The State of Innovation Summit 2009

Paola Antonelli joined The Museum of Modern Art in February 1994 and is Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design. Her first exhibition for MoMA, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design (1995), was followed by several others, covering all facets of architecture and design in the contemporary world. Her most recent exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind (2/24-5/12/2008), was devoted to the relationship between design and science. Paola Antonelli’s goal is to insistently promote design’s understanding, until its positive influence on the world is fully acknowledged and exploited. She is currently working on several shows on contemporary design; on Design Bites, a book about foods from all over the world appreciated as examples of outstanding design; and on trying to get a Boeing 747 into the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

Dr. Gene Block became chancellor of UCLA in August 2007. As chief executive officer, he oversees all aspects of the university’s three-part mission of education, research, and service. A biologist, he holds faculty appointments in both the UCLA College of Letters and Science and the David Geffen School of Medicine. He also heads a research laboratory funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The priorities Chancellor Block has set for UCLA during his administration include academic excellence, diversity, civic engagement, and financial security. He recently announced an initiative to raise $500 million exclusively for student scholarships and fellowships over the next four years.

As CEO and Editor-in-Chief, Adam Bly drives Seed Media Groupʼs overall business and content strategy.

At the age of 16, Adam became the youngest researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, where he spent three years working with a team studying cell adhesion and cancer. While at NRC, Adam identified a cultural shift in the making: science is transforming business, politics, the arts and current affairs unlike ever before; today, science affects every single person on the planet and science literacy is essential to modern society. Adam set out to launch a new type of magazine that captured the ideas, issues, and icons shaping this global science culture. With the receipt of the 2006 Independent Press Award for Best Science and Technology Coverage, it was noted that “the best comparison for Seed is the early years of Rolling Stone, when music was less a subject than a lens for viewing culture.” Under Adam’s leadership, the magazine received two National Magazine Award nominations in 2007, for Best Design and for General Excellence, the magazine industry’s highest honor. Seed is now the flagship division of Seed Media Group, a science media company Adam founded in 2005 to extend the magazine’s mission to other platforms and markets.

Since 2000, George Campbell has been president of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, an all honors college and one of America’s most selective institutions of higher education.  Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Campbell, a physicist, held various R&D and management positions at AT&T Bell Laboratories and served as CEO of NACME Inc.  He’s a Director of Consolidated Edison, Inc., Barnes and Noble Inc. and a Trustee of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Montefiore Medical Center, the Institute of International Education and The New York Hall of Science.  Earlier in his career, Campbell served on the faculties of Nkumbi International College in Zambia and Syracuse University.  He has published numerous papers in physics and science and technology policy and is co-editor of Access Denied: Race, Ethnicity and the Scientific Enterprise.  A former Simon Guggenheim Scholar, he’s a Fellow of the AAAS and the New York Academy of Sciences.  Campbell earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Syracuse University, a B.S. in physics from Drexel University and is a graduate of the Yale Executive Management Program. 

Ryan Chin is a fourth-year PhD student at the MIT Media laboratory in the Smart Cities research group. He is building the car of the future – a foldable, stackable, sharable, electric, two-passenger city vehicle that rethinks urban mobility. This work, in collaboration with General Motors, takes into account problems of parking, congestion, energy efficiency, pollution, communication, and considers the best and most efficient uses of available resources in urban environments. In 2007 Chin lead a team of Media Lab students in the creation of the RoboScooter – a lightweight electric folding scooter designed as a clean, green mobility solution for today’s crowded cities. The RoboScooter is a collaboration between the Smart Cities group and Media Lab sponsors Sanyang Motors (SYM) and Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan (ITRI). The full-scale working prototype was exhibited at the Milan Motorshow in November 2007. Both key projects serve as platforms for investigating urban design, mass-customization, personalization in product-development processes, and MIT Media Lab technological innovation.

Wayne Clough is the 12th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, leading the world’s largest museum and research complex with 19 museums, nine research centers, the National Zoo and research activities in more than 90 countries. A civil engineer, Clough served as president of the Georgia Institute of Technology for 14 years before coming to the Smithsonian in July 2008.

At the Smithsonian, Clough has initiated a long-range strategic planning process that will define the Smithsonian’s focus for the future. He is working to expand the Smithsonian’s global relevance and help our nation shape its future through research, education, and scientific discovery on major topics of the day. In addition, Clough has initiated plans to digitize many of the 137 million objects in the Smithsonian’s collection, ensuring that these one-of-a-kind specimens and artifacts and their accompanying information are accessible worldwide.

Tomás Díaz de la Rubia is the Chief Research and Development Officer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), responsible for the quality and strategic direction of the science and technology portfolio at LLNL. He is also the Principal Deputy in the Science and Technology Principal Directorate at LLNL, with a multidisciplinary staff of 3300 people. The focus of his scientific work has been the investigation, via large-scale computer simulation, of defects, diffusion, and microstructure evolution in materials in extreme environments.

