Joel Kurtzman, Senior Fellow; Executive Director, Center for Accelerating Energy Solutions, The Milken InstituteJoel Kurtzman is a senior fellow, executive director of the Center for Accelerating Energy Solutions and publisher of The Milken Institute Review. He is also a senior advisor to Knowledge Universe. Previously, he was global lead partner for Thought Leadership and Innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he was responsible for developing new, marketable ideas in strategy, technology, the capital markets and business policy. He was also responsible for the firm's Menlo Park Technology Research Centre, its technology forecasting teams and its innovative R&D.
Kurtzman developed the Opacity Index with the Milken Institute. He is the former editor of the Harvard Business Review and a former member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School Publishing. He was also business editor and columnist at The New York Times. He was a columnist for Fortune, Chief Executive and the European Business Forum, and was an on-air book reviewer at CNN.
Kurtzman began his career as an international economist at the United Nations, where he was deputy director of the U.N.'s Project on the Future. He was responsible for 19 teams of researchers in 23 countries who were engaged in a massive, global, economic and social forecasting and policy-making program. His economic modeling teams were the first to warn of the impending Latin America debt crisis. Kurtzman's research teams produced a library of 17 volumes of books on the global economy. While at the U.N., he participated in the negotiations between India and the Union Carbide Corporation over the Bhopal disaster. For these efforts, he was awarded India's Indira Gandhi Prize.
Kurtzman is the author of 20 books and hundreds of articles. He is a member of the editorial board of MIT's Sloan Management Review and an advisor to Wharton's SEI Center. He has lectured around the world, hosted television and radio programs globally and served as chairman of numerous conferences. Kurtzman earned his AB at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Recipient of the Eisner Memorial Award, the highest award given by the university to a student. He earned his master's at the University of Houston in Studies of the Future (economic forecasting) and was the recipient of a Moody Foundation Fellowship. He has served on public and private company boards and on the boards of nonprofit organizations.
