Before joining the AGSM @ the UNSW  Business School in January 2006, he was on the faculty of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management (from 1997 to 2005).

He also held visiting positions all over the world. In 2001-2, he was a research fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) as well as the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Germany. In 2005, Murmann also served as a visiting professor at  Alto University (then Helsinki University of Technology) and the University of Lille. In 2009 he was a visiting fellow at Harvard Business School and the University of Paris East. He was Visiting Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania during the academic years 2011/12 and 2012/13,  In 2014, he was a visiting scholar at Cass Business School in London and Fudan University in Shanghai.

Professor Murmann received a BA in Philosophy with honors from the University of California at Berkeley and a Masters and PhD degree with distinction in Management of Organizations (1998) from Columbia University.

Murmann research since 2017 has mainly focused on improving the foresight of companies  by using the collective wisdom of employees beyond the top management.

Murmann's intereste throughout his career has been to study systematically how firms gain and lose competitive advantage over long periods of time. His award-winning comparative study of the early history of the synthetic dye industry was published in 2003 by Cambridge University Press under the title Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology and National Institutions.

Murmann's historical research has been driven by the conviction that managers, whose experience is focused by necessity on the firms they have worked for, can benefit greatly from learning how all players that make up an industry gained or lost competitive advantage over longer periods of time. By collecting data not only on successful firms but also on failed companies across many industries he strives to develop robust, evidence-based insights into what determines the competitive success of firms.

Professor Murmann has published his research in books as well as in many scholarly journals such as Strategic Management Journal,  Strategy Science, Organization Science, Industrial & Corporate Change, Research Policy, Research in Organization Behavior, and the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.

Professor Murmann received numerous awards for his research on industrial and technological change. His book Knowledge and Competitive Advantage received the 2004 Joseph Schumpeter Prize and 2004 Stanley Reiter Best Paper Award at the Kellogg School of Management. He also received with Michael Tushman the 1998 Stefan Schrader Best Paper Award of the Academy of Management's Technology and Innovation Management Division. Most recently he was awarded with Guido Bünstorf the K. William Kapp Prize by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy.  In 2018 he won with Zhijing Zhu the IACMR Best Macro Conference Paper Award.

Professor Murmann has lectured to diverse audiences all over the world. He has taught core MBA and Executive MBA courses in Strategic Management and the Management of Organizations. His portfolio of Executive teaching includes courses on General Management and Corporate Growth. He has also developed a Ph.D. course on Evolutionary Theories of Organization. While at the Kellogg School of Management, he won the Chair's Core Course Teaching Award.
Professor Murmann is a member of many scholarly societies and edits websites on Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences (etss.net) and on Economic Evolution (economic-evolution.net). He also serves as an associate editor of Management and Organization Review.

He has consulted with companies in Australia, China, Switzerland, USA and  as well government agencies in Australia.

Johann Peter Murmann is Professor  of Strategic Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland..  He received a BA in Philosophy with honors from the University of California at Berkeley and a Masters and PhD degree with distinction in Management and Organizations (1998) from Columbia University. Professor Murmann's award winning research focuses mainly on studying systematically how firms gain and lose competitive advantage over long periods of time. He has lectured at prestigious universities around the world. 

Innovation in of Chinese Firms

Development of Energy Technologies

Evolution of Competitive Advantage in the International Synthetic Dye Industry, 1850-Present;

How Can Small Economies Create Globally Competitive Firms in New High-Tech Industries (Australian Research Council Project)

Institutional Theory of Competitive Advantage;