The professor and his graduate student learned together, as Mansfield sent Teece out into the field to gather data, interview executives and managers of large corporations, and glean the hidden costs of transferring technology from one country to another. Mansfield, a strong statistician who preferred to “get the right data and a small sample, rather than having the wrong data and the universe,” favored a multi-disciplinary approach that was ahead of its time in the way it incorporated the often messy data of real-world industry.

“Mansfield ignited an interest in me in technology and technology transfer,” says Teece, and that ignition would have deep implications for the study of the business enterprise. “He gave me the courage to believe that there was a methodological approach there, based on understanding things at the enterprise level, which was accepted in the academic world.”

In the 33 years since he finished his Ph.D. dissertation on the costs of international technology transfer, Teece has gone on to achieve a rare level of success inside and outside the academy—despite, or perhaps because of, what he calls his “lifelong battle with mainstream economics.”Currently the Tusher Chair in Global Business and professor of business administration at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, as well as director of Berkeley’s Institute of Management, Innovation and Organization, his deep research into the ever-evolving nature of the business firm has been highly influential—at least among those outside of the economics orthodoxy.

“David has done some of the most original, provocative, powerful work on the theory of the firm of anybody that I know,” says Dr. Richard Nelson, the Blumenthal Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and a former economics professor at Yale. “But much of what he has done has been structured outside of the boundaries of what was considered the appropriate framework for theorizing about firms in economics departments.”

“Deep down, really what I am is a practicing business intellectual, and that’s almost an oxymoron,” Teece says matter-of-factly. “Business intellectuals are not taken seriously, either by intellectuals or business people.”

Press him a bit and he admits that he may be the exception that proves the rule. He was named one of the world’s top 50 living business intellectuals by the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change, and he is not above bringing up the fact that he was the lead author on the most cited article in economics and business worldwide for the decade of 1995-2005 (“Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management,” in Strategic Management Journal). He is also one of the top 10 most cited scholars for that decade. His 1986 “Profiting from Technology Innovation,” in Research Policy, is the most widely cited business article in that journal’s history, and one that prompted the editors to issue a sort of Feschrift a few years ago celebrating it.

His international background and his desire to be a good citizen of the world prompted him to play a key role in founding St. Petersburg State University’s School of Management, the top business school in Russia, which he helped start from scratch shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (He currently chairs the school’s International Academic Council, and was presumably pleased with the subject of its most recent international conference: “Dynamic Capabilities and Beyond.”)

On the practicing side, the LECG (Law and Economics Consulting Group) Corporation, which Teece co-founded in 1988, is an international provider of expert analysis, testimony, and consulting services on a broad range of business topics. The Wall Street Journal described him as a “renowned expert on lots of things and pioneer of a lucrative consulting niche that has transformed business litigation” in a front-page article last March; lucrative in this case means that he clears between $2 million and $3 million a year for his own expert testimony and a cut of the action from the other experts, many of whom make their living in the academy.

Through his expert testimony, he is sometimes able to influence business-related law by debunking unsound economic theories that have made their way into the books.

“David’s articles have actually been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Tom Campbell, dean of the Haas School, during a 2006 presentation. Noting that Teece had been a “very important witness on behalf of Oracle when the government attempted to stop Oracle from acquiring PeopleSoft,” Campbell pointed out that LECG was “unique in harnessing attributes of the Academy in an area which was greatly in need of them, namely the prestige of individual faculty with the nimbleness of a private company.”

“I find that the academic training and familiarity with genres of research is extraordinarily valuable in helping me understand the complex reality that you get to see up close in the context of litigation,” says Teece. “And, moreover, if you can speak plain English, you do have a shot at distilling their complex reality down in a way that a jury can understand, too.

“As a testifying expert, I frequently find myself putting down bad theories,” he adds. “Some expert has assumed that the world looks like some model that they’re familiar with, but they haven’t looked enough to discover that the world is nothing like the model.”

“Professor Teece’s economic work was so panoramic that he could be plugged into almost any industry dispute and presented as knowledgeable,” noted the Journal. “He didn’t fluster under cross-examination. And his New Zealand accent worked nicely on the witness stand; it made him sound erudite without being pompous.”

It is certainly true that Teece does not fluster easily. During the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley firestorm, he and some friends ignored the “very persistent” evacuation warnings of the police and stayed to fight the fire, brandishing hoses and saving both his own house and his neighbor’s in the process. In conversation he projects a comfortable tenacity that undoubtedly serves him well in his own business enterprises. Those include Canterbury International, a New Zealand-based rugby-apparel company that he bought and reorganized, and I-Cap Partners, a group of private-equity funds that he started. He also has plans for a new state-of-the-art winery in New Zealand. (“We already have 200 acres of flourishing vineyards in sauvignon blanc, pinot gris, pinot noir, and riesling,” he says.)

“I’m really running a twin career, one of an academic and one that is manager/entrepreneur/investor,” he adds, quickly pointing out that Berkeley has been kind enough to let him work in a half-time capacity. “What tends to happen to academics if they get interested in business is they quit the academic world and become full-time executives or entrepreneurs or goodness knows what. I’m sort of the last man standing in terms of doing both simultaneously.”