Henry Chesbrough is best known as “the father of Open Innovation”. He is the founding Faculty Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he has served as an Adjunct Faculty member for 20 years. He is also Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation and Sustainability at Luiss University in Rome. Previously he was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, an MBA from Stanford, and a BA from Yale University.
He has written books such as Open Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), Open Business Models (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), Open Services Innovation (Jossey-Bass, 2011) and Open Innovation Results (Oxford, 2020). The Oxford Handbook of Open Innovation, with Agnieszka Radziwon, Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel West, will be published in March of 2024. His research has been cited more than 110,000 times, according to Google Scholar.
An academic entrepreneur, he launched the Berkeley Innovation Forum at Berkeley Haas in 2005, which currently has 30 member companies. He started the European Innovation Forum with Wim Vanhaverbeke in 2012. He started up the World Open Innovation Conference in 2014, which annually hosts more than 200 scholars and managers. He originated the weekly Open Innovation Research Seminar, which has met online weekly since 2016.
He has been recognized as one of the leading business thinkers by Thinkers50 several times. He received an Innovation Luminary award from the European Commission in 2014. He received the Industrial Research Institute Medal of Achievement in 2017, the Herbert Simon Award of the Rajk College for Advanced Studies in Corvinus University in 2020, the Viipuri Prize from Lappeenranta University of Technology in 2022, and holds four honorary doctorates.