

Innovation strategy
Organisation theory
Market-building – pragmatics of system-building and entrepreneurship
Knowledge and information-intensive industries, including higher education and media
Research methods – archival analysis
Economic sociology of strategy

Current research

Global models and institutional innovation:  The dynamics of emerging financial markets (technology markets to enterprise markets), 1985-2005,
Market-building in Amazon Peru:  What systems builders do
Inhabited institutions:  The pragmatics of entrepreneurial action
Building inclusive markets: Complex institutional contexts and gender in rural Bangladesh
Origins of governance regimes: “Before’ epistemic communities with cases from security/prevention and from REDD+/ecosystems services
How institutions change:  Lessons from the development economics of A.O. Hirschman
When states count:  Global logics of governance and science shaping the early history of national population censuses
Governance reforms in the ‘ancient’ universities

Books:

Ventresca, M.J., K. Munir, and M. Lounsbury (eds).  Constructing Markets and Industries, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010.

Ventresca, M.J.  When States Count:  Innovations in the Global Governance of Counting People, 1853-1995, forthcoming 2010.

Meyer, R.M., K. Sahlin, M.J. Ventresca, and P. Walgenbach (eds.), Ideology and Institutions:  Research in the Sociology of Organizations, JAI Press, 2009.

Mutch, A., R. Delbridge, & M.J. Ventresca (eds.) Situating Institutional Analysis of Organisation, 13(5), 2006.

Lounsbury, M., & Ventresca, M.J. (eds), Social Structure and Organization Revisited, JAI Press, 2002.

Hoffman, A., & Ventresca, M.J. (eds), Organizations, Policy, and the Natural Environment: Institutional and Strategic Perspectives, Stanford University Press, 2002.

Selected articles and chapters:

Useful links:

Wolfson College

Academy of Management
* * Organization and Management Theory (OMT) Division
* * Business Policy and Strategy Division
* * Critical Management Studies

European Group For Organization Studies (EGOS)

American Sociological Assocation
* * Culture Section
* * Economic Sociology Section
* * Organizations, Occupations and Work Section
* * Theory Section

ReNeUv

Innovation Journalism