Mollick built a company before he studied them. He co-founded eMeta Corporation, a technology startup, where he served as vice president of business development [1], before returning to academia. Today he is an Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School, the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar, a Rowan Fellow [2], and co-director of Wharton’s Generative AI Labs [2]: titles that predate, and outlast, the recent Co-Intelligence fame.
His training sits at the center of the field even where the name recognition is quieter. A Harvard undergraduate, he took both his MBA and his PhD at MIT’s Sloan School of Management [2] (a school the wider public knows for engineering, but which U.S. News ranks among the country’s top graduate business programs [3]), advised by Ezra Zuckerman, an economic sociologist [1].
His research record predates the AI turn that made him famous by a decade. He published an early empirical study of crowdfunding dynamics in the Journal of Business Venturing (2014) [4], and, with Ramana Nanda, a Management Science study finding that crowds fund some arts projects that expert judges would not (2016) [5]. The pattern in both: run the data, let it overrule the folklore.
Wharton’s endowed Roberts chair is the clearest institutional bet on him, but the record around it isn’t thin. He holds the Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowship in Entrepreneurship Research (2013) [2] and the AOM-TIM Emerging Scholar Award (2015) [2], both early-career research honors; the ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution (2024) and the Greif Research Impact Award (2020) [2] recognize the scholarship more broadly. Poets & Quants named him MBA Professor of the Year in 2024 [2], and TIME placed him on its 100 Most Influential People in AI the same year [6]: popular AI recognition landing on top of an academic record already built, not standing in for one.
His first book was Changing the Game: How Videogames are Transforming the Business World (2008, with David Edery) [1]. The Unicorn’s Shadow [7] argued the empirical case against inherited myths about which founders succeed and how. Co-Intelligence then turned that same empirical instrument on generative AI, becoming a New York Times bestseller and a best book of the year for both The Economist and the Financial Times [2]; a sequel, Co-Existence, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House [8].
Management isn’t adjacent for Mollick: it’s the whole career, a company he ran [1], a PhD earned studying management at a top-ranked program [2][3], and a scholarly record in entrepreneurship built years before AI made him famous [4][5]. His word carries the most weight on the empirical study of entrepreneurship and crowdfunding, and now on how individuals and organizations should actually use generative AI day to day. The throughline is the same both times: run the experiment, report what the data shows, and let it overrule intuition.