Mark Greeven
Professor of Management Innovation at IMD
Mark explores new ways of managing in a turbulent world. He has been collaborating with innovative Chinese companies (for example Huawei, SF Express, Ping An, Alibaba, Haier) and entrepreneurial multinationals (for example Walmart, Bayer, ASML, Volkswagen, AIA, Johnson & Johnson, Bosch, Daimler, Nestle, Richemont, SwissRe) to explore novel ways of management, accelerating corporate innovation, enabling digital and AI transformation and building business ecosystems.
Mark is a Professor of Management Innovation and Founding Director of the China Initiative at IMD (former Dean of China and Asia), contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Forbes, Fast Company, Financial Times, Nikkei, Channel News Asia, and on the 2025 and 2023 Thinkers50 List of most impactful management thinkers, after being on the Radar List in 2017. He is a Chinese speaker with 20 years (and counting) experience on the ground in China. He is also a Research Affiliate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Author of “The Future of Global Retail” (Routledge, 2021) with cover endorsement by Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Executive Chair, the LEGO Brand Group, “Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Change Makers and Underdogs: Lessons from China’s Innovators” (MIT Press, 2019) with cover endorsement by Henry Chesbrough; “Business ecosystems in China: Alibaba and competing Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi and LeEco” (2017, Routledge), with cover endorsement by Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper; “Innovation in uncertain institutional environments” (2009). His works have been translated into Chinese and Japanese.
Founding member of the Business Ecosystem Alliance. His strategic foresight work contributed to future-ready dialogues in the public and private sector, including as a council member at the WEF Global Foresight Network. In addition, he co-leads research on industrial intelligence in collaboration with AVEVA, the digital ecosystem arm of Schneider Electric.
He has built what he advises others to build. He founded IMD China in Shenzhen, scaled it into a multi-million-dollar executive education business in three years and launched cross-border programmes at four institutions, from the Chinese Economy and Business Programme at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Global Entrepreneurship Programme at Zhejiang University to IMD’s Future-Ready Enterprise Programme with MIT Sloan. He has also founded private companies in cross-border e-commerce, kids education and technology scouting.