Henry Chesbrough

Henry Chesbrough is Faculty Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation within the Institute of Business 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.  He is known as “the father of open innovation”, due to his book, Open Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 2003).  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 second 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 has been translated into six languages.  Henry also wrote , Open Services Innovation (Jossey Bass, 2011), which analyses open innovation in services’ contexts.  It was favorably reviewed in The Economist, and is being translated into several languages. His most recent book, Open Innovation Results: Going Beyond the Hype and Getting Down to Business (Oxford University Press, 2019),  offers the latest theory and evidence from open innovation processes, and discusses how to get real business results from it.

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 blog to Forbes.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 tweets @Openinno, and co-manages the Openinnovation.net website, an open innovation resource for managers and academics alike.  

Henry also co-creates impactful custom programs for our corporate, government, and university partners.