About Karel Cool

Karel Cool's research, teaching and consulting focus on problems of industry dynamics and competitive strategy (e. g. competitive positioning; assessment of profit opportunities in markets; strategic supply chain dynamics and management; eco-system leadership; vertical integration and de-integration; industry overcapacity; critical mass races, customer value creation and capturing).

He has published in many journals, including Management Science, the Strategic Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Marketing Letters, Advances in Strategic Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, etc, edited the books, European Industrial Restructuring in the 1990s, 1992 (with D. Neven and I. Walter; Macmillan 1992), and Industry Structuring and Restructuring (with J. Henserson and R. Abate; Blackwell 2004, SMS Book Series), and has contributed to many books on competitive strategy.

From 1995 till 2007, he was Associate Editor of the Strategic Management Journal, the leading strategy journal.

He has consulted on major strategic problems of corporate and industry restructuring and worked with a variety of corporations, including Unilever, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Daimler-Chrysler, Borealis, RollsRoyce, Thomson Travel Group, Exxon, Solvay, Novo-Nordisk Lufthansa, KBC, Whirlpool, IBM, Expedia, Banque de France, McKinsey, Starwood, BCG, Shell, ING, Aktiva, Amgen, Bayer, Nordea, World Economic Forum, IBM, KGL Kuwait, Hearst, Reynaers Aluminium, Dong Energy Wind Power, Vandemoortele, Mars, etc.

During the academic year 1995/6 he was Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He has also been Visiting Professor at Northwestern University and was co-chair of the 2002 annual Strategic Management Society Conference held in Paris.

He won 6 times the “Best Teaching Award” in the MBA Insead Programme and is the Founder and Director of the long running Competitive Strategy executive program at INSEAD in Fontainebleau and Singapore. In 2007, he was inducted as Fellow of the Strategic Management Society. In 2009, he received from Purdue University the George S. Day Distinguished Alumni Academic Service Award.

In September 2014, he was honored by the Case Center as one of the best selling case authors over the past forty years: Karel has (co-) authored more than sixty case studies.

Karel Cool obtained his PhD (1985) and MScIA (1982) from Purdue University and his MA (1981) and Lic (1978) in Applied Economics from the University of Antwerp (UFSIA).

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