Ben Fry is director of Seed Visualization and its Phyllotaxis Lab, a design laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts focused on understanding complex data.

Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. At the end of 2007, he finished writing Visualizing Data for O’Reilly.

Klaus G. Hoehn is Vice President, Advanced Technology and Engineering, a position he has held since January 2006.  He is responsible for directing advanced technology development and engineering services that support worldwide agricultural, construction, and commercial and consumer equipment design and manufacturing.

Hoehn joined Deere & Company in 1992 as Manager, Engineering, at John Deere Werke, Mannheim, Germany.  He transferred to the company’s Product Engineering Center in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1997, where he served as Manager, Worldwide Core Technology and Component Engineering.  In 1998, Hoehn was named Director, Worldwide Tractor and Component Engineering.

Prior to becoming DuPont’s CEO on February 1, 1998 and Chairman on January 1, 1999, Chad, 60, rose through manufacturing positions; led DuPont’s global Nomex® and Kevlar® businesses; and, from 1990 until 1997, served in a series of leadership positions in Asia culminating with his appointment as chairman of Asia Pacific.  He was elected president of DuPont in 1997.  Chad started at DuPont in the summer of 1970 at the company’s Old Hickory site after receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Tennessee. He is a licensed Professional Engineer.

Dr. Ray O. Johnson is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of the Lockheed Martin Corporation. As a member of the executive leadership team, Dr. Johnson guides the Corporation’s technology vision and provides corporate leadership in the strategic areas of technology and engineering, which include more than 71,000 people working on more than 4,000 programs. Dr. Johnson also leads the Corporation’s Advanced Concepts Organization and the Center for Innovation, a world-class laboratory for collaborative experimentation and analysis involving Lockheed Martin, its customers, and industry partners.

Claudia Kotchka is a Senior Executive and Change Agent who successfully led an innovation culture transformation at Procter & Gamble. She is recognized for integrating design, innovation, and strategy. A pioneer in innovation practices, Claudia is acknowledged for strategic thinking, organization development and marketing expertise. She globalized the design capability at P&G by establishing design centers in Geneva, Brussels, Singapore, Guangzhou, Kobe, Caracas, Santiago, and Panama. P&G is now a leader in the strategic use of design for innovation.

Julie Lasky is editor of Change Observer, a forthcoming online magazine devoted to design for social impact that is affiliated with the popular website Design Observer (http://www.designobserver.com). Prior to that she was editor-in-chief of I.D., the award-winning magazine of international design. A widely published writer and critic, she has contributed to the New York Times, Metropolis, Dwell, Architecture, Slate, Surface, The National Scholar, and NPR, and she is the author of two books: Borrowed Design: Use and Abuse of Historical Form (written with Steven Heller) and Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry.

C. D. (Dan) Mote, Jr. is currently president of the University of Maryland and Glenn L. Martin Institute Professor of Engineering. Prior to assuming the presidency at Maryland, Dr. Mote served as vice chancellor at Berkeley, held an endowed chair in Mechanical Systems and was president of the UC Berkeley Foundation. He has served as vice chair of the Department of Defense Basic Research Committee, and is a member of the Council of the National Academy of Engineering. His science policy work includes serving on the committee that authored the National Academies’ “Rising above the Gathering Storm” report and participating in the Leadership Council of the National Innovation Initiative, an activity of the Council on Competitiveness.

Sendhil Mullainathan is a professor of economics at Harvard, is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is a co-founder of MIT Poverty Action Lab and co-founder and managing director of the think tank Ideas 42.

David Nicholson graduated in Pharmacology from the Universities of Manchester (BSc) and Wales (PhD).  He has been employed in the pharmaceutical industry since 1978.

David initially worked for Beecham at their research facility in Germany (1978-1988).  He joined Organon in 1988 as Department Head, Pharmacology in Newhouse, Scotland.  Following positions as Program Vice President of CV and CNS R&D, he was head of research in the Netherlands and globally, before becoming head of R&D for Organon. 

David is presently Senior Vice President, Global Project Management and Drug Safety, at Schering-Plough.

Cory Ondrejka is EMI Music’s Executive Vice President, Digital Marketing.  In this role, which he assumed in March 2009, Ondrejka is advancing the company’s digital marketing capabilities, developing new consumer and market insight resources, and leading EMI’s experimentation with new digital marketing and product models in order to provide the best service to its artists and their fans. 

Ondrejka was formerly EMI’s Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy.  Since joining the company in 2008 from Second Life developer Linden Lab, he has helped create and implement a new digital strategy including building a world-class digital engineering team and infrastructure in San Francisco, instituting modern, agile software development practices and tools and helping to transform the company’s approach to analytics.

