Contributors
Henry Chesbrough, Ph.D.
Henry Chesbrough is an Adjunct Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, where he serves as Faculty Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation. He is also Professor of Information Systems at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. Before moving to Berkeley, Chesbrough was Assistant Professor of Business Administration and the Class of 1961 Fellow at the Harvard Business School.
Chesbrough has written extensively on the topic of open innovation, a term that he coined in his award-winning book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Harvard Business Press, 2003). The book was named Best Business Book of 2003 by Strategy + Business and Best Business Book on Innovation by The European Association for Creativity and Innovation, and Chesbrough himself was named one of the Scientific American 50, for leadership in technology and business. His follow-up book, Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovative Landscape (Harvard Business Press, 2006), was named one of the top ten books on innovation for 2006 by Businessweek. Chesbrough is also the author, with Joel West and Wim Vanhaverbeke, of Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Oxford University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in The Harvard Business Review, The California Management Review, Industrial and Corporate Change, The Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Research Policy, Research-Technology Management, Business History Review, The Journal of Economic Literature, The Sloan Management Review, R&D Management, Businessweek, The Financial Times, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.
More recently, Chesbrough has turned his attention to the world of innovation in services. In his latest book, Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era (Jossey-Bass, 2011), he explains how companies can, with the help of open innovation, make the shift from product-centric to service-centric thinking. With global economies shifting to a focus on services, openness, and its ability to deliver improved choices for customers and better economies for corporations, is a path that can turn commodity companies into trailblazers.
Chesbrough has a BA in Economics from Yale University, summa cum laude, an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and a PhD in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California – Berkeley. Prior to his academic career, Chesbrough worked in strategy consulting at Bain, and spent ten years in various product planning and strategic marketing positions in Silicon Valley companies. He worked for seven of those years at Quantum Corporation, a leading manufacturer of hard disk drives.
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Joel West, Ph.D.
Dr. Joel West is a Professor at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in Claremont, CA. His research over the past 15 years has focused on how firms use selective openness for competitive advantage, and how they can gain competitive advantage under conditions of externally imposed openness.
In the open innovation community West is best known for co-editing “Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm” (Oxford, 2006) with Henry Chesbrough and Wim Vanhaverbeke, the first book on open innovation written for an academic readership. In addition to the 2006 book, he has published journal articles and book chapters on open innovation, and also lectured and consulted on open innovation on three continents. Since January 2007, he has also been the author of the Open Innovation blog.
In addition to open innovation, West has also done research on open source software and open standards. His research has been published in Asian Survey, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Studies, Management International Review, R&D Management, Research Policy, Telecommunications Policy and The Information Society, among other journals.
Prior to his appointment at KGI, he was on the faculty of the San Jose State University College of Business, where he taught courses in strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship and supervised the undergraduate honors consulting class. He has previously served as director of the SJSU Solar Workforce project and research director for the Silicon Valley Open Source Research Project at SJSU.