Josh Lerner

Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor at Harvard Business School and Co-Director of the HBS Private Capital Project. Much of his research focuses on venture capital and private equity organizations and innovation policy. He has been recently recognized as among the forty most influential economists worldwide by ScholarGPS and research.com.

He has co-directed the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program since 2010 and serves as co-editor of their publication, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy. He founded and runs the Private Capital Research Institute, a nonprofit devoted to encouraging access to data and research and has been a frequent leader of and participant in the World Economic Forum projects and events.

In the 1993-1994 academic year, he introduced an elective course for second-year MBAs. Over the past three decades, “Venture Capital and Private Equity” has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at Harvard Business School and whose teaching materials are used in business schools around the world. He has taught numerous executive and doctoral courses on venture capital, private equity, and entrepreneurship and has introduced a series of entrepreneurship classes at Harvard College.

He graduated from Yale College with a special divisional major. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy. He then earned a Ph.D. from Harvard's Economics Department.