ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

A writer, management consultant, and social ecologist, Peter Drucker was one of the most influential figures in the field of management theory and practice. Called the “man who invented management” by BusinessWeek , Drucker developed one of the country’s first executive MBA programs at Claremont Graduate University, where he taught until 2002. He was the author of many books, including The Daily Drucker and The Effective Executive. Drucker received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2002 and passed away at age ninety-five in 2005.

 

Stewart Brand is cofounder and president of the Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network. He also founded and edited the Whole Earth Catalog and has written several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

 

Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School, where she also serves as Director of Research. Currently teaching Leadership and Organizational Behavior at HBS, Amabile was the host and instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a twenty-six-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She is the author of Creativity in Context and The Progress Principle.

 

American urban studies theorist Richard Florida is a professor and the head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Named one of Esquire’s Best and Brightest alongside venerable figures like Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Sachs, Florida heads the private consulting firm Creative Class Group and is senior editor at the Atlantic. He was appointed to Business Innovation Factory’s Research Advisory Council and was recently named European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation. He is the bestselling author of The Great Reset, The Rise of the Creative Class, Who’s Your City, and many other books.

 

Clayton Christensen is the leading authority on the theory of disruptive innovation, an innovation that helps create a new market and value network while disrupting the existing network. A four-time recipient of the McKinsey Award by the Harvard Business Review, Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He cofounded the management consultancy Innosight and investment firm Rose Parks Advisors in 2007, followed by nonprofit think tank Innosight Institute in 2008. He is the author of Disrupting Class, The Innovator’s Prescription, The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution.

 

Eric Von Hippel is a professor of technological innovation in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a professor in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is the author of Democratizing Innovation and The Sources of Innovation.

 

Stefan Thomke, an authority on the management of innovation, is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He has worked with U.S., European, and Asian firms on product, process, and technology development, organizational design and change, and strategy. He is chair of the Executive Education Program Leading Product Innovation, which helps business leaders in revamping their product development processes for greater competitive advantage, and is faculty chair of HBS executive education in India. Professor Thomke is also on the core faculty of the Advanced Management Program where he teaches the course Leading Innovation. He is the author of the books Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation and Managing Product and Service Development.

 

John Seely Brown is the former head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and was the chief scientist at Xerox. He is the independent cochairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge and a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California. He is coauthor of the bestselling book The Social Life of Information. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

 

John Hagel III is the cochairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He is the author of a series of bestselling business books, including Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box and The Only Sustainable Edge. An alumnus of McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, he lives in Burlingame, California.

 

Geoff Mulgan recently became the CEO of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts after acting as chief executive of the Young Foundation, a center for social innovation in the UK. A visiting professor at University College, London, the London School of Economics, and the University of Melbourne, Mulgan was the director of Policy and director of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He is an adviser to many governments around the world and the author of several books including Connexity, Good and Bad Power, and The Art of Public Strategy.

 

With more than twenty years of research behind him, Amar Bhidé is a leading authority on innovation and entrepreneurship. The Thomas Schmidheiny Professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Bhidé is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He previously served as Laurence D. Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University and as a faculty member of Harvard Business School and University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. He is the author of A Call for Judgment, The Venturesome Economy, The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses and Of Politics and Economic Reality.