Mark H. Moore is the Research Professor of Public Management. His current primary focus is studying the processes that enable social innovation and change to occur in response to changing political, economic, and social conditions.
He began his career at the Kennedy School as a member of the inaugural class of the masters program in public policy, and was subsequently awarded one of Harvard’s first PhDs in public policy. After being appointed assistant professor in 1974, Moore took leave to serve for two years as the chief planning officer at the newly created Drug Enforcement Agency. In 1978, he was appointed the first Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and used that position to launch the Kennedy School’s Criminal Justice Program. At that time, he was also asked to lead the Kennedy School’s “strategic management cluster,” which was tasked with developing a distinctive approach to public management that could integrate the school’s interests in policy analysis and improving government policy-making processes with the more traditional concerns of public administration. He was also appointed to chair the newly created Faculty Committee on Executive Programs through which the concepts being developed could be tested for utility and value with practicing public executives.
In 1998, Moore was appointed Hauser Professor of Nonprofit Organizations, and served as the first Faculty Director of the newly created Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. The aim of the Center was to focus Kennedy School attention on the important role played by civil society actors in shaping government’s (and therefore society’s) overall capacity to identify, understand, and ameliorate pressing social problems. In 2007, he took up a half time appointment as a professor at the Harvard Business School to learn how they thought about and taught the subjects of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. In 2008, he served in a half-time position as the Simon Professor of Organizations, Management, and Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to help that school design and launch a special program for educators, administrators, and social entrepreneurs seeking to close the “achievement gap” in American education.
In 2014, with the knowledge gained from time at both HBS and HGSE, Moore returned to the Kennedy School on a full time basis to work on its Social Innovation and Change Initiative. The principal task was to further develop a course entitled “Sparking Social Change” that sought to enable students who came to the Kennedy School to imagine and pursue an idea for creating public value that could scale to significance from any particular position in society they might occupy – a task that continues today.
His publications are spread across three broad fields. In the field of public management , his works include Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government; Recognizing Public Value, and the forthcoming Delivering Public Value: Operational Management in the Public Sector. In the field of criminal justice, his works include Dangerous Offenders: The Elusive Targets of Justice; Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing; and From Children to Citizens: The Mandate for Juvenile Justice. In the field of social innovation, he is trying to catch up with the modern age and is developing digital materials to support the course on “Sparking Social Change.”
Moore holds a B.A. from Yale University (Summa Cum Laude and Honors with Exceptional Distinction in Political Science and Economics), and an M.P.P. and Ph.D. from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.