BUILD BORROW - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Paul Desmarais Chaired Professor of Partnership

Laurence Capron is the Paul Desmarais Chaired Professor of Partnership and Active Ownership at INSEAD in France and Director of INSEAD's Executive Education Program on M&As and Corporate Strategy. Her teaching and research activities focus on M&A, alliances, corporate development, and portfolio strategy. She teaches in the MBA, executive MBA, executive education, and PhD programs at INSEAD. She is the author of numerous articles, including "Finding the Right Path" in Harvard Business Review (with Will Mitchell). Laurence has received numerous professional honors and awards, including the INSEAD Best Teaching Award for her MBA elective, M&A and Corporate Strategy, which she has taught at INSEAD and Wharton. She is also the recipient of prestigious research awards, including the Academy of Management's Best Paper Award, McKinsey/Strategic Management Society Award, and HEC Paris Foundation Best Doctoral Dissertation Award. She won the 2011 "Prix Académique Syntec du Conseil en Management" in France for the best research paper in the strategy and finance category. Her current research focuses on how companies obtain new resources and use M&A, alliances, and licensing to supplement their organic growth. Laurence joined INSEAD in 1997 after earning her PhD in strategy from HEC Paris. She was Visiting Professor of Strategy at MIT Sloan (2011-2012), Wharton (2005-2006), and Kellogg (2004-2005). From 2007 to 2010, she directed the INSEAD-Wharton Alliance. She sits on the editorial board of Strategic Management Journal.

Will Mitchell is the J. Rex Fuqua Professor of International Management at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Will also holds the Anthony S. Fell Chair in New Technologies and Commercialization at the University of Toronto, where he currently serves as a Visiting Professor of Strategic Management in the Rotman School of Management. Will earned a PhD degree at the School of Business Administration of the University of California at Berkeley and a BBA degree at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Before joining Duke University, he was a faculty member at the University of Michigan. Will teaches in the MBA, PhD, and executive education programs at Duke and the University of Toronto, as well as in programs in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. He teaches courses in business dynamics, emerging-market strategy, corporate strategy, entrepreneurship, health sector management, and pharmaceutical strategy. Will studies business dynamics in developed and emerging markets, investigating how businesses change as their competitive environments change and, in turn, how these business changes contribute to ongoing corporate and social success or failure. The research emphasizes technical and organizational change, including information technology, product technology, organizational processes and structures, and institutional environments. He has published extensively in the strategy and medical services literatures. His current research focuses on how firms select and then manage different modes of change, such as mergers and acquisitions, alliances, discrete resource exchange, and internal development. He is studying the causes and effects of such changes for firms operating in several industrial sectors in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, with particular focus on life-sciences firms and numerous firms and groups that operate in emerging markets. Will is active in professional and corporate organizations. He is a coeditor of Strategic Management Journal; an editorial board member on several strategy-related journals in North America, Asia, and Europe; and a board member of Neuland Laboratories, Ltd. (Hyderabad).