Robert and Barbara Frick Professor of Business | Olin Business School, Washington University
Anne Marie Knott, Ph.D. is The Robert and Barbara Frick Professor in Business at the Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis, where she has been on faculty since 2005. Prior to her appointment at Olin, she was Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School. Professor Knott holds a Ph.D. in management from the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, an MBA (also from UCLA) and a B.S. in Math from the University of Utah. Between her B.S. and Ph.D., Professor Knott worked at Hughes Aircraft Company developing missile guidance systems (from entry level technical staff to program manager). This background both motivates and informs her research. Her primary research area is innovation—both large scale R&D and entrepreneurship, which she views as complementary in contributing to economic growth. She has published numerous articles in Management Science, Organization Science, the Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of Small Business Economics, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations, and Research and Technology Management, in addition to authoring the entrepreneurship text, “Venture Design”.
Most recently, Professor Knott developed a measure of a company’s R&D productivity, called RQ (short for research quotient) that allows firms to value their R&D, determine its optimal level, and calculate how much a given increase in R&D will increase revenues, profits and market value. Her book, How Innovation Really Works, documents the results from two NSF studies that link companies RQ scores to confidential NSF data on their R&D practices.
Because her research has important practical implications for companies and investors, Professor Knott has been a keynote speaker at the National Academies, the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), and the American Chemical Society (ACS) CTO summit, and the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute annual meeting. She is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and has on online column at Forbes, both of which she uses to help companies increase their RQ, and investors understand the implications of doing so.