We´re happy to announce that John Kao will return to Innovation in Mind for his second year as our moderator.

John is an author and strategic advisor based in San Fransisco. His work concentrates on issues of innovation and organizational transformation.

Dubbed “Mr. Creativity” by The Economist, John calls himself an innovation activist.  He is chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, whose i20 group is an association of 30 national ‘Chief Innovation Officers.’  John coined the term “large scale innovation” to refer to innovation as a societal agenda. He has advised numerous nations and regions on innovation strategy and execution. His advisory work for Hillary Rodham Clinton was described in The New York Times as “out of the box”.

John is the author of Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, a BusinessWeek best-seller, and Innovation Nation, published in October, 2007 about America’s growing innovation challenge. 

Currently John serves as director of the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium, founding member of Cisco System’s Innovation Commission, and chairman of the Global Advisory Council on Innovation of the World Economic Forum. He is a graduate of Yale College (philosophy), Yale Medical School (psychiatry) and Harvard Business School (management).  An accomplished jazz pianist, he spent the summer of 1969 playing keyboards for Frank Zappa. 

“We need to see our work on innovation as involving disciplined practice, not the quest for short-term wins.”