| Website | fernstrategy.com |
| Blog | fernstrategy.com |
| @fernstrategy | |
| Birthplace | Los Angeles |
| Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD | 2005 |
| Strategic Management | |
| University of Oregon, Bachelor of Science | 1998 |
| Entrepreneurship |
Michael J. Fern, PhD is the founder of FernStrategy, Inc., a strategy consulting firm that enables computing and media companies to achieve and sustain leadership in dynamic markets.
Michael has advised and taught executives, managers, and professionals from a range of technology companies, including Agilent, Apple, Applied Materials, Cisco, eBay, Fairchild Semiconductor, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Juniper Networks, Lockheed Martin, McAfee, NVIDIA, Oracle, Qualcomm, Salesforce.com, Sandisk, SAP, Seagate, Sprint, Sybase, Symantec, TSMC, VMWare, Yahoo, and Xilinx.
His work on strategy, innovation, and technology has been published in several management journals, and he has presented his work at a variety of U.S. and international conferences. He has received Fellowships from Booz Allen Hamilton, the Strategic Management Society, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for entrepreneurship. His technology work has been funded through substantial government and university grants.
He has hands-on technical experience in software project management, with the commercialization of a cloud-based learning management system, known as Utilium (utilium.com). He is an active contributor to Y Combinator’s Hacker News, a social news website for software programmers and entrepreneurs. His technical experience extends back to the 1980s, when he developed and managed a bulletin board system (BBS) using the WWIV platform.
He has experience as an executive and graduate-level teacher, recently serving as a professor of strategy in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. As a professor, he taught the capstone course, “Strategy in High-Technology Firms,†in the evening MBA program. While at the University, he received a Presidential Grant for research on the topic of customer value creation in high-technology firms.
He received a PhD in strategic management from the Kenan-Flagler Business School (KFBS) of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned a Bachelor of Science, summa cum laude, from the University of Oregon.
