Christian Terwiesch

About

Christian Terwiesch is the Andrew M. Heller Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as a Professor in and the chair of the Operations, Information, and Decisions department. He also holds a faculty appointment at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and is co-director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. His research focuses on healthcare operations, innovation management, lean operations, and new service delivery models. Terwiesch has published extensively in leading academic journals, including Management Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, and is recognized as an award-winning teacher with extensive experience in MBA teaching and executive education. He is the co-author of the widely used Operations Management textbook, 'Matching Supply with Demand,' and has launched the first MOOC in business on Coursera, which has enrolled over half a million students. His management books, including 'Innovation Tournaments' and 'Connected Strategies,' explore innovation processes and digital transformation, with the latter being featured as the cover story of Harvard Business Review and shortlisted for the Thinkers 50 award. His work often involves consulting for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, helping them enhance innovation and restructure their innovation portfolios.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Nursing
• Marketing
• Sociology
• Business
• Medicine
• Medical emergency
• Engineering
• Operations management
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Ideas are Dimes a Dozen: Large Language Models for Idea Generation in Innovation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 165 citations

  PublisherDOI

• Customizing Primary Care Delivery Using E‐Visits

  Production and Operations Management · 2021 · 40 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Technologies that enable “e‐visits”—remote interactions between patients and physicians—are touted as a way to improve and expand primary care. We study a setting in which a physician can divert some of the patient demand away from the office visits and into the e‐visits, which utilize less of the physician's service capacity while maintaining an appropriate quality of care. We explicitly model a distinguishing feature of primary care settings: patient office revisit intervals are determined joi…

  PublisherDOI

• Prompting Diverse Ideas: Increasing AI Idea Variance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 39 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Impact of Facility Layout on Service Worker Behavior: An Empirical Study of Nurses in the Emergency Department

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2021 · 30 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Problem definition: We study the impact of service facility layout on how service workers organize their tasks. We focus on the hospital emergency department (ED) as a service setting in which nurses (servers) have discretion over how they interact with patients (customers) in a facility that introduces significant heterogeneity in necessary walking distance. Academic/practical relevance: Prior studies on facility layout in operations have largely focused on the direct effect of transit times on…

  DOI

• ChatGPT decreases idea diversity in brainstorming

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-05-14 · 20 citations

  letterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kevin G. Volpp

  University of Pennsylvania

  44 shared

• Shivan J. Mehta

  University of Pennsylvania

  27 shared

• Karl T. Ulrich

  26 shared

• David A. Asch

  25 shared

• Steven C. Marcus

  17 shared

• Jesse M. Pines

  CARE USA

  15 shared

• Christoph H. Loch

  Cambridge School

  15 shared

• Diwas Singh KC

  Emory University

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• Thinkers 50 award

Similar researchers at University of Pennsylvania

• Lyle Ungarh-87
• Angela Duckworthh-84
• Lorin M. Hitth-49