Melissa Schilling is a professor of management and organizations at New York University 's Stern School of Business. Professor Schilling teaches courses in strategic management, corporate strategy and technology, and innovation management. Before joining NYU, she was an Assistant Professor at Boston University (1997–2001), and has also served as a Visiting Professor at INSEAD and the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She has also taught strategy and innovation courses at Siemens Corporation, IBM, the Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurship Fellows program, Sogang University in Korea, and the Alta Scuola Polytecnica, a joint institution of Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino.

Professor Schilling's research focuses on technological innovation and knowledge creation. She has studied how firms fight technology standards battles, and how they utilize collaboration, protection, and timing of entry strategies. She also studies how product designs and organizational structures migrate toward or away from modularity. Her most recent work focuses on knowledge creation, including how breadth of knowledge and search influences insight and learning, and how the structure of knowledge networks influences their overall capacity for knowledge creation. Her research in innovation and strategy has appeared in the leading academic journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, and Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and Research Policy. She also sits on the editorial review boards of Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Discoveries, Organization Science, Strategy Science, and Strategic Organization. Professor Schilling won an NSF CAREER award in 2003, and Boston University’s Broderick Prize for research in 2000.