معرفی
Maria P. Roche serves as Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where she teaches the MBA elective Innovating at Scale and contributes to executive education programs. Her research investigates how specialized knowledge is commercialized and how micro-geographic environments—including neighborhoods, buildings, and office layouts—influence innovation outcomes, demonstrating that strategic design of physical and social environments yields significant performance gains.
Her educational background includes a PhD in Management (Strategy and Innovation) from the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. She also holds an MS in Business Administration and a BA in International Cultural and Business Studies from the University of Passau in Germany.
Professor Roche's research spans innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship, with emphasis on knowledge spillovers in coworking spaces, urban infrastructure effects on innovation, and academic entrepreneurship. Her work combines large-scale empirical analyses with field experiments, revealing how proximity-driven social interactions and environmental design shape technological adoption and startup success across biotechnology, software, and high-tech industries.
Her publications from 2020–2025 consistently explore geography-innovation linkages, with major themes including physical proximity effects in coworking hubs, street-network impacts on regional innovation, and optimal workplace configurations for knowledge-intensive organizations. This body of work has appeared in Management Science, Organization Science, and Review of Economics and Statistics, influencing both academic discourse and corporate practices as featured in The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
Her scientific recognition includes:
- 2025 Wyss Award for Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students
- 2025 TIM Emerging Scholar Award
- 2021 Best Dissertation Award from TIM Division of Academy of Management
- National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant (2019–2021)
- 2019 Ewing Marion Kauffman Best Student Paper Award
Professor Roche actively mentors doctoral students—evidenced by her Wyss Award—and serves on editorial boards for Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, and Strategy Science. Her research has received external funding including NSF grants, and she engages globally as a keynote speaker at academic and corporate conferences. Prior to academia, she gained professional experience in venture capital and film across Canada, Germany, Austria, Spain, and the United States.