Created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Raymond Lee Orbach was nominated by President Bush to serve as the first Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).  On May 26, 2006, Dr. Orbach was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate and sworn in as Under Secretary on June 1, 2006.

As Under Secretary, Dr. Orbach’s primary responsibility was to serve as chief scientist for DOE, and to advise the Secretary of Energy on a variety of topics.  In addition to these duties, Dr. Orbach was also responsible for leading the Department’s implementation of the American Competitiveness Initiative, designed to help drive continued U.S. economic growth. He was also responsible for leading the Department’s efforts to transfer technologies from DOE national laboratories and facilities to the global marketplace, serving as Chair of the Technology Transfer Policy Board, responsible for coordinating and implementing the Department’s technology transfer and activities. 

Neri Oxman is a designer and researcher whose work establishes a new approach to design at the interface of computer science, material engineering, and ecology. She is the founder of an interdisciplinary design initiative, MATERIALECOLOGY. A graduate of the AA School of Architecture and previously a medical scholar at the Hebrew University and the Technion Institute of Technology, she is currently based at MIT where she is a presidential research fellow and a PhD candidate in Design Computation.

Mr. Phillips is credited with launching the PDA, Cable Modem, Fixed Cellular, Time Magazine’s Medical Invention of the Year- the VeinViewer, and the world’s largest provider of digital imaging infrastructure for the internet, in such areas as online real estate, auction listings, and classified ads.

Throughout his business career, Jim has held numerous prominent positions and has founded and co-founded many successful corporations. He was formerly Vice President of Nortel Networks; President & Co-Founder of SkyTel - the nation’s largest messaging company; President & Vice Chairman of Telular Corp.; Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Motorola, PCS and Multimedia divisions, where his team invented the cable modem. Mr. Phillips has also served as Senior Vice-President of Marketing of Mobilecomm, the second largest provider of cellular and paging services in the U.S.

Jim also Co-Founded iPIX Corporation where he served as Chairman and CEO. During his tenure with iPIX, he led the company to become what Forbes called “the Kodak of the Internet.” Additionally, Jim also founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Snowflake Corporation - a leader in biometric identification, and has served as CEO in Residence and Special Advisor to the Private Equity and Investment Banking Groups at Morgan Keegan & Co.

David E. Shaw serves as chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research and as a senior research fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University.  He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980, served on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Columbia until 1986, and founded the D. E. Shaw group in 1988.  Since 2001, Dr. Shaw has been involved in full-time, hands-on research in the field of computational biochemistry.  His lab is currently involved in the development of new algorithms and machine architectures for high-speed molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules, and in the application of such simulations to basic scientific research and computer-assisted drug design.  In 1994, President Clinton appointed Dr. Shaw to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.  He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected to the board of directors of the latter in 1998.

Lou Anna K. Simon is the 20th president of Michigan State University, leading the way to Advancing Knowledge and Transforming Lives. She served as provost and vice president for academic affairs from 1993-2004, interim president in 2003 and was appointed president by the MSU Board of Trustees in January 2005.

President Simon has a distinguished history with MSU. After earning her doctorate in administration and higher education from MSU in 1974, she became a member of the MSU faculty and assistant director of the Office of Institutional Research (now the Office of Planning and Budgets). From there, she moved into a variety of administrative roles, including assistant provost for general academic administration during the 1980s and associate provost in the early 1990s.

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute as a Distinguished Professor in 2003, he was the leader, and founder, of the high-energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he is one of only approximately ten Senior Fellows.  In 2006 Dr. West was named as one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.”

Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1929. He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he taught for four decades, receiving both of its college-wide teaching awards. He is currently University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard, and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He is the recipient of more than 100 international medals and awards, including the National Medal of Science; the International Prize for Biology from Japan; the Catalonia Prize of Spain; the Presidential Medal of Italy; the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, given in fields of science not covered by the Nobel Prize; and for his conservation efforts, the Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society.

Deborah L. Wince-Smith is the president of the Council on Competitiveness, the only place where CEOs, labor leaders, and university presidents are working together to ensure that Americans prosper in the global economy. Founded in 1986, this unique business-labor-academia coalition recommends actionable public policy solutions to make America more competitive in the global marketplace.

Wince-Smith is internationally renowned as a leading voice on competitiveness, innovation strategy, science and technology policy, energy, education, economics, and business.

As president of the Council, Wince-Smith spearheaded the groundbreaking National Innovation Initiative (NII), which played a pivotal role in creating a reinvigorated U.S. competitiveness movement. The NII shaped the bipartisan America COMPETES Act, created state and regional innovation initiatives, and brought a global focus to innovation.