PERSON
Rebecca Henderson
British-American economist (b. 1960), Harvard University Professor, whose 1990 architectural innovation framework and subsequent work on purposeful capitalism have reshaped how scholars understand why expert organizations fail and how institutions can be redesigned for AI.
Rebecca Henderson is one of a handful of Harvard faculty to hold a University Professorship, the institution's highest academic distinction. Her career spans innovation economics, competitive strategy, sustainability, and the institutional redesign of capitalism. Born in England, she earned her PhD from Harvard and joined MIT Sloan before returning to Harvard Business School in 2009. Her 1990 paper with Kim Clark introduced architectural innovation as a distinct category—changes to component relationships that destroy incumbent firms because embedded organizational knowledge filters out the architectural signal. Her subsequent research explored AI as an 'invention of a method of invention,' corporate purpose as competitive architecture, and stakeholder capitalism as institutional redesign rather than moral exhortation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Henderson's intellectual formation combined rigorous economic training with a sustained engagement with organizational and institutional questions that pure economics often sidesteps. Her early work on architectural innovation drew on Herbert Simon's bounded rationality, James March's organizational learning, and Thomas