Professor Lenox is the Samuel L. Slover Professor of Business at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business where he coordinates and teaches the core MBA strategy course. He also serves as Associate Dean and Executive Director of Darden's Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and as the Founder and Faculty Director for the multiple-university Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. Prior to joining Darden in 2008, Professor Lenox was a professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business where he served as the area coordinator for Fuqua’s Strategy Area and the faculty director and founder of Duke’s university-wide Corporate Sustainability Initiative. At Duke, he coordinated and taught the core MBA strategy course and was runner-up for the Chrysler faculty teaching award on multiple occasions. He received his Ph.D. in Technology Management and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 and the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. Professor Lenox has served as an assistant professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and as a visiting professor at Harvard, Oxford, and IMD.

Professor Lenox’s research has appeared in over twenty-five refereed academic publications and has been cited in a number of media outlets including the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Economist.  In 2009, he was recognized as a Faculty Pioneer by the Aspen Institute and won the Strategic Management Society’s Emerging Scholar Award. In 2011, he was recognized by Poets & Quants as one of the 40 best professors under 40.  Professor Lenox’s primary expertise is in the domain of innovation strategy and policy. He is broadly interested in the role of innovation and entrepreneurship for economic growth and firm competitive success. In particular, he explores the sourcing of extramural knowledge by firms and its impact on firm innovation strategy. Professor Lenox has also had a long-standing interest in the interface between business strategy and public policy as it relates to the natural environment. Recent work explores firm strategies and policies that have the potential to drive “green” innovation and entrepreneurship.  Professor Lenox has published on the topics of open innovation, corporate venture capital, industry dynamics, corporate sustainability, industry self-regulation, certifications and standards, environmental activism and firm strategy, and green design and innovation.


Michael Lenox is among "The World’s 40 Best B-School Profs Under the Age of 40" by Poets & Quants. Fortune and CNN Money published the list as "The World’s Top Business Professors under 40”.