Henry Chesbrough

Why organisations work with Henry Chesbrough

• He is the named author of the framework that most corporate innovation functions claim to use. When a board wants the original argument rather than a consultant’s summary, they bring him in.
• Two decades of field research inside Procter & Gamble, Intel, IBM, GE, Bayer, and Huawei give him specific evidence on where open innovation pays off and where it quietly fails.
• His work extends beyond R&D into business models and services, which is where most open innovation programmes stall once the easy wins run out.
• He sits at the centre of the academic and practitioner networks that define the field, including the Garwood Center at Berkeley Haas and the Open Innovation Community he founded.
• Recognition from Thinkers50 (ranked four times), the Industrial Research Institute’s Medal of Achievement, and the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award establishes standing with both academic and corporate audiences.

Biography highlights

• Faculty Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
• Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation at Luiss University, Rome.
• Author of “Open Innovation” (HBS Press, 2003), “Open Business Models” (2006), “Open Services Innovation” (2011), and “Open Innovation Results” (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Named to the Thinkers50 ranking four times and shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2011.
• Recipient of the Industrial Research Institute’s Medal of Achievement (2017), the Herbert Simon Award (2020), and the Academy of Management Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award (2022).
• Honorary doctorates from Hasselt University, the University of Vic, and Eindhoven University of Technology.

Biography

“Open innovation” is the most widely adopted idea in corporate R&D of the last twenty years, and Henry Chesbrough is the person who named it. His 2003 book set out a simple claim that changed how firms think about invention: no organisation, however well resourced, can rely only on its own labs. The better question is how to combine internal and external ideas, and how to build a business model that captures value from both.

That argument has held up through two decades of field research. Chesbrough’s work inside Procter & Gamble, Intel, IBM, GE, Bayer, and Huawei is the evidence base behind “Open Innovation Results” (Oxford University Press, 2020), which examines why many open innovation programmes stall and what separates the firms that generate measurable returns from the ones that merely adopt the vocabulary.

His institutional base is the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he is Faculty Director. He is also Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation at Luiss University in Rome, and previously held a chair at ESADE in Barcelona. Before academia he spent over a decade in Silicon Valley’s disk drive industry, finishing as Vice President of Marketing at Quantum’s Plus Development subsidiary.

Recognition has followed the field’s maturity. Thinkers50 has named him to its ranking four times, the Industrial Research Institute awarded him its Medal of Achievement in 2017, and the Academy of Management gave him its Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award in 2022. For senior leaders rebuilding an innovation function, Chesbrough brings both the original thesis and the accumulated evidence of what happens when it meets a real P&L.

Key speaking topics

• Open innovation
• Business model innovation
• Corporate R&D strategy
• Ecosystems and external partnerships for innovation
• Services innovation
• Technology commercialisation
• Intellectual property strategy

Ideal for

• CEOs and CTOs responsible for corporate R&D and innovation portfolios
• Chief Strategy Officers rebuilding the firm’s approach to external partnerships and ecosystems
• Heads of corporate venturing, open innovation, and new business building
• Boards and executive teams reviewing the economics of internal versus external innovation sourcing

Audience outcomes

• A clear grasp of what open innovation actually requires beyond the label, from the person who defined it.
• Named examples of where the model has produced measurable results and where large firms have wasted effort.
• A sharper view of how business models, not just technology pipelines, determine returns on innovation spend.
• Language and frameworks that help executive teams align on what “open” means for their specific sector.