Rate My Professor Matthew Higgins

Matthew Higgins serves as the Earl P. and Ethel B. Koerner Chair of Strategy & Entrepreneurship and Professor of Management in the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, where he also directs the Levy-Rosenblum Institute. In this role, he oversees initiatives to enhance faculty research productivity, develop post-doctoral fellowships, and organize conferences, such as one for a special issue of the Journal of Business Venturing on entrepreneurial interventions. Previously, from 2019 to 2025, he held the Emma Eccles Jones Chair and was Professor of Entrepreneurship & Strategy in the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, serving as Director of the Sorenson Center for Discovery & Innovation Studies and Chair of the Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy from 2020 to 2023. During his tenure there, he led curriculum revisions emphasizing quantitative skills and experiential learning, and established a post-doctoral fellowship program. Earlier, he spent 14 years at the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology, advancing from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor of Strategy & Innovation. Higgins earned his PhD in economics from Emory University, a master’s degree in economics from the University of Akron, and bachelor’s degrees in economics and political science from the University of Akron. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.

Higgins specializes in Business & Economics, with research centering on firm responses to productivity changes and challenges, including the interplay between internal R&D and external technology markets via acquisitions, alliances, licensing, and corporate venture capital. He examines how firms optimize R&D portfolios and the effects of regulation on innovation, primarily within the pharmaceutical industry. His work has appeared in leading journals such as Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and The RAND Journal of Economics. Key publications include 'Research and Market Structure: Evidence from an Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogenic Outbreak' (Research Policy, 2023), 'Generic Competition and the Incentives for Early-Stage Pharmaceutical Innovation' (Research Policy, 2022), 'Unpacking the Effects of Adverse Regulatory Events: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Relabeling' (Research Policy, 2021), and 'Corporate Venture Capital as a Real Option in the Market for Technology' (Strategic Management Journal, 2018). His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Kauffman Foundation, Georgia Research Alliance, Rich Foundation, Pfizer Inc., and IQVIA Inc. Higgins has earned numerous awards for teaching undergraduates, MBAs, and executives, consults for governments and global pharmaceutical companies, and previously served on the NSF SBIR/STTR Advisory Subcommittee.