About

Christian Terwiesch is the Andrew M. Heller Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as a Professor in and the chair of the Operations, Information, and Decisions department. He also holds a faculty appointment at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and is co-director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. His research focuses on healthcare operations, innovation management, lean operations, and new service delivery models. Terwiesch has published extensively in leading academic journals, including Management Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, and is recognized as an award-winning teacher with extensive experience in MBA teaching and executive education. He is the co-author of the widely used Operations Management textbook, 'Matching Supply with Demand,' and has launched the first MOOC in business on Coursera, which has enrolled over half a million students. His management books, including 'Innovation Tournaments' and 'Connected Strategies,' explore innovation processes and digital transformation, with the latter being featured as the cover story of Harvard Business Review and shortlisted for the Thinkers 50 award. His work often involves consulting for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, helping them enhance innovation and restructure their innovation portfolios.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Nursing
• Marketing
• Sociology
• Business
• Medicine
• Medical emergency
• Engineering
• Operations management
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Database
• Family medicine
• Arithmetic

Selected publications

• Advice quality and source disclosure shape trust in AI-generated ethical advice

  Scientific Reports · 2026-03-19 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  PROTOCOL REGISTRATION: The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 13/09/24. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6FPW7 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Demonstrating the Potential of LLMs for Dynamic, Multimodal Clinical Decision-Making

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• ChatGPT decreases idea diversity in brainstorming

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-05-14 · 20 citations

  letterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• <div> Reimagining Customer Service Journeys with <span>LLMs: A Framework for Chatbot Design and </span><span>Workflow Integration</span></div>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• ChatGPT Decreases Idea Diversity in Brainstorming

  2024-12-10 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Lee and Chung explore how ChatGPT augments human creativity in brainstorming. In a series of experiments, they randomized participants to complete a range of creative challenges, either with or without the help of ChatGPT. These challenges included tasks such as coming up with gift ideas, designing toys from various everyday objects, and repurposing household items. Each participant submitted one idea, which external evaluators rated on multiple creativity dimensions, including innovativeness and usefulness. Across tasks, instructing participants to use ChatGPT enhanced the average creativity of ideas, outperforming web searches and unaided human intuition, with creativity measured as the average of aggregated scores of originality (original, innovative, creative) and appropriateness (practical, effective, useful). These results strengthen the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of LLMs in idea generation, contributing to a rapidly growing literature. However, as we further demonstrate analytically, reliance on ChatGPT for idea generation comes with a significant tradeoff: while enhancing individual ideas' creativity, it reduces the diversity of ideas in a pool of ideas—a critical element for effective brainstorming.

  PublisherDOI

• Prompting Diverse Ideas: Increasing AI Idea Variance

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-01-27 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Unlike routine tasks where consistency is prized, in creativity and innovation the goal is to create a diverse set of ideas. This paper delves into the burgeoning interest in employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the productivity and quality of the idea generation process. While previous studies have found that the average quality of AI ideas is quite high, prior research also has pointed to the inability of AI-based brainstorming to create sufficient dispersion of ideas, which limits novelty and the quality of the overall best idea. Our research investigates methods to increase the dispersion in AI-generated ideas. Using GPT-4, we explore the effect of different prompting methods on Cosine Similarity, the number of unique ideas, and the speed with which the idea space gets exhausted. We do this in the domain of developing a new product development for college students, priced under $50. In this context, we find that (1) pools of ideas generated by GPT-4 with various plausible prompts are less diverse than ideas generated by groups of human subjects (2) the diversity of AI generated ideas can be substantially improved using prompt engineering (3) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting leads to the highest diversity of ideas of all prompts we evaluated and was able to come close to what is achieved by groups of human subjects. It also was capable of generating the highest number of unique ideas of any prompt we studied.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prompting Diverse Ideas: Increasing AI Idea Variance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 39 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Stacking consecutive similar neuroendovascular cases is associated with reduced turnover time and procedure time

  Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery · 2024-08-21

  article

  BACKGROUND: Across a wide range of tasks it has been shown that workers switching between different activities have 'switching costs' due to slower performance and increased errors. Scheduling similar cases consecutively, or 'stacking cases', allows an operating room (OR) team to avoid switching costs and might therefore result in increased efficiency. OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether stacking neuroendovascular cases decreases turnover and procedure time. METHODS: A retrospective case series was identified of 4386 endovascular cases performed by vascular neurosurgeons between 2015 and 2023 at an academic center. A 'stacked case' was defined as a binary variable, which counted as 'yes' when the preceding case was the same procedure. Primary outcomes were turnover time and procedure time. RESULTS: Diagnostic angiograms (n=2575) and aneurysm embolizations (n=517) had a sufficient number of cases for statistical analysis.Stacked diagnostic angiograms were associated with significantly faster turnover time (7 min, P=1e-12) in a multivariate regression model. Turnover time decreased with additional stacked cases, with a 4 min reduction for a single stacked case, up to 11 min for a fifth stacked angiogram.For angiograms and aneurysm embolizations, stacked cases were associated with shorter procedure times: 4 min for angiograms (P<0.0001) and 20 min for aneurysm embolizations (P=0.0057). CONCLUSION: This project demonstrates that stacking similar cases is associated with reduced turnover and procedure time, after controlling for other variables that affect the flow of an OR day. Stacking cases is a zero-cost intervention that offers significant efficiency gains in the OR schedule.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2023-02-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 3: Direct the Tournament (or Not)

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2023-02-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kevin G. Volpp

  University of Pennsylvania

  44 shared

• Shivan J. Mehta

  University of Pennsylvania

  27 shared

• Karl T. Ulrich

  26 shared

• David A. Asch

  25 shared

• Steven C. Marcus

  17 shared

• Jesse M. Pines

  CARE USA

  15 shared

• Christoph H. Loch

  Cambridge School

  15 shared

• Diwas Singh KC

  Emory University

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• Thinkers 50 award