Luiz Mesquita

Luiz F. Mesquita is an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship in the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He joined ASU in 2003, at the School of Global Management and Leadership on the West campus, teaching working adults, and moved to W. P. Carey in 2009. From 2021 to 2024 he served as Associate Dean of Graduate Programs, overseeing the school’s graduate portfolio, its programs, and its faculty, and during that period he also directed the school’s flagship Full-Time MBA program. He had earlier led the school’s Entrepreneurship program (2015–2018).

As Associate Dean he led the design and streamlining of the school’s graduate portfolio. He set the bar each new program had to clear, drawing on a deep working knowledge of how the Graduate College’s rules shape what a degree can and cannot be, and he brought market-intelligence data into the room so that curricula answered real demand. Under his leadership the school launched four new high-enrollment master’s degrees, including the first AI-in-business degree in the United States, and consolidated or retired low-enrollment ones, redeploying faculty toward the programs students most wanted. He is the architect of the “carousel,” a rolling-admissions curriculum design that let programs enroll students year-round and fill their cohorts closer to capacity.

His research asks how firms compete and cooperate to build advantage, and how organizations hold together when the shocks come. It runs across strategic alliances and buyer-supplier relationships, the geography of competition, and how firms fare in turbulent and recessionary markets. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Review, the Academy of Management Journal, the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, the Journal of International Business Studies, and Harvard Business Review, among others. He has served on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Learning & Education, the Journal of Management, and the Journal of Management Studies.

Alongside his academic work, he maintains an independent strategy advisory practice, helping company boards and leadership teams think through the scope and reach of their business and corporate strategies. It began with a multi-year engagement advising an outpatient healthcare group through a period of expansion, and he continues to advise firms selectively. Earlier in his career he worked in industry with John Deere & Company and as a consultant with Booz Allen & Hamilton and the Inter-American Development Bank, and he has built international graduate pipelines across Asia and Latin America. Born and trained in Brazil, he came to strategy by way of agronomic engineering at the University of São Paulo and a master’s in applied economics, and earned his doctorate in strategic management at Purdue University.