Dr. Milstein is director of the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and lecturer at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He oversees the center's work on sustainable innovation and low-income or base-of-the-pyramid enterprise development. He conducts research on strategy, decision making, technology management, and innovation.

His own research is focused on how and why firms generate new business growth opportunities by treating social and environmental challenges as unmet market needs. His work includes private sector approaches to poverty alleviation and technology commercialization strategies to catalyze sustainable innovation.

Dr. Milstein’s research projects cover a wide range of areas, from economic development in Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, and the Philippines to multinational collaboration on corporate approaches and enterprise development in Latin America, China, and Africa. He also consults with a number of multinational firms, small- and medium-sized enterprises, and NGOs, including Caterpillar, Suncor, the U.S. Army, and Schering-Plough.

He earned a BA in economics and Japanese from the University of Michigan, and later earned both an MBA in general management and an MS in natural resource policy from the University of Michigan's dual-degree Corporate Environmental Management (now Erb) Program. He received his PhD in strategic management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.