John Seely Brown is the Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. In addition, he is a Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at USC.

Prior to that he was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a position he held for nearly two decades. While head of PARC, Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, knowledge management, complex adaptive systems, and nano/mems technologies. He was a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). His personal research interests include the management of radical innovation, digital youth culture, digital media, and new forms of communication and learning.

John, or as he is often called - JSB - is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and of AAAS and a Trustee of the MacArthur Foundation. He serves on numerous public boards (Amazon, Corning, and Varian Medical Systems) and private boards of directors. He has published over 100 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business Review's 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, "Research that Reinvents the Corporation" and again in 2002 for his article "Your Next IT Strategy."

In 2004 he was inducted in the Industry Hall of Fame.

With Paul Duguid he co-authored the acclaimed book The Social Life of Information (HBS Press, 2000) that has been translated into 9 languages with a second addition in April 2002, and with John Hagel he co-authored the book The Only Sustainable Edge which is about new forms of collaborative innovation. It also provides a novel framework for understanding what is really happening in off-shoring in India and China and how each are inventing powerful news ways to innovate, learn and accelerate capability building.

JSB received a BA from Brown University in 1962 in mathematics and physics and a PhD from University of Michigan in 1970 in computer and communication sciences. In May of 2000 Brown University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science Degree. It was followed by an Honorary Doctor of Science in Economics conferred by the London Business School in July 2001. And in May of 2004 he received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Claremont Graduate School. In 2005, he received an honorary doctorate from University of Michigan and delivered their commencement speech.

Rethinking Globalization: Innovation in a Flat World

The intensity of global competition calls for a review of your business strategy. Your company's sustainability depends on your ability to develop a constantly evergreen set of capabilities before anybody else does. How do you acclerate your firm's capability-building processes? Your talent development strategy? Is it possible to learn even faster?

Innovation Blowback: The Coming Asian Invasion

Emerging markets such as China and India have become breeding grounds for new management processes and practices that help companies to maintain or even improve the quality of their products and services while simultaneously slashing prices. The disruptive impact is now confined to developing countries, but "blowback" from this surge of innovation could quickly be unleashed on the rest of the world. To meet the challenge, established businesses must learn new skills--not least important, an ability to orchestrate complex networks of specialized enterprises. What steps must you take to protect your company's future?

Value Creation at the Edge: Learning to Cope with Globalization

It is not just corporate training that is important but rather rich participation with partners who are at the edge. Ask: how do you learn as much from a partner as you learn from creating something yourself? How does distributed collaboration around the world become a critical strategy for survival? What are the most effective ways to convert your existing global supplier networks into new nodes of innovation?

Digital Culture and Learning in the Digital Age

Rethinking how today's kids that grow up digital learn, think, work, communicate and socialize. Understanding today's digital kids is of growing importance, not only to educators, but also to human resource departments, strategists, and marketing folks. Understanding the social practices and constructivist ecologies being created around open source and massively multiplayer games will provide a glimpse into new kinds of innovation ecologies and some of the ways that meaning is created for these kids -- ages 10 to 40. Perhaps our generation focused on information, but these kids focus on meaning -- how does information take on meaning?

Why IT Matters More Today than Ever Before

My claim is that we are just at the beginning of the real information revolution. But to understand how to achieve a sustainable competitive edge from IT, we must first rethink the essence of corporate strategy and then understand how Web services or, more generally, service-oriented architectures, enable a new kind of corporate strategy to become enacted. For this to work, a deeper alliance must be created between the CIO and the CSO and CEO. Much of my research here is done in collaboration with John Hagel.

Radical Adaptability

We are at a strategic juncture which brings two separate developments together - grid computing and extended web services - providing the opportunity to slash cap ex and tco on the one hand and enabling a degree of radical adaptability - both in terms of computer utilization AND business flexibility, on the other hand. This confluence is unprecedented and opens up a host of strategic possibilities but this also requires new skills for the CIO and potentially a new positioning of CIOs before the full potential of this confluence can be realized...

Creating a Culture of Learning

Organizational learning and knowledge sharing have held out great promises, but have failed to deliver the goodies. Why? And what can be done about it? I claim a lot. But first we must understand how learning and creativity actually happen inside an organization, how IT can support them (which it doesn't today), and in general how and why knowledge both sticks within an a community of practice, but seems to readily leak out along the pathways of external networks of practice. Coming from PARC ,you can imagine I have had a lot time to reflect on this problem.

Managing Radical Innovation

Let's be clear: you can't manage invention or nurture it ... think innovation ecologies, not mechanisms. But you can manage innovation, the pathway to the market. Indeed, we constantly discover that there is often more creativity in bringing a radical innovation to market than what went into the invention in the first place. Yes, this is about lessons learned the hard way.

The Will to Innovate

I am tired of everyone pointing their fingers at the other guys -- corporations at unions; universities at government; and so on. Start by looking at your organization. What has your organization undertaken to innovate your own innovation processes?

I am distressed at how bad most CEOs are today in thinking out of the box. Boards aren't much better. And, of course, most institutions and foundations tend to be hesitant to re-invent themselves...

It's time to be bold; it's time to innovate innovation. The 21st century demands it...

Design, Design, Design

Why can't we keep things simple? Sure, we all complain, but why can't we design stuff that mere mortals (like you and me) can use? There are many reasons why this doesn't happen, but one of the main ones is that we, technologists, continually overlook the social resources that people use to orient themselves, to navigate through complex territory, and to help each other figure things out. Some of these ideas Paul Duguid and I cover in our book, The Social Life of Information, but others go to the heart of how we can design transparent systems that fade into our subconscious and are just there, not in our face.

Take the U.S. Constitution. Part of the constitution's strength was keeping it simple and honoring the social resources that a community of imagination (i.e. the nation) could deploy to evolve its interpretation as the world evolved. Design applies to institutions and nations, and individuals as well- the freedom to design your own life...