Rebecca Goldberg

Education: Systems thinking and entrepreneurship at Darden (MBA), the creative process at a top-ten art school (BFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and liberal arts via American Studies (BA, Tufts University).

Rebecca has been consulting, teaching, and authoring works on new product innovation for over twenty years. She implements scale-up and innovation models in companies poised for high growth. Her clients have included two Global Fortune 100 companies, four Fortune 500 companies, three privately held companies, and the US Army and Navy. Her recent work focuses on creating models that utilize predictive analytics.

Rebecca is an Executive Lecturer at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, where she coauthors with several faculty. She has published over 350 works at top universities including UVA, Cambridge, Columbia, Yale, and NYU, as well as dozens of mainstream articles in major publications such as The Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, and others. She coauthored The Lean Anthology: A Practical Primer in Continuous Improvement (Taylor & Francis/Productivity Press, 2014) and the Business Horizons article “Robust Services: People or Processes?” and she is a contributing author for the textbook Operations Management: An Integrated Approach, 7th edition (Wiley & Sons, 2020). 

She is currently co-authoring a new product development book with Raul Chao, with a working title of The Blue Cyclone: How to Build, Test, and Launch New Products in the Age of Ai. It is designed as a practical field-book for product developers, founders, innovation teams, consultants, and executive-education audiences. It provides a workshop-based system for developing and launching new products across four archetypes: physical artifacts, digital products, food and beverage, and fashion/apparel. AI is treated as an accelerator for ideation, research synthesis, prototyping, and iteration, but with explicit cautions around validation, operational feasibility, IP, bias, hallucination, and false confidence.