Ivy Buche

Term Research Professor

Ivy Buche is a research fellow and term research professor. With a focus on corporate purpose, she works on business transformation projects with senior executive teams of multinational companies across industries such as shipping, FMCG, insurance, mobility, agri-business, and security services. 

Buche specializes in strategy and responsible leadership from the perspective of the top management team. Specifically, her research examines how large incumbent firms reorient their corporate purpose to remain relevant in a rapidly evolving environment. She also explores how leaders successfully enact and embed purpose at the core of the organization through strategic choices and decisions while addressing emergent dilemmas over time. Her expertise lies in qualitative research methods.  

Her practitioner articles have been published in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. Her article “Put Purpose at the Core of your Strategy” has been featured twice in Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must Read series – on Strategy (2020) and on Leading with Purpose (2025). Her other articles include “The Strategic Advantage of Incumbency” (Harvard Business Review) and “From Islands of Experimentation to AI Everywhere” (MIT Sloan Management Review).  

An accomplished case writer, Buche has published more than 60 business case studies, many of them on companies in emerging markets. She has repeatedly won case writing awards in the John Molson International Case Competition, Canada (2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2025). In 2021, her case on Cisco (India) was a bestseller at The Case Centre (TCC), UK. With her case on Recruit Holdings, she won TCC’s Outstanding Case Writer Hot Topic Competition in 2017 on the theme of Big Data – Risks and Opportunities. In 2019, she won the EFMD case writing award in the Indian Management Challenges category for her case on the Indian startup Pepperfry.  

Prior to joining IMD, she was a researcher at the Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Before embarking on an academic career, she was a senior engineer in quality assurance and spare parts at Tata Motors (India). 

Buche was instrumental in delivering a strategy project with Sweden’s Securitas AB, which won gold in the organizational development category of the 2024 EFMD Excellence in Practice awards.  

She holds an Executive PhD in management from ESCP Business School in France. She also has an MBA in human capital management from the Nanyang Business School (Singapore) and a Bachelor of Engineering in Metallurgy from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (India). 

Academic publications
Insight for Executives
Article
Tencent, avamposto cinese che scala la Rete

Although Tencent holdings was not very successful in making WeChat famous beyond beyond China, it nevertheless attempted to build a global gaming empire. In January 2021 the value of Tencent's mar...

Digital Communication
1 March 2021
Article
How Tencent became the world's most valuable social network firm - with barely any advertising

The Chinese technology giant Tencent recently overtook US rival Facebook to become the world’s most valuable social network company, with a market capitalisation of US$540 billion. Yet it is sittin...

Finance Strategy Communication
18 January 2018