Team Member Name

Erich Joachimsthaler, Ph.D. is the founder and CEO of Vivaldi. He is a rare combination of consultant, entrepreneur, academic, researcher, author and positive contrarian. Over the last 20 years, Erich has led Vivaldi in helping companies to build strong brands, identify innovation and growth opportunities, and fully realize them as companies, industries and categories to evolve from the traditional economy to the platform economy (Fourth Industrial Revolution, Metaverse, or Web 3.0).

His special areas of emphasis are leveraging new innovation and growth or marketing strategies in the context of industries under deep disruption and reinvention due to rapidly changing customer expectations. He is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in his areas of expertise in the world.

Erich’s extensive experience and thought leadership in strategy, business models, and innovation have informed his book, “The Interaction Field,” which describes the emergence of what the next generation of successful companies and brands will look like. Erich presents “a thrilling new way of looking at a successful business model for the future,” predicting that successful companies will shift from transactional businesses to an interactional model. This new model goes further than solely extracting value for the benefit of investors or shareholders — it creates value for all participants engaged in the Interaction Field, as well as society at large.

Prior to his work at Vivaldi, Erich has held academic faculty positions at the University of Southern California, Instituto Estudios Superiores de la Empresa (IESE) in Barcelona, Spain and The Darden School, University of Virginia. He has served as a Visiting Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at IESE since 1995. He first joined IESE as a full-time professor in 1989 after completing his Post-Doctoral Fellowship work at Harvard Business School. In his career, Erich has published over 100 articles in highly respected academic journals and in best-selling, award-winning books. Together with David A. Aaker, he wrote some of the most seminal articles on brand strategy and brand architecture in the Harvard Business Review and the California Management Review. His book “Brand Leadership,” co-authored with David A. Aaker, describes the new leadership paradigm of building strong brands and has been translated into 14 languages. His book on innovation and growth strategies from a consumer-centric perspective, “Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute Your Company’s Next Growth Strategy,” was published by the Harvard Business School Press, has been translated in 10 languages, and won the AMA-Berry Best Marketing Book of the Year Award. “The Interaction Field The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers and Society” was published by Public Affairs/Hachette Group in 2020 and won the Bronze medal of the prestigious Axiom Business Book Awards. Erich has received numerous awards of distinction for his work.

He won the Best Dissertation Award for his pioneering work on solving the mathematical classification problem. In 2017, he was inducted as an ISBM Fellow, recognizing him as a senior scholar/thought leader, having made significant contributions to the advancement of the theory and practice of B2B marketing. There are only 27 academics and scholars exist worldwide who have been awarded this distinction. Erich also was voted to the Top 50 Chief Digital Officer CDO Influencer list, which is a ranking of global superstars in the fields of digital technology and in the adoption of data-driven culture.

Erich is an internationally recognized authority on the impact of technology on strategy, the digitalization of industries and categories, and the role of innovation and branding. Erich holds degrees in economics, statistics and business administration with minors in computer science from both German and U.S. universities, having received a Master of Science degree in quantitative methods and marketing and a Ph.D. in Business Administration, with an emphasis in statistics and consumer behavior from the University of Kansas. He joined Harvard Business School as a Post-doctoral Fellow.