Chip Heath’s research focuses on two general areas: What makes ideas succeed in the social marketplace of ideas, and how can people design messages to make them stick? How do individuals, groups, and organizations make important decisions and what mistakes do they make?

Chip Heath is the Thrive Foundation for Youth Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research examines why certain ideas - ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths — survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. A few years back Chip designed a course, now a popular elective at Stanford, that asked whether it would be possible to use the principles of naturally sticky ideas to design messages that would be more effective. The material from that course, How to Make Ideas Stick, has been taught to hundreds of students including managers, teachers, nonprofit leaders, doctors, journalists, venture capitalists, product designers, and film producers.

Chip is the coauthor (along with his brother, Dan) of a book titled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, published by Random House in January 2007.

Chip’s research has appeared in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Cognitive Psychology, Journal of Consumer Behavior, Strategic Management Journal, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. Popular accounts of his research have appeared in Scientific American, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Business Week, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair, NPR, and a National Geographic television show.

Chip has taught courses on Organizational Behavior, Negotiation, Strategy, International Strategy, and Social Entrepreneurship. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Heath taught at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He received his BS in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University and his PhD in Psychology from Stanford.