Ellie Okada is an international scholar with extensive academic experience in researching and teaching management and governance. The focus is on integrating insights from humanistic disciplines into Strategic Management, International Business, and
Entrepreneurship. Motivation is to enable more people to participate in societal activities who might otherwise feel socially insignificant.
My teaching experiences include serving as an Adjunct Professor of Strategy at the Keck Graduate Institute, Claremont, CA (via Zoom), and as a tenured full professor at Yokohama National University (Japan). My experience includes being a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Columbia Business School. To identify organizational issues that can make therapeutics for severe illnesses more patient-centered, I founded the Boston Cancer Policy Institute, which studies management, governance, and social science aspects of translational sciences. Post-university service activities include serving as an expert to the OECD (headquartered in Paris) at the 2011 kick-off meeting of the project “New Sources of Growth: Intangible Assets” (held in Washington, D.C.). Highlights of my credentials include identifying mechanisms by which organizational identities influence humanistic management decisions, while impacting external individuals’ identities and creating a positive reinforcing cycle in impoverished urban areas (presented at the SASE 2025 annual conference, Montréal).