About Manuel Sosa

Manuel Sosa is a professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD. He directs the Heinrich and Esther Baumann-Steiner Fund for Creativity and Business, the creativity-business learning platform, and the INSEAD-ArtCenter collaboration. He is also the director of the on-demand executive programme “Mastering Creative Thinking (online)”. 

Professor Sosa’s research efforts are applied to improving the management of innovation. His recent research efforts focus on studying the role of creativity and design in transforming incumbent organizations into more innovative ones. He is also investigating the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in improving (or hindering) innovation processes. His research has been published in leading academic journals in operations management, organization science, and engineering design. His research related to modularity on complex systems has been nominated twice for the best paper award in the ASME Design Theory and Methodology conference, and his research about "managing design" (featured in this TEDx Talk) has received several awards at both INFORMS and Academy of Management conferences.

Professor Sosa teaches in the MBA, PhD, and Executive programs, covering topics related to innovation management and creative thinking. His teaching achievements include the development of a 20-year-long program with Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, California) to integrate creative and business thinking for successful innovating. He led (in collaboration with Eight, Inc.) the development of the Creative Garage space for teaching creative thinking at INSEAD’s Asia Campus. He has published over 25 teaching cases in topics related to innovation management. He has received the Dean’s commendation for excellence in MBA teaching multiple times and won the best teaching award for his MBA elective course on creative thinking in 2021.

Professor Sosa received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar (Caracas, Venezuela) and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work experience includes systems engineering in the petrochemical industry and development and deployment of computer-aided engineering software applications in the automobile and aerospace industries.

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