Margaret B.W. Graham

Dr. Margaret B.W. Graham has been a professor at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University since 2000. She was a founding director of the Winthrop Group Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition to several multi-year projects focusing on research-based firms in the specialty materials, automotive, and pharmaceutical industries, she spent four years as an executive in R&D management at Xerox PARC, Xerox's advanced research center in Palo Alto, CA. Dr. Graham earned a PhD and an MBA (in that order) at Harvard University) and has been a member of the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and the Boston University School of Management. While at B.U. as Professor, Operations Management and Management of Technology, she served as Associate Dean and Dean of the Faculty. Dr. Graham is a leading scholar of the history of industrial research. Her books include The Business of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc, and R&D for Industry: A Century of Technical Research at Alcoa, coauthored by Bettye Pruitt, both published by Cambridge University Press. Her latest book on innovation, Corning and the Craft of Innovation, coauthored by Alec Shuldiner, was published by Oxford University Press. Her articles include writings on Schumpterian innovation, the history of aluminum in the third industrial revolution, and the history of the information age. A chapter entitled "The Threshold of the Information Age: Radio, Television and Motion Pictures Mobilize the Nation," appears in Alfred Chandler and James Cortada (eds.), A Nation Transformed by Information, published by Oxford University Press. Most recently she has been working on a history of entrepreneurship in the twentieth century United States. Her chapter on twentieth century entrepreneurship in the U.S. appeared in The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, edited by David S. Landes and Joel Mokyr, Oxford University Press. She is the sitting president of the Business History Conference meeting in Portland, Oregon this spring.