Frank Nagle

Frank Nagle is an assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Nagle studies how competitors can collaborate on the creation of core technologies, while still competing on the products and services built on top of them. His research falls into the broader categories of the future of work, the economics of IT, and digital transformation and considers how technology is weakening firm boundaries. His work frequently explores the domains of crowdsourcing, free digital goods, cybersecurity, and generating strategic predictions from unstructured big data. His work utilizes large datasets derived from online social networks, open source software repositories, financial market information, and surveys of enterprise IT usage. Professor Nagle’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the academic journals Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, and Strategic Management Review as well as in the practitioner-oriented publications Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Brookings Institution TechStream. He has won awards and grants from AOM, NBER, SMS, INFORMS, EURAM, the Sloan Foundation, and the Linux Foundation. He is the co-director of the HBS/Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative. At HBS, he is a faculty affiliate of the Digital Initiative, the Managing the Future of Work Project, and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).

Professor Nagle serves on the advisory board at Nexleaf Analytics and Alphamatician and advises other big data analytics startups. He currently advises the OECD Working Party on Innovation and Technology Policy and is on the European Commission/ Open Forum Europe Board of Experts for the Impact of Open Source on Technological Independence, Competitiveness, and Innovation in Europe. He has consulted for The World Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Social Security Administration, and various companies in the technology, defense, and energy sectors. He is currently a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Prior to his academic career, Frank worked at a number of startups and large companies in the information security and technology consulting industries. In these roles, he researched a variety of topics related to social network privacy and the economics of IT, conducted cybersecurity assessments and breach investigations, and developed and taught a two-week course that all FBI cyber agents must pass before entering the field.

Prior to joining HBS, he was an assistant professor in the Management & Organization Department at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, where he also served as co-director of Marshall Digitopolis, and as a faculty affiliate of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication. Frank earned his DBA in Technology and Operations Management from Harvard Business School. He also earned a BS and MS in Computer Science from Georgetown University and an MS in International Business Economics from City University, London.