Jim Pulcrano

Jim is an IMD Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management. His current projects include teaching in Lausanne, London and Silicon Valley, research on disruption, and various strategy, networking, customer-centricity and innovation mandates with multinationals in Europe, Asia and the US.

Clients have included Audemars-Piguet, Bayer, Bossard, Bühler, Caterpillar, EDF, Engie, INEOS, KPN, Lenovo, Medtronic, Mölnlycke, Monsanto, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Straumann, UEFA (the European Football Association), and the Swiss federal government.

Jim joined the management team of IMD in 1993 as Director of Marketing. During a 20-year career at IMD, Jim had direct responsibility for IMD's clients across a wide part of the world, was a founding member of the Executive MBA teaching team (focused on entrepreneurship and IMD's work in Silicon Valley), created and ran IMD's annual startup competition (which he still does) and had responsibility for IMD's worldwide alumni network. Jim stepped down from IMD in 2013 as Executive Director. He is the former Chairman of UNICON, an association of the world's top business schools.

Before joining IMD, Jim was Managing Director of a Swiss startup in the medical device industry. Prior to his MBA degree, he worked as an engineer in the USA and Africa for Schlumberger, a leader in the petroleum services industry.

He has contributed substantially to six startup companies over the past 30 years in the US and Switzerland. The Swiss federal government chose him in 2003 to join its strategy committee for Swissnex, the "Swiss Houses" in the United States, Singapore and Shanghai, under the Swiss Secretariat for Education & Research. He is also a jury member for Switzerland's Venture Lab grant program, teaches in the Swiss governmen's Innosuisse entrepreneurship courses, and served on the Board of AISTS, the International Academy of Sports Science & Technology, where he still teaches. He is also a member of the NCCR, the Swiss National Center for Robotics Competence, providing grants to promising research in robotics. He is an investor and on the advisory board of LuckaBox, a Swiss last-mile delivery provider. Jim also serves on the PhD candidates' committee for the EPFLInnovators European program.

He completed his doctorate in 2012 at the Grenoble Ecole de Management focused on entrepreneurship and networking. He received his MBA from IMD in 1984 and he has a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia (USA).

Jim was born in the United States, has Swiss/American citizenship, speaks English and French, is married and has three children. He lives in Switzerland. His non-professional interests are outdoor sports and cooking.