Professor, Entrepreneur, Marketing consultant, Author, Founder of StratX ExL

Jean-Claude “JC” Larreche is Emeritus Professor at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, where he held the Alfred H. Heineken Chair of Marketing from 1993 to 2018.

His academic and business activities are focused on building the fundamental capabilities required to create corporate value, especially through marketing excellence, customer focus, and value-capture selling. He is Founder and President of StratX ExL and of StratX Simulations.

StratX ExL organizes and delivers experiential learning seminars on leadership, marketing, and innovation for leading global corporations. StratX Simulations is the provider of world-renowned computerized business learning software, including REVMANEX, Markstrat, Circular Markstrat, Digital Markstrat, Blue Ocean Strategy Simulation, BrandPRO, Digital MediaPRO, and MixPRO.

In addition to his distinguished academic and business career, Larreche is known for his books Value Capture Selling: How to Win the 3rd Sales Transformation (to be published by Wiley in September 2023) and The Momentum Effect: How to Ignite Exceptional Growth, numerous articles and papers, and his pioneering work in business simulations, starting with Markstrat, the leading strategic-marketing simulation, used by more than a million executives worldwide. Education Larreche received a degree in engineering (with a major in computer hardware) from INSA Lyon in 1968. He then developed his expertise in computer software and obtained his MSc in Computer Science from the University of London in 1969.

He entered the world of business by studying at INSEAD where he received his MBA in 1970.

He specialized further in marketing and modeling at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California where he obtained his PhD in 1974. While pursuing his PhD at Stanford, Larreche continued to pursue his interest in computer science there—taking classes taught by John McCarthy, the father of artificial intelligence. It was at Stanford that he was given the nickname “JC” by his classmates.