Marie Thursby

Research Interests/Areas of Expertise

Microeconomics, international economics, innovation, global technology transfer, management of technology

Biography

Professor Marie Thursby is one of the foremost scholars in the field of the economics of innovation. She holds the Chair in Entrepreneurship and is a member of the Strategy faculty at the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech, as well an adjunct professor in the Economics department at Emory University.

Awards & Accomplishments

The TI:GER® program Marie founded has received numerous awards, including an Award for Exceptional Activity in Entrepreneurship across Disciplines from the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award, and the Model Specialty Entrepreneurship Award from the United States Association for Small Business Enterprise.

Impact

Marie is the founding director of the internationally acclaimed program, Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Returns (TI:GER®) – a unique educational collaboration between Georgia Tech and Emory University. TI:GER teams PhD students in engineering and science with MBA and JD students in an experiential curriculum focused on the intersection of technical, legal and business issues at the heart of innovation.

Leadership

Marie has been an Associate Editor in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Area of Management Science 2003 and an Editor of Research Policy since 2012. She also has been the Georgia Tech Social and Ethical Coordinator for the NSF National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network.

Teaching

Previously, she has held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, Syracuse University, and North Carolina State University.

Research Interests

Marie has published extensively on the economics of innovation, with particular emphasis on the role of universities in innovation systems, multinational R&D decisions, and the role of contracts in effective technology transfer. Her work has appeared in nearly 90 publications, including top peer-reviewed journals such as the American Economic Review, Management Science, and Science. Her current research is focused on incentive problems in biomedical translational research and in information sharing among competitive researchers. Her research has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation.

She has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1987.

Education

Ph.D., Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1974

A.B., Economics, Mount Holyoke College, 1969