Matthew Higgins

Matthew J. Higgins joins the Freeman School as Professor of Management and Earl P. and Ethel B. Koerner Chair of Strategy & Entrepreneurship. He will also serve as the Director of the Levy-Rosenblum Institute. Additionally, he is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, Germany.

Prior to joining the Freeman School, Higgins served as Emma Eccles Jones Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship & Strategy in the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. He also served as the Director of the Sorenson Center for Discovery & Innovation Studies where he led the creation of a unique post-doctoral fellowship program. From 2020 to 2023, he served as Chair of the Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy. Prior to his tenure at the University of Utah, he spent 14 years at the Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology.

As an innovation scholar, his research interests center primarily on firm responses to productivity changes and challenges and the performance implications of these decisions. This includes understanding the interrelationship between internal R&D and the use of external technology markets through acquisitions, alliances, licensing and corporate venture capital. He is keenly interested in how firms build and dynamically optimize their R&D portfolios. More recently, Higgins has explored the impact regulation has on innovation and productivity.

Most of his research has been conducted within the context of the pharmaceutical industry and has been published in a diverse range of leading journals including Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and The RAND Journal of Economics. His research has received funding and support from the Georgia Research Alliance, Kauffman Foundation, Rich Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Pfizer Inc., and IQVIA, Inc. (formerly IMS Health, Inc.)

Higgins is the recipient of numerous awards for his undergraduate, MBA and Executive MBA teaching. In addition to his research and teaching, he also consults with governments and global pharmaceutical companies. He previously served on the NSF SBIR/STTR Advisory Subcommittee in Washington, DC.

He holds a PhD in Economics from Emory University, an MA in Economics from the University of Akron and Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Political Science (International Relations) from the University of Akron.