About Hanieh Mohammadi
Researcher & Consultant
STRATEGY & ORGANIZATION · CONSULTING
Hanieh Mohammadi, Ph.D.
Hanieh Mohammadi is a Strategy and Organization scholar and a management and policy consultant who studies how innovation actually happens — and helps organizations make it happen on purpose.
Her research examines the team–organization boundary: the interface where authority, identities, and structures are negotiated in practice, and where innovation is either enabled or quietly killed. An ethnographer by method, she has conducted longitudinal fieldwork inside a technology startup and across inter-ministerial government collaborations. This work is anchored by her signature concept, structural serendipity — a system’s capacity to turn unexpected cues into durable outcomes, making breakthroughs designable rather than lucky.
She earned her Ph.D. in Strategy and Organization from McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, where she was mentored by Henry Mintzberg. Her work has been recognized with the Best Student Paper Award at ASAC 2025, selection for the Spark Tank competition at the Academy of Management (2025), and the Mintzberg Graduate Award. Her papers are under review at Organization Science and Strategic Organization, with her flagship paper targeted for Administrative Science Quarterly.
Alongside her academic work, she has advised the United Nations on employment, tourism, and labour-market systems, consulted for the Government of Albania’s Ministry of Economy, served as business advisor and marketing director at Emergex Subsidies, and co-founded the Novel Managing School. She has designed and facilitated executive workshops for senior leaders and government officials, and taught at McGill’s Desautels Faculty and Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Education.
Her foundations span mechanical engineering and physics (Sharif University of Technology), a Master’s in Management, and a Master in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard’s Kennedy School — a combination that lets her connect technical depth, applied practice, and organization theory across strategy, innovation management, and human–AI collaboration.