Kevin Boudreau

Kevin Boudreau is a Professor at Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business, in the Department of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, with courtesy appointments in the College of Computer Science and the College of Social Sciences & Humanities, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His work sits at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and the economics of knowledge and science, with a particular focus on platforms, digital organization, and how new ideas and technologies are produced and evaluated.

A defining feature of his research is the use of large-scale randomized field experiments — run with partners including NASA, industry platforms, and a strategic scientific grants office — to study questions long thought impossible to test cleanly: how platforms attract and govern complementors, how competition and incentives shape innovation, how scientific collaborations form, how knowledge moves across disciplinary frontiers, and how a scientific funder can run experiments to optimize toward its own goals. As Chief Economist of the NASA Tournament Lab (2011–2015), he helped build the infrastructure for running such experiments at scale. This draws on a career in industry, where he led M&A and large-deal digital-infrastructure teams at QUALCOMM, built a European telecoms consulting and advisory practice at The Economist Intelligence Unit, and advised on strategy at Deloitte. It continues today in hands-on technical work: he assembles engineering teams to build platforms and scale their adoption through the IoT Open Innovation Lab, NUgig, the Cyber-Physical Marketing Challenge, and Digital Scientific Twins, both to prototype with industry partners and to generate the data behind his research. He was also part of the founding faculty team of Northeastern's Wireless Internet Research Center. The same question runs through both halves of this work — how large numbers of people can be organized to produce innovation and knowledge — tested once in commercial platforms and again in the institutions of science. His papers appear in Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Research Policy, the RAND Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Science, and Nature Biotechnology.

He is a Faculty Research Fellow at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, an Associate Editor at Management Science, and a former Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in Entrepreneurship (2022–2023). His research has been supported by more than $1.51 million in funding — from the Kauffman, Sloan, Google, and Microsoft programs, NASA, GE, and Northeastern's RIELS, among others — and his work has earned multiple best-paper honors — two Copeland Awards, and recognition from INFORMS, Management Science, and Harvard Business Review. He earned his PhD from the MIT Sloan School (as an MIT Presidential Fellow), an MA in Economics from the University of Toronto, and a BASc in Engineering (summa cum laude) from the University of Waterloo.