Claus Otto Scharmer (born 1961) is a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and co-founder of the Presencing Institute. He chairs the MIT IDEAS program for cross-sector innovation and is the author/co-author of several books.

Scharmer studied economics at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, receiving his diploma and eventually his PhD. In 2015 Otto co-founded the MITx u.lab, a massive open online course with more than 140,000 users from 185 countries.

He received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching at MIT (2015), and the EU Leonardo Corporate Learning Award for the contributions of Theory U to the future of management (2016). In 2017 he was ranked #1 of the world's top 30 education professionals by globalgurus.org.