Bio Details

Derek van Bever is a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the General Management Unit and director of the Forum for Growth and Innovation. He teaches Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (BSSE) in the MBA elective curriculum and Leadership and Corporate Accountability in the first-year required curriculum. He is co-chair of the school’s Executive Education course in Disruptive Innovation and is co-director of the Harvard Macy Institute’s Leading Innovation in Health Care and Education course. With his colleague Matthew S. Olson, he is co-author of the book Stall Points (Yale University Press, 2008), a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the growth experience of companies in the Fortune 100 across the past half-century. A 2008 Harvard Business Review article on the book entitled “When Growth Stalls” won the McKinsey Award for that year.

He cofounded the Advisory Board Company—a research, consulting, and technology firm serving hospital and university executives—and was chief research officer of the Corporate Executive Board, now part of Gartner Group, the world’s largest executive advisory network. His research interests include the challenges facing leading companies seeking discontinuous renewal through market-creating innovation, as well as the new models for uniting faith, leadership and corporate mission that are emerging in the economy.

An alumnus of HBS and Harvard Divinity School (HDS), van Bever is a member of the HDS Dean’s Council and recently received the 2019 Dean's Leadership Award for his leadership in the school's strategic planning efforts around its 2016 bicentennial. He is also a candidate for ordination in the United Church of Christ. He and his wife, Ellen Nelson van Bever, live in Cambridge with their three teenage children.