Special Jones Seminar - Dr. Liz Gerber - Assoc. Prof. of Design, Northwestern

"Scaling Up Innovation": new socio-technical infrastructure for effective collective innovation.

May 24, 2017
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
Spanos Auditorium, Cummings Hall
Sponsored by
Thayer School of Engineering
Audience
Public
More information
Kathy DiAntonio

Scaling Up Innovation

Innovation offers remarkable opportunities for global and social prosperity, but is fundamentally limited to traditional sources of expertise and capital. Dr. Gerber’s research explores a future in which there is broad exchange of expertise and capital throughout the innovation process, expanding innovation beyond the formal organization. Latent in billions of internet users, connected via unprecedented socio-technical frameworks for collaborative work, is an accelerating future of collective innovation; the combination of volunteers and enabling systems that created the Linux operating system will combine again and again to develop new products once thought to be the exclusive domain of formal organizations. Developing the future, however, requires gaining insight into several core research questions: how to motivate and ensure high quality contributions, how to establish trust and reputation, how to communicate and coordinate with thousands of diverse individuals, and how to develop and assert expertise. Dr. Gerber’s work aims to understand and pioneer new socio-technical infrastructure that harnesses untapped resources, and to discover key principles underlying effective collective innovation at scale. Together these advances will enable a brighter future for collective innovation, innovation that is ambitious and wide-ranging in scope, and inclusive, distributed, and collaborative in execution.

Dr. Liz Gerber serves as the Charles Deering McCormick Professor, Associate Professor of Design in the School of Engineering and School of Communication, as Director of the Design Research Cluster, and as the Faculty Founder of Design for America at Northwestern University. She has authored or co-authored more than 50 peer reviewed publications and she has received major research grants from NSF, Mozilla Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Microsoft and her work has been reported in venues including NPR, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, and Sloan Management Review. She’s worked in entertainment, software, and healthcare industries, designing and commercialized products for global distribution. She received her BA from Dartmouth College in Studio Art and Engineering, and her PhD and MS in Management Science and Engineering and Product Design from Stanford University. Learn more about Dr. Gerber and her work at www.lizgerber.com and connect with her on Twitter at @elizgerber.

Location
Spanos Auditorium, Cummings Hall
Sponsored by
Thayer School of Engineering
Audience
Public
More information
Kathy DiAntonio