CV
The short and medium bios below are free to use for press, events, or introductions.
Short bio
Anoop R. Menon is co-founder and CEO of Eisengard AI, where he led the company's AI-era pivot and the hands-on build of the AI systems deployed to production. Previously a professor of strategy at the Wharton School, with a PhD from Harvard Business School, his research on cognition in strategy won the inaugural Strategy Science Best Paper Award (2022). His work follows a single through-line in cognition and consciousness, studied across strategy, AI, and the sciences of mind.
Medium bio
Anoop R. Menon's work spans strategy, production AI systems, cognitive research, and consciousness research, and it sits within a longer intellectual through-line in the cognition–consciousness dyad, studied across strategy, AI, the sciences of mind, philosophy, and contemplative practice.
He is co-founder and CEO of Eisengard AI, where he led the strategic pivot from a data-analytics-era positioning to an AI-first architecture, and led the design and hands-on build of the AI systems deployed to production.
Before Eisengard, he was Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Wharton School (2013–2020), after a PhD in Strategy from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics & Psychology from Amherst College. His research on cognition and strategy won the inaugural Strategy Science Best Paper Award (2022) and the Sumantra Ghoshal Research and Practice Award (Academy of Management, STR Division, 2022). His recent research publications are in a multi-paper program on the institutional and cognitive foundations of AI adoption in education.
His current research draws these threads into a formal model of awareness. It traces how the set of things a mind, a firm, or a market even considers forms, why it hardens, and what it takes to shift. He is building the model from first principles and applying it from the single mind outward to firms, markets, and the institutions they harden into.
He also served on the board of The Monroe Institute (2024–2026), a research institute working on consciousness.
Experience
- Co-founder & CEO Led the company's pivot to an AI-first product and the hands-on design and build of the AI systems deployed to production. Selected systems and projects on the Building page.
- Assistant Professor of Strategy
Board & Advisory
- Director, Board of Directors
- Pro bono strategic consulting
- Pro bono strategic consulting
Education
- PhD in Strategy, Harvard Business School (2013) Dissertation: "Essays on Cognition in Strategy"Committee: Giovanni Gavetti (co-chair), Dennis Yao (co-chair), Juan Alcácer, Andrei Shleifer
- BA in Economics & Psychology, Amherst College (2007) Phi Beta Kappa (junior year, top 1% of class)Addison Brown Scholarship (highest academic standing in the graduating class)James R. Nelson Memorial Award for Economics
Current Research
- The Awareness Engine
- Education and AI
Publications
Peer-reviewed journal articles appear in full. Conference proceedings and other work are selected; the complete record is on Google Scholar.
Peer-reviewed journal articles
- Enseignants, formateurs en entreprise et directeurs d’école professionnelle soumis à des contraintes — Stress et burnout: comment l’IA pourrait aider
- Rationalizing Outcomes: Interdependent Learning in Competitive Markets
- Corporate Strategy and Network Change
- Using Machine Learning to Revisit the Diversification–Performance Relationship
- Breakthrough Recognition: Bias against Novelty and Competition for Attention
- Bringing Cognition into Strategic Interactions: Strategic Mental Models and Open Questions
- Acquisitions, Node Collapse, and Network Revolution
- Elevating Repositioning Costs: Strategy Dynamics and Competitive Interactions
- Evolution Cum Agency: Toward a Model of Strategic Foresight
- Consequences of Misspecified Mental Models: Contrasting Effects and the Role of Cognitive Fit
- Managerial Overoptimism in Strategy Formulation: An Associative Explanation
Under review
- Odyssée professionnelle : Les enseignant·e·s face à l’inclusion scolaire
- The Architecture of the Institutional Gap in Swiss Inclusive Education: What the System Does Not Count
- AI in One Hand, Inclusive Education in the Other: Why Mainstream Teachers Who Use AI Do Not Use It for Inclusive Education
Conference proceedings
- The Power of Open-Minded Simplicity in Mental Models
- What You Say Your Strategy Is and Why It Matters: NLP of Unstructured Text
- On Network Change
- The Impact of Prior Performance on Strategic Choice: An Emotion-Based Argument
Book chapter & cases
- Product Market Strategy
- Charlie Merrill and the Financial Supermarket Strategy
Awards & Honors
- Strategy Science Best Paper Award
- Sumantra Ghoshal Research and Practice Award
- SMS Best Conference Paper Prize (Honorable Mention)
- Wharton Teaching Excellence Award
- Best Reviewer Award
- Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Teaching Award (Finalist)
- Wyss Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research
Fellowships
Selected.
- Mack Institute Research Fellowship
- Doctoral Fellowship
Teaching
- The Wharton School · 2014–2020
- University of Pennsylvania (Wharton / Penn Engineering) · Spring 2016
- Harvard Business School · 2012
Invited Talks & Seminars
Selected.
- Guest lectures, Entrepreneurial Strategy
- Guest lecture, Technological Entrepreneurship
- Department seminars
Patents
Named inventor on a published U.S. patent application, Systems and Methods for an Intelligent Analytic Platform (U.S. Pub. No. 20210263621), assigned to Eisengard AI. Filed as an application; not prosecuted to grant.
In the News
Selected.
- The Science of Breakthroughs: What Holds Some Ideas Back?
- Why Big Business Is Making a Giant Leap into Space
- Is Apple Losing Its Innovation Edge?
- How Businesses Can Get Inside the Minds of Their Competitors
- Network Synergy: A New Way to Value M&A
- The Final Frontier: How Entrepreneurs Cracked the Aerospace Industry
Methods
Causal inference and econometrics (panel data, difference-in-differences, robust and bootstrap inference, mediation); agent-based simulation and game-theoretic modeling; cognitively grounded formal modeling; NLP and large-scale text analysis; representation and contrastive learning; neural audio and speech models; network analysis and knowledge-graph reasoning; retrieval systems (RAG, vector search); and multi-agent AI engineering.
Service & Affiliations
- Editorial & reviewing
- Affiliations