Center for Edge Innovation - John Hagel - 2008 World Meeting

The Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation conducts original research and develops substantive points of view for new corporate growth. The Silicon Valley-based Center helps senior executives make sense of and profit from emerging opportunities on the edge of business and technology. The Center focuses on the boundary, or edge, of the global business environment where strategic opportunity is the highest. The Center is dedicated to helping executives:

• Embrace the opportunity
• Learn faster
• Act boldly
• Change the world

The Center’s leadership team

John Hagel III (co-chairman) is a recognized thought leader on the intersection of technology and strategy. Throughout his career, he has influenced corporate strategies as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur. Since 2001, he has been an independent consultant and writer. Prior to that, he held significant positions at leading consulting firms and public and private companies. From 1984 to 2000, he was a principal at McKinsey & Co., where he was a leader of the Strategy Practice. In addition, he founded and led McKinsey’s Electronic Commerce Practice from 1993 to 2000. He has also served as chief strategy officer of 12 Entrepreneuring, Inc. and senior vice president of strategic planning at Atari, Inc. Earlier in his career, he was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and founded Sequoia Group, Inc., a systems house that sold turnkey computer systems to physicians.

John Seely Brown (independent co-chairman) has been advisor to the provost and a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California since 2003. This position followed a lengthy tenure at Xerox Corporation, where he served as director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) (1985-2000) and chief scientist of Xerox Corporation (1992-2002). While head of PARC, Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, complex adaptive systems, micro electrical mechanical system (MEMS) and NANO technology. His research interests include digital culture, ubiquitous computing, service-oriented architectures, global innovation networks and learning ecologies.

Brown is a member of the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a trustee of Brown University and the MacArthur Foundation. He serves on several corporate and advisory boards. He has published more than 100 papers in scientific journals and authored or co-authored five books.

Lang Davison (executive director) joins the Center for Edge Innovation from McKinsey & Company, where since 2003 he has been editor of McKinsey’s flagship publication, The McKinsey Quarterly. During his 14 years at McKinsey, Davison served in a variety of senior communications, content and media roles, leading the development team for mckinseyquarterly.com, which he edited from 1998-2003, and developing and bringing to market the best-selling and critically acclaimed books Net Gain and Net Worth, both authored by John Hagel, as well as more than three hundred articles in The McKinsey Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal by thought leaders like Stanford’s Robert Sutton, Harvard’s Pankaj Ghemewat, McKinsey’s Lowell Bryan and Eric Beinhocker and IMD’s Phil Rosenzweig.