Dorothy Leonard
Dorothy Leonard, the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration, joined the Harvard faculty in 1983 after teaching for three years at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught MBA courses in managerial leadership, corporate creativity, new product and process design, technology strategy and innovation management. At Harvard, M.I.T., and for corporations such as Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, and 3M, Professor Leonard has conducted executive courses on a wide range of innovation-related topics such as cross-functional coordination during new product development, technology transfer and knowledge management. She served for three years as faculty chair for Leading Product Development, a program for upper level executives on managing new product and process development, and currently chairs the HBS executive program Leveraging Knowledge in the 21st Century Organization. She teaches in other Harvard executive programs such as Managing Global Opportunities, The General Manager, and Enhancing Corporate Creativity. She has also served as a Director of Research for the Harvard Business School and Research Director for Harvard Business School's non-profit organization, HBS Interactive.

Professor Leonard's major research interests and consulting expertise relate to managing the innovation process. She is currently studying how innovation novices gain tacit and explicit knowledge from mentors. The novices in this study are entrepreneurs in startup businesses and intrapreneurs in large organizations. She has consulted with and taught about innovation management for governments (e.g., Sweden, Jamaica) and major corporations (e.g., IBM, Kodak). She serves on the corporate Board of Directors for American Management Systems and was a director for Guy Gannett Communications until its sale in 1999. She has also served on a number of company advisory boards.

Her numerous writings appear in academic journals ('Core Capabilities and Core Rigidities in New Product Development' in Strategic Management Journal), practitioner journals ('Sparking Innovation Through Empathic Design' in Harvard Business Review) and books on technology management ('Guiding Visions' in The Perpetual Enterprise Machine). In addition, Professor Leonard has written dozens of field-based cases used in business school classrooms around the world. Her book, Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation , was published in hardback in 1995 by Harvard Business School Publishing and reissued in paperback in 1998. Professor Leonard's most recent book, When Sparks Fly: Igniting Group Creativity (co-authored with Walter Swap), was published September 1999 by Harvard Business School Press. Before obtaining her Ph.D. from Stanford University, she worked in Southeast Asia for ten years.

Walter Swap
Walter Swap is Professor of psychology emeritus and former Chairman of the Psychology Department at Tufts University. He was also a Professor in the Gordon Institute at Tufts, which offers a degree in engineering management to practicing engineers and scientists. Dr. Swap served for nine years as the Dean of the colleges, responsible for all aspects of undergraduate academic life at Tufts. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Harvard and his Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Swap’s professional life has been divided among teaching, research, and administration. He has received two awards for teaching excellence. He was a founding member of the university’s innovative Center for Decision Making, where he introduced undergraduates to the complexities of choice and group dynamics, and conducted workshops for midlevel managers from a variety of industries. As dean, he developed centers and programs promoting excellence in teaching, undergraduate advising, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary education.

Dr. Swap is the author, with wife Dorothy Leonard, of When Sparks Fly: Igniting Creativity in Groups (1999). Among Dr. Swap’s other publications are Group Decision Making (1984), numerous book chapters, and articles in professional journals, including The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, on topics including group dynamics, attitude change, personality theory, altruism, and aggression. Dr. Swap is also a runner, gardener, pianist, singer, and amateur composer.

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