Manuel Sosa

Manuel E. Sosa is a Professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). He directs the Heinrich and Esther Baumann-Steiner Fund for Creativity and Business, the creativity-business learning platform, and the INSEAD-ArtCenter collaboration. He is also a Visiting Professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management (January-August 2025).

Sosa’s research efforts are applied to improving the management of innovation. His recent research efforts focus on studying the role of design in transforming incumbent organizations into more innovative ones. He also investigates how on-line reviews relate to product and service performance. His past research studied coordination and innovation networks in complex organizations. His work has been published in various top-rated academic journals in operations management, organization science, and engineering design.

Sosa’s teaching achievements include the development of a 20-year-long program with Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, California) to integrate creative and business thinking for successful innovating. He also led the development of the Creative Garage space for teaching creative thinking at INSEAD’s Asia Campus. He has published over 20 teaching cases in topics related to innovation management. At INSEAD, he has received the Dean’s commendation for excellence in MBA teaching multiple times and won the best teaching award for his MBA elective course on creative thinking in 2021.

Manuel E. Sosa received his BS degree in mechanical engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar (Caracas, Venezuela) and his SM and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work experience includes systems engineering in the petrochemical industry as well as development and deployment of computer-aided engineering software applications for the automobile and aerospace industries.