This post follows directly on Steve Blank’s earlier excellent post, Why Companies are not Startups. The question of how corporations can be more innovative is one I have wrestled with for a long time. For those who don’t know, I wrote the book Open Innovation in 2003, and followed it with Open Business Models in … Continue reading “Why Internal Ventures Are Different from External Startups”
Author: Henry Chesbrough
Henry Chesbrough is Faculty Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Previously, he was an assistant professor of business administration, and the Class of 1961 Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of California-Berkeley, an MBA from Stanford University, and a BA from Yale University, summa cum laude.
His research focuses on managing technology and innovation. His book, Open Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), articulates a new paradigm for organizing and managing R&D. In this new approach, companies must access external and well as internal technologies, and take them to market through internal and external paths. This book was named a “Best Business Book” by Strategy & Business magazine, and the best book on innovation on NPR’s All Things Considered. Scientific American magazine named him one of the top 50 technology and business leaders in recognition of his research on industrial innovation. An academic version of open innovation, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, with Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West, was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press.
His most recent book, Open Business Models (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), extends his analysis of innovation to business models, intellectual property management, and markets for innovation. It was named one of the ten best books on innovation in 2006 by BusinessWeek, and is being translated into six languages.
His academic work has been published in Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Sloan Management Review, Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change, Research-Technology Management, Business History Review, and the Journal of Evolutionary Economics. He is the author of more than 20 case studies on companies in the IT and life sciences sectors, available through Harvard Business School Publishing. He contributes a monthly column on innovation to BusinessWeek.com, and is a member of the Editorial Board of Research Policy and the California Management Review.
Prior to embarking on an academic career, he 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 hard disk drive manufacturer and a Fortune 500 company. Previously, he worked at Bain and Company. He can be reached at [email protected].