Peter Boumgarden is the Koch Professor of Practice for Family Enterprise and the Director of the Koch Center for Family Enterprise at Washington University in St. Louis (Olin Business School). At the University level, Peter serves as the Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. His work at the Koch Center centers on issues of strategic ownership across the family enterprise — business, investment, and philanthropy — and does so through research, student engagement, and commercial and community interaction. From 2019 until 2022, Peter led the university’s Center for Experiential Learning, a group that runs for-profit & non-profit student-led strategic consulting engagements around the globe. 

Outside of his work at the university, Dr. Boumgarden consults and facilitates executive education in the private and non-profit sectors on strategy, innovation, organizational design, and executive team development. A subset of past clients includes Mastercard, AB InBev, Edward Jones, General Electric, Charles Schwab, Bunge, CCA Global, Centene, and Bayer. His work focuses on helping senior executives define and implement sustainably differentiating strategies, all with attention to the role of values in shaping such decisions. Dr. Boumgarden’s facilitation combines methods from design thinking, strategic planning, and rapid experimentation made possible by leveraging a company’s analytics capabilities.

At Washington University, Peter is an award-winning instructor teaching courses on strategic ownership, leadership, and talent analytics in Olin’s EMBA, MBA, BSBA, and Executive Education programs. Previously to his time at Olin, Peter was a tenured Associate Professor of Management at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and a Visiting Lecturer in Strategy at Ross School of Business (University of Michigan). In 2015, the National Science Foundation selected Dr. Boumgarden as an entrepreneurial mentor for its i-Corp program, an initiative to bring cutting-edge university technology to market. 

Dr. Boumgarden completed his Ph.D. in Strategy and Organizations at Washington University, where he won the Hubert C. Moog Scholarship for excellence in research. His past research has covered the link between organization structure and long-term performance (USA Today and Hewlett-Packard), investment biases in corporate innovation (Bunge Global), the relationship between team design and innovation (Intel), and venture capital syndicates and their role in sourcing new opportunities. Current work includes projects on the differences in long-horizon private equity and family office investment, distinct owner motivations, and how they map onto the alternatives at strategic transitions, amongst other areas. His academic work appears in Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, and Judgement & Decision Making. His practitioner work appears directly and has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the LA Review of Books.