Peter B Zemsky
The Eli Lilly Chaired Professor of Strategy and Innovation
Professor of Strategy, Coordinator, Strategy Area
Dean of Faculty (as of January 2010)

Peter Zemsky is the Eli Lilly Chaired Professor of Strategy and Innovation. He is currently the head of the INSEAD Strategy Area and is responsible for overseeing the school’s multi-million euro R&D budget.

Professor Zemsky graduated as the top economics major from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. After working at the Federal Reserve in Washington, he went to Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he first became interested in the application of microeconomics to business strategy. Since receiving his PhD from Stanford in 1995, he has been a resident faculty member at INSEAD, except for 2002-2003 when he was a Visiting Professor at Wharton.

A leading expert on economics-based approaches to strategy, Professor Zemsky has written on a wide variety of topics including the sustainability of competitive advantage, disruptive technologies, time-based competition and the accumulation of intangible resources. He is a pioneer in the use of mathematical modeling to elucidate the verbal arguments traditionally used in strategy theorizing and publishes in both the leading economics and strategy journals.

In the INSEAD MBA programme, he teaches the opening module introducing the challenges of General Management. Previously, he was responsible for the MBA core strategy course and was a finalist for the best core teacher award in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Currently, most of his teaching is with executives, for whom he runs a variety of workshops on topics from industry evolution to developing a competitive advantage. He launched and directs INSEAD’s Blue Ocean Strategy open enrolment programme.