Our Team

Anita M. McGahan is Senior Research Scientist at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, where she leads the PI-Squared project on private innovation in the public interest.  She is also University Professor, George E. Connell Chair, Professor of Strategic Management, and Vice Chair of Massey College at the University of Toronto.  She is past President of the Academy of Management, a former member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance, and a long-time Senior Institute Associate at Harvard’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.  She also served in a range of leadership positions at the University of Toronto.  Her primary field is Strategy.

McGahan earned both her PhD and AM at Harvard University in two years. She holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where she received highest academic honors as a Baker Scholar, and a BA from Northwestern University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She spent several years early in her career at both McKinsey & Company and Morgan Stanley & Company and was previously on the faculties of both Harvard Business School and Boston University. She has visited the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the London Business School, the Australian Graduate School of Management, the University of Cambridge, and the Division of Social Medicine and Global Health at Harvard Medical School.  She is advisor to NeoGov and several other companies.

McGahan’s credits include five books and over 175 articles, case studies, notes and other published material on competitive advantage, industry evolution, and global health. Her current research emphasizes entrepreneurship in the public interest and innovative collaboration between public and private organizations.  She is also pursuing a long-standing interest in how firms overcome industry disruption to achieve breakthrough performance.  Her recent work emphasizes innovation in stakeholder governance and a new stakeholder theory.  McGahan has been recognized as a master teacher for her dedication to the success of junior faculty and for her leadership in course development.  In 2010, she was awarded the Academy of Management BPS Division’s Irwin Distinguished Educator Award.  In 2012, the Academy conferred on McGahan its Career Distinguished Educator Award for her championship of reform in the core curriculum of Business Schools, and in 2021, the Academy conferred on McGahan its Career Distinguished Service Award for leadership in the Academy and other organizations.  In 2018, McGahan was awarded both the Inaugural Educational Impact Award and, with Michael E. Porter, the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize from the Strategic Management Society.  With doctoral student Leandro Pongeluppe, she was awarded the Glueck Best Paper Award in 2021 from the Academy of Management.  With former doctoral student Keyvan Vakili, she was awarded the Academy of Management Journal’s Impact Award in 2022.  In 2023, she received the William D. Guth Distinguished Service Award in Strategic Management from the Academy of Management and the Sumantra Ghoshal Award for Rigour and Relevance in the Study of Management at the London Business School.  In 2012 she was elected a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society, and in 2015 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management.