About the Academic Contributing Authors
Professor Gina O'Connor
Dr. O'Connor is the Associate Dean, Academic Director for the Radical Innovation Research Project, Director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship, and a professor in the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. She is also a founding partner of the rInnovation Group. Gina is a well-recognized thought leader in the field of innovation, having been widely quoted in The Economist and Fast Company, among other publications. Her fields of interest include new product development, radical innovation, technology commercialization, and strategic marketing management in high-technology arenas. The majority of her research efforts focus on how firms link advanced technology development to market opportunities.
Her articles have been published in Organization Science, the Journal of Product Innovation Management, California Management Review, Academy of Management Executive, and the Journal