Chicago Booth Leads Way in Terms of Influential Thinkers

If you were to stop a Harvard Business School student on the way to class and ask them which business school has the most influential business thinkers in the world, they’d probably tell you their own.

But they would be wrong, at least according to a report by Thomson Reuters.

The report, published earlier this year, lists 95 professors whose academic papers garnered the top 1% of citations in their fields, a widely accepted measure of their influence. And it’s true, Harvard University tops the list with a dozen professors in that elite category.

But of those 12 only one is affiliated with Harvard Business School. Michael Tushman studies the relations between technological change, senior executive teams, and organizational evolution. The rest are affiliated with other schools at the university, including its powerhouse department of economics.

Chicago Booth number 2 on list, but number 1 for business schools

No. 2 on the list is the University of Chicago, with eight professors, including seven who are affiliated with the Booth School of Business (the eighth is a Nobel Prize-winning economist), making it far and away the business school with the most influential faculty.

Northwestern University and Texas A&M are tied for third with four professors each. All four Northwestern professors are affiliated with the Kellogg School of Management; all four Texas A&M professors are at the Mays Business School.

Other top schools fare poorly in Thomson Reuters analysis

Harvard Business School isn’t the only well-known school that fared poorly in Thomson Reuters analysis. London Business School has one professor on the list, Julian Birkinshaw. Stanford Graduate School of Business has none.

Harvard Business School’s near-absence from the list puts it on par with dozens of other programs that aren’t normally considered Harvard’s peers, including the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and the Georgia Institute of Technology, which each have one business school professor on the list.

Contacted about Harvard Business School’s showing in report, HBS spokesman Jim Aisner declined to comment.

The analysis by Thomson Reuters was dominated by US schools. Of the 95 professors on the list, 72 hailed from US institutions, followed by the United Kingdom (5), Canada (4), and Germany (3), with Italy, France and the Netherlands (2) in a three-way tie for fifth.