Home > Alumni > News and Alumni Profiles > Marjorie A. Lyles
Scholar Gets Passport Stamped While Studying the World's Developing Markets
Before becoming a scholar in international markets, Marjorie A. Lyles (PhD '77) was an undergraduate with a West Coast worldview. She thought moving from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh meant she was "east."
Lyles soon figured out Pittsburgh was more Midwest than East. She earned her doctorate in strategic decision making from the Katz Graduate School of Business and left with the mindset that American companies lacked expertise on foreign markets.
Fascinated by this subject, Lyles headed a little further east - to the Far East and to Eastern Europe - and for the more than three decades since, she has researched emerging economies, primarily on the topic of joint ventures. Lyles is a professor of international strategic management and OneAmerica Chaired Professor in Business Administration, at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.
"It helps me grow when I go to places and learn about them. I think it really helps American students to go [abroad] because then they also grow. This experience is especially important for studying emerging economies," Lyles said.
She recently received the John W. Ryan Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Programs and Studies, becoming one of only two faculty members across all IU campuses to receive the award. Furthermore, in November, she will be inducted as a fellow of the Strategic Management Society, a prestigious appointment in her field.
Lyles' area of expertise is in two principal areas: knowledge transfer as it relates to emerging economies, and organizational learning as a theory and a process. She has had more than 60 scholarly articles published in top journals, received two National Science Foundation grants, and performed consulting work for various companies, including the global pharmaceutical firm, Eli Lilly and Company.
Lyles has conducted research in China, and the southeastern Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. She also has studied Hungarian new ventures, traveled to Russia and throughout the European Union, and visited Brazil and Kenya on business.
Lyles' field research has coincided with historical events. In 1989, she was in one of the first government delegations allowed back into China after the Tiananmen Square protests. The U.S. Department of Commerce had invited Lyles to participate in its programming in Dalian, China, which trained Chinese managers on subjects such as joint ventures, technology licensing, and finding partners.
"China was just fascinating, and continues to be, in the sense that it's growing and changing so much, and there's so much energy there," Lyles said.
However, research in China isn't always easy, she added, because under the communist controls "it's hard to say how their economic system works. Some of it isn't transparent, even now."
In the 1990s, Lyles oversaw a 10-year project that examined the Hungarian economy after the country declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1989 and transitioned to a free market system. She studied the performance of new joint ventures and private firms created after Hungary's transformation.
"In Eastern Europe, it was a very abrupt change, which made it very interesting because all of the sudden they were no longer a communist country and had no more central planning. It meant that many of the people with entrepreneurial leanings could go out and start new firms," Lyles said.
Lyles coauthored a research paper about knowledge transfer in Hungarian private firms in the Journal of International Business Studies, which in 2006 was deemed the most influential research paper of the past decade because it was the most cited during that span.
Lyles has taken numerous business students on trips to China and Russia. Her advice to them on local cuisine: "Food is an important part of a culture. Rather than telling people you don't like their food, go in expecting to try it, and find things you like."
Lyles and her husband, Thomas Doyle, have two children and live in Indianapolis, Ind.
