Mary Tripsas

Mary Tripsas is a Professor of Technology Management in the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UC Santa Barbara, Tripsas served on the faculties of the Wharton School for four years, the Harvard Business School for thirteen years, and Boston College for eight years. At BC she was founding director of the Edmund H. Shea Jr. Center for Entrepreneurship and led the creation of a new undergraduate concentration in Entrepreneurship.

She earned her Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management, her MBA from the Harvard Business School, her B.S. in Computer Science and Accountancy from the University of Illinois at Urbana, and was certified as a CPA in the State of Illinois.

Tripsas is a leading management scholar whose research and teaching focus on technological innovation and entrepreneurship. She studies how organizations can best adapt to new technologies that disrupt industries and ecosystems, with an emphasis on how the interplay of organizational capabilities, organizational identity, and managerial mental models shape strategic responses to technological shifts. She has studied the evolution of technology and competition in a diverse range of both established and nascent industries including photography/digital imaging, typesetters, air taxis, music synthesizers and publishing.

Her influential work on the transformation of industries by new technology has been published in top tier journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Research Policy, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and Strategic Management Journal. She has won multiple major awards including the Strategic Management Journal Schendel Best Paper Award, the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal Best Paper Award, the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Thought Leader Award, the Emerald Publishing Citation for Excellence Award, the Journal of Product Innovation Management Best Paper Award, and the MIT Sloan Zannetos best PhD thesis prize. In addition to journal articles, Tripsas has published a number of Harvard Business School teaching cases related to her research, with over 150,000 copies of her cases sold to students at academic institutions around the world.

Tripsas has served as a Senior Editor at Organization Science and is currently on the editorial boards of the Strategic Management Journal and the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. She has also served on the Board of Directors of the INFORMS Organization Science Division and the Consortium of Cooperation and Competitiveness and was Division Chair of the Academy of Management’s Technology and Innovation Management division. She is currently on the Executive Committee of the Industry Studies Association.

Before entering academia, Tripsas was a strategy consultant in the Cambridge and Milan offices of the Monitor Group and worked for IBM as both a software engineer and member of the sales force. She also served on the board of directors of Lexar Media (NASDAQ: LEXR) from 2003 to 2006, when the company was acquired by Micron.

Honors and Awards

• SMS SRF Research in Organizations Grant (with S. Brusoni, X. Mundet), 2020-2022
• Undergraduate Teaching Star Award, Boston College Carroll School of Management, 2017, 2019
• Elected to Macro Organization Behavior Society (MOBS), 2015
• Haub Family Fellow, Boston College , 2014- 2016
• Graduate Teaching Award, Boston College Carroll School of Management, 2013
• All-Academy Showcase Symposium co-organizer, Academy of Management, 2013
• HBS MBA Class of 1966 Research Fellow, 2006-2008
• HBS Arthur M. Rock Center for Entrepreneurship Assistant Professor, 2004-2006
• SMS Best Conference Paper Prize, Finalist, 1999
• Business History Conference Best Dissertation Finalist, 1999
• INFORMS Technology Management Division Best Thesis Prize, second place, 1998
• Winner, MIT Sloan Zannetos Ph.D. Thesis Prize, 1997
• Winner, INFORMS College of Organization Science Best Dissertation Proposal, 1994
• Consortium on Competitiveness and Cooperation Dissertation Grant, 1994-1995