Matt Marx

Biography

Matt Marx is the Bruce F. Failing Sr. Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and a professor of management and organizations in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, part of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. He serves as department editor for entrepreneurship and innovation at Management Science and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he chairs the Innovation Information Initiative. Previously, he was an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

Marx’s research focuses on reducing barriers to the commercialization of science and technology, informed by his decade of experience as an executive and engineer at two speech recognition startups that achieved a combined $1.4 billion in equity value. His work has appeared in journals across multiple disciplines, including Management Science, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Administrative Science Quarterly, the Review of Financial Studies, Organization Science, the American Sociological Review and Science. His research on employee noncompete agreements and job mobility contributed to policy reforms in Hawaii and Massachusetts, and his work has been covered by outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, The Economist, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Wired, Fortune, Forbes and Bloomberg.

As head of the Innovation Information Initiative steering committee, Marx curates large scale, open datasets for the scientific commons. Available at RelianceOnScience.org, his global patent to science citation data has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. His work has been supported by more than $2.5 million in grants and awards from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and other organizations.

Marx holds six patents and earned a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems from Stanford University, a master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab and both MBA and doctoral degrees from Harvard University.

Education

DBA Harvard University, 2009
MBA Harvard University, 2005
MS Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995
BS Stanford University, 1993

Research

• Koffi, Marlene; Marx, Matthew. "Cassatts in the Attic: Is There a Gender Gap in the Commercialization of Science?"American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. 18.2 (2026): 266–298
• Scharfmann, E.; Marx, Matthew; Fleming, L. "Pasteur’s Quadrant Researchers bring novelty, impact to publishing and patenting"Science. 390.6776 (2025): 891-893
• Marx, Matthew; Wang, Qian; Yimfor, Emmanuel. "Minimum Viable Signal: Venture Funding, Social Movements, and Race"Management Science. 72.4 (2026): 3332-3350
• Balsmeier, Benjamin; Fleming, Lee; Marx, Matthew; Shin, Seungryul. "Startups, Unicorns, and the Local Influx of Inventors"Review of Economics and Statistics. (forthcoming).
• Botelho, Tristan; Marx, Matthew. "Beyond Blame: Evaluative Stigma, Attribution, and Employee Careers after Employer Failure"Administrative Science Quarterly. 71.1 (2026): 166-214
• Hsu, David; Marx, Matthew. "Revisiting the Entrepreneurial Commercialization of Academic Science: Evidence from “Twin” Discoveries"Management Science. 68.2 (2022): 1330-1352
• Marx, Matthew. "Employee Non-compete Agreements, Gender, and Entrepreneurship"Organization Science. 33.5 (2022): 1756-1772
• Marx, Matthew; Fuegi, Aaron. "Reliance on science by inventors: Hybrid extraction of in-text patent-to-article citations"Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. 31.2 (2022): 369-392
• Marx, Matthew; Fuegi, Aaron. "Reliance on science: Worldwide front‐page patent citations to scientific articles"Strategic Management Journal. 41.9 (2020): 1572-1594

Awards

• Management Faculty Research Excellence (2025) Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management
• Undergraduate Teaching Excellence (2024) Charles H Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management