Laura Cardinal

Background

Laura B. Cardinal, Ph.D., is the SmartState Endowed Chair and Director for the Center for Innovation and Commercialization at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Previously, Cardinal was a faculty member at Tulane University, where she served as director of the Burkenroad Institute for the Study of Ethics and Leadership. Cardinal’s expertise centers on the implementation of innovation goals and strategies and includes the effects of organizational control and coordination on innovation, R&D and founding firm adaptation. She also studies the coordination of new product development teams and product commercialization. She has received awards for both research and teaching in these areas. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin where she was a National Science Foundation grant recipient.

Cardinal sits on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management and the Board of Directors of the Organizational Design Community. She serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Discoveries and the Journal of Organization Design. Previously she served as an associate editor of the Academy of Management Annals, sat on the Board of Directors of the Strategic Management Society (SMS), served on the editorial boards of the Strategic Management Journal and Organization Science, and was chair for the Competitive Strategy Interest Group of SMS and for the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the AOM. Her book, Organizational Control (with Sitkin and Bijlsma-Frankema), was published by Cambridge University Press.

Education

• Ph.D., University of Texas, 1990 
• B.A., University of Texas, 1982