Christian Terwiesch, PhD, is the Andrew M. Heller Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is part of the faculty in the Operations, Information, and Decisions Department. He is also co-director of Penn’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management and holds a faculty appointment at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.
A leading scholar in operations and innovation management, Christian’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals, including Management Science and The New England Journal of Medicine. He is an award-winning educator with extensive experience teaching MBA students and executives worldwide.
Christian is the co-author of Matching Supply with Demand, a widely adopted textbook now in its fifth edition, written with Gerard Cachon. Building on this work, he launched the first business-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Coursera, which has become one of the platform’s most influential offerings.
His first management book, Innovation Tournaments (Harvard Business School Press), co-authored with Karl Ulrich, introduced a rigorous, process-based framework for mastering innovation. Over the past two decades, Christian has designed and led innovation tournaments for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, across global innovation hubs from Silicon Valley and Wall Street to Shanghai and Buenos Aires.
More recently, Christian has focused on advancing machine creativity, co-authoring pioneering studies on AI-supported idea generation. His current work explores how emerging technologies can be leveraged to reimagine innovation and transform the delivery of clinical care.
Originally from Germany, Christian holds a doctoral degree from INSEAD and a diploma from the University of Mannheim.
