Lee Fleming joined the IEOR Department at UC Berkeley in Fall 2011 and is the Faculty Director of the Coleman Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership. He teaches the engineering leadership and capstone integration courses within the Masters of Engineering curriculum. His research investigates how managers can increase their organization’s chances of inventing a breakthrough, through types of collaboration, the integration of scientific and empirical search strategies, and the recombination of diverse technologies. His recent work has disambiguated the U.S. patent record and demonstrated that non-compete agreements create a brain-drain from states that enforce non-competes to states that do not. His is currently using big data techniques to study innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge flow, and science policy.
Dr. Fleming earned his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at UC Davis. Dr. Fleming earned a Masters in Engineering Management from Stanford University in the Honors Cooperative Program. He received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Stanford. He also completed a Masters in statistics during his doctoral years. Between 1998 and 2011, he was a professor at the Harvard Business School, most recently as the Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Business Administration.
Research and Areas of Interest
- Strategies for product invention, through types of collaboration
- The integration of scientific and empirical search strategies
- The recombination of divers technologies
- Innovation, social networks, knowledge diffusion, regional economics