Costas Markides

Repeatedly ranked among the world’s top 50 business thinkers by the Thinkers50, Professor Costas Markides is recognised as one of the world’s foremost experts on strategy and innovation. An internationally acclaimed teacher and conference speaker, Professor Markides has researched the topics of strategic innovation, business model innovation, diversification and international acquisitions.

His work explores how established companies could pursue radical or disruptive innovation and how they can compete with two business models in the same industry. He also examines how companies can create a culture of continuous innovation and the role that individual managers play in making a company more innovative.

In recent years, Professor Markides has increasingly turned his attention to social issues and studies how management ideas can be used to address social problems  such as drug related crime, poverty and malnutrition.   His forthcoming book Architects of Change explores how individuals could design innovative solutions to social problems in ways that make them easily scalable. He also examines how a decentralised change process could be used to scale up social innovations and diffuse them globally.

Professor Markides' book All the Right Moves: A Guide to Crafting Breakthrough Strategy was shortlisted for the Igor Ansoff Strategic Management Award in 2000. Similarly, his book Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets (with the late Paul Geroski), was on the shortlist for the Financial Times-Goldman Sachs Management Book of the Year in 2005. In Game-Changing Strategies (2008), Professor Markides explores how established firms can use business model innovation to break the rules in their markets and how to respond when a disruptive business model invades their markets. 

A native of Cyprus, Professor Markides received his BA (Distinction) and MA in Economics from Boston University, and his MBA and DBA from Harvard Business School. He is now Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and holds the Robert P Bauman Chair of Strategic Leadership at London Business School.