Henry Chesbrough

Henry Chesbrough
Executive Director, Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation

The Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation is an emerging center for large-enterprise innovation within the Institute for Business Innovation, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. As announced by Dean Rich Lyons in 2011, the Garwood Center was created thanks to a $4.5 million endowment from alumnus the late Ed Garwood (BS 31) along with his wife Elsie. The Garwood Center focuses on the key topics: open innovation – the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation; business model innovation – creating and capturing more value by innovating business models and coordinating them with key partners; open services innovation – extending the open innovation and open business models concepts to services; and applied corporate innovation – developing innovative solutions to business problems using MBA student teams.

Given his previous leadership at the Haas School’s Center for Open Innovation and his track record as the ‘Father of Open Innovation’, Professor Henry Chesbrough was chosen to lead the Garwood Center, “Globalization and commoditization are creating significant challenges for corporate innovation,” Chesbrough observes, “To sustain growth and profits in today’s world, corporations will need to extend innovation beyond their products and technologies to business models and services. The Garwood Center will focus on both academic research and management practices that address these challenges.”
Garwood Center - Berkeley Innovation Forum
The Garwood Center is also home to the Program in Open Innovation, Berkeley Innovation Forum, and Haas@Work Program. The Program in Open Innovation conducts research, publishes articles and develops teaching materials around a more distributed model of industry innovation called “Open Innovation.” The goal is to make the Program in Open Innovation as externally connected as possible, to identify important ideas and information from outside, and to share ideas with interested parties on the outside. The Berkeley Innovation Forum is a membership organization dedicated to sharing knowledge about innovation challenges. Haas@Work is an applied innovation program employing student consulting teams to develop innovative solutions to business problems.