CRTI Team

Innovation Leadership

CRTI leadership, faculty and staff stimulate innovation activities by creatively combining and managing diverse inputs toward common purpose. Whether by conducting independent research, enabling others to do the same, networking the brightest minds worldwide or partnering with corporations to develop sustainable innovation capabilities, they exemplify innovation through collaboration.

Mohan Sawhney

McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology Mohanbir Sawhney conducts research in the areas of network-centric innovation, innovation typology, marketing frameworks, marketing in new media environments, and branding and social identity. His work on innovation typology has been published in publications like Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and the Financial Times. His work on the Innovation Radar™, co-authored with Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz, has been widely cited and used by corporations worldwide. He has also written extensively on community-centric innovation and innovation in networked environments in publications like California Management Review and Journal of Direct Marketing. His work on network-centric innovation was the subject of his fourth book – The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World, published in November 2007. He is currently developing models for a marketing process architecture as well as a framework for organizing and measuring the performance of marketing in large corporations called the Three Horizons of Marketing.

James Conley

James Conley holds faculty appointments at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. He also serves as a visiting eminent professor at the University of Brunei and as an adviser to the Åbo Academy of Finland helping to develop innovation capacity and the infrastructure for technology transfer to the general economy. His post-doctoral students are examining how intellectual properties are changing the nature of competition for firms in both developed and developing economies. This research examines public domain IP databases in a novel and rigorous manner and has implications for strategy, marketing and technology professionals. The outlets for this research include journals, management reviews and more mainstream media such as The Wall Street Journal. Additionally, he is leading workshops for academics and diffusing CRTI research findings through custom executive programs. Since 2008, he has served on the United States Department of Commerce Advisory Committee to bring research insights to discussions of innovation public policy.

Mark Jeffery

Director of Technology Initiatives and Senior Lecturer in the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation, Mark Jeffery has an active research program at Kellogg. His primary focus is on unlocking strategic value from enterprise technology. A thread that runs throughout the research is the importance of risk in managing enterprise technology projects. To this end Jeffery has developed advanced real options tools to analyze risk in projects. More recently, the empirical research has been extended to marketing. Jeffery leveraged this work in “Return on Investment Analysis,” a chapter he wrote for the 2004 Wiley Internet Encyclopedia, and the forthcoming Wiley Handbook of Technology Management. He has also developed 22 original case studies, which are published through Harvard Case Publishing and span the spectrum of enterprise technology management issues from portfolio management, ROI and program project management to real options and risk management.

Robert C. Wolcott

Robert C. Wolcott’s research interests focus on how large companies can innovate successfully to accomplish corporate objectives and how innovation can help local and global organizations achieve a range of commercial and social objectives. Wolcott has focused particular attention on corporate entrepreneurship—how established companies build new businesses. Wolcott also pioneered, with CRTI director Mohan Sawhney and CRTI alumnus Inigo Arroniz, the Innovation Radar™ and created a research partnership with the Nordic Council of Ministers to disseminate the Radar methodology throughout Scandinavia. In 2008, Wolcott joined Kellogg Marketing Professor Philip Kotler to investigate the relationship between the marketing and R&D or product development functions at large companies. The research has engaged professionals from more than 30 companies and will result in a set of principles for optimizing this critical partnership for innovation success. More recently, Wolcott has turned his interest in innovation to helping develop solutions to the global challenges of the 21st century, such as economic development, environmental sustainability and security.

Holger Ernst

Prof. Dr. Holger Ernst focuses his research interests in the fields of technology and innovation management, intellectual property management, new product development and entrepreneurship. His published articles have appeared in leading U.S. journals including the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management as well as the International Journal of Management Reviews, Research Policy, R&D Management, Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft and Zeitschrift für betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung in Europe. Prof. Ernst serves as an advisor to a variety of private and public European organizations in the area of technology, patent and innovation management. He is a director and co-founder of the WHU Biopharma Management Center and serves as a professor of technology and innovation management at the WHU – Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Management, Vallendar, Germany.

Bob Cooper

Bob Cooper is a Senior Fellow at CRTI and serves as a lecturer and academic director in the Executive Education program. During his 32-year career at the DuPont Company, he held numerous management positions over a broad range of businesses. In 1999, Chad Holliday, DuPont CEO, charged Bob with developing and implementing a process that would enable DuPont to accelerate its top-line-driven earnings growth. The resulting Market Driven Growth (MDG) process was launched across DuPont in 2000 and helped to build a multi-billion dollar growth portfolio for the company. After retiring from DuPont, Bob joined the Kellogg School where he created “Driving Top-Line Organic Growth,” an executive education program, and maintains a blog on market driven growth and innovation. He also consults on growth strategies and processes with major corporations, including recent clients LG Chem (South Korea’s largest chemical company), Microsoft, Applied Computer Services, Wolters Kluwer, and Raytheon Missile Systems. He holds a PhD in chemistry from Brown University, a post-doctoral fellowship from the California Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Delaware.

Mike Lippitz

Mike Lippitz researches and develops strategies, policies and management systems to enhance corporate competitiveness and government effectiveness. Combining experience in government, business and technology—and translating across those communities for high-level decision makers—has been the focus of his career. Areas of expertise include corporate entrepreneurship, innovation management, global technology scouting, and long-term science and technology management. His current research focus is finding and characterizing Innovation Communities around the world. His book with Robert C. Wolcott—Grow from Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation, released in 2010—sets out strategic options for large, established companies seeking to create new businesses on an ongoing basis. He advises private corporations and the US Department of Defense on innovation policy and practices.

Kristen M. DaRosa

Kristen DaRosa is responsible for media and corporate relations at the Kellogg School of Management. She joined CRTI in 2007, managing customized executive education programs for Nissan, DuPont and Microsoft. DaRosa manages digital marketing communications for the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN). DaRosa is also a communications consultant specializing in publicity and personal identification websites. She is a member of Vistage International, a mentor to young entrepreneurs and a collaborative partner with Chicago-based nonprofits.

Rahi Gurung

Rahi Gurung oversees and manages operations and business admininistration for the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation. In his current role, he is responsible for supporting the faculty with executive education programs and managing the CRTI's inner-admininstration details. Gurung has held a position with the Kellogg School of Management for over ten years, working previously with the Marketing Research Center. He is also an entreprenuer, managing a retail business in the city of Chicago.