Kim B. Clark was born on March 20, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah. He and his family lived in Salt Lake City until 1960, when his father's new job required them to move to Spokane, Washington. Clark matriculated at Harvard University in 1967 as a pre-med major and left after his freshman year to serve as a missionary for the LDS Church in Germany. Following his mission, Clark enrolled for a time at Brigham Young University. In 1971, he resumed his studies at Harvard, where he received B.A. (1974), MA (1977), and Ph.D. (1978) degrees in economics.[4][5]
Clark joined the Harvard faculty in 1978 and served as Dean of HBS from 1995 to 2005.[6]
As a professor at HBS, Clark's research focused on modularity in design and the integration of technology and competition in industry evolution, particularly within the computer industry. He has published several articles in the Harvard Business Review and peer-reviewed academic journals. A few of his papers were co-authored with former HBS associate dean and former BYU-Hawaii president Steven C. Wheelwright.[4]
With a variety of co-authors, Clark published an important series of studies on technological innovation. The organizational linkages, or integration, required to accomplish an innovation is a thread that runs through these studies. These insights culminated in his book with Carliss Baldwin, “Design Rules: The Power of Modularity,” which explores the rules for integrating components that shaped innovation in the computer industry as well as many others. His various articles and books have been cited more than 20,000 times according to Google Scholar.[7]
Newcomen-Harvard Award for Best Paper Published in the Business History Review (1994)[4]
Works
Abernathy, William J.; Clark, Kim B. (February 1985). "Innovation: Mapping the winds of creative destruction". Research Policy. 14 (1): 3–22. doi:10.1016/0048-7333(85)90021-6.
The individuals listed below are current General Authority Seventies. Each is a member of either the First or Second Quorums of the Seventy. Those in italics are the current members of the Presidency of the Seventy.