Professor Stacy Wood

Langdon Distinguished University Professor of Marketing, Executive Director, Consumer Innovation Consortium, North Caroline State University

Stacy Wood
Stacy Wood

https://poole.ncsu.edu/people/swking/

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5256-1772

Stacy Wood is the Langdon Distinguished University Professor of Marketing, NC State, and served as the Executive Director of the Consumer Innovation Collaborative.

Her research explores the human side of innovation—how people learn about, adopt, adapt to, or reject new things—from high tech products to societal trends. Dr. Wood is a multi-methodologist with published work in top journals using an unusually diverse set of analytical tools, including behavioral experiments, longitudinal models, qualitative ethnography, quantitative econometric models, and physiological metrics (e.g., fMRI).  She was elected President of the Association for Consumer Research (ACR) in 2018. She served as Editor for the Journal of Consumer Research (2021-2024).

Dr. Wood (Ph.D., UF, 1998) has also taught at USC, MIT, and Duke, where her classes at the Duke School of Medicine and the Fuqua School of Business have won multiple teaching awards.  At MIT, she became a Faculty Fellow of the Convergence Culture Consortium. At NC State, Dr. Wood founded the Consumer Innovation Collaborative to partner with top corporations and tackle their most challenging consumer issues of the future. Dr. Wood has advised many Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and the World Bank.

Dr. Wood is known for translating the knowledge from marketing theory (specifically as it relates to decision-making, identity, risk perceptions, and culture) to a broader understanding of how people approach change and adopt innovations in many domains. To this end, she has been a frequent speaker to diverse audiences in medicine, engineering, sustainability, design, agriculture, and textiles. Her current research explores the intersection of innovation, technology, and medicine from a consumer-centric perspective with the goal of increasing accessibility of healthcare to people in a way that is more patient-centric (and thus more likely to result in adherence and long-term health gains). To this end, she explores the multifaceted reasons behind patients’ health choices and the practical success of different interventions and policy initiatives.

During the pandemic, Dr. Wood worked at an international level to bring innovation theory insights to the global promotion of healthy behaviors like vaccination and masking. Examples of these efforts, both research and public engagement, can be seen here:

  • Her work with Dr. Kevin Schulman on adoption of a novel vaccine, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (link here).
  • Her work with the World Bank and Dr. Muhammad Pate for global promotion of vaccination, published in the British Medical Journal (link here).
  • Her work with cohort analysis for NZ vaccine promotion (link here).