Jay Barney

Jay Barney, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Utah, is among the world’s top scholars in strategic management.

“His early research was foundational in establishing what many would characterize as the most important theory and research stream to emerge within the field of strategy over the past 30 years—the resource-based view,” wrote one scholar in a letter of nomination for the Rosenblatt Prize. “But he has also been instrumental in shaping several other research streams, including foundational work in entrepreneurship and more recently in stakeholder theory.”

The resource-based view, or RBV, in strategy has revolutionized strategic management, serving as the dominant perspective for the past 25 years. Previously, the dominant view was that firms should operate in the most attractive industries.

“Professor Barney argued that firm leaders should instead emphasize looking inside the firm for resources that could create more value than other firms not possessing such resources,” a nominator wrote. “Subsequent empirical research offered overwhelming support for the general notions of the RBV and Professor Barney's specification of the factors that are likely to constitute durable advantages remains centrally influential to this day.”

His more recent research has focused on entrepreneurship and on the relationship between stakeholder theory and strategic management. His work on entrepreneurship has already won several awards.

Professor Barney is the U’s mostly widely cited academic—with more than 225,000 Google citations.  He has been selected as a Fellow of both the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society, served as editor in chief of the field’s flagship theory journal--the Academy of Management Review, and holds honorary doctorate degrees at universities in Sweden, Denmark and Spain.  He has also received all the most prestigious awards in his field.

Professor Barney has mentored several dozen Ph.D. students, and has published eight books, including co-authoring a leading graduate-level test in strategic management and a recent book showing how leaders can change their organizational cultures by building stories.

Professor Barney earned his doctorate at Yale in 1982 and served on the faculties at UCLA, Texas A&M, and The Ohio State University before coming to the U’s David Eccles School of Business in 2012--where he was the founding chair of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy.  This department has since become one of the world’s top academic departments in this area of business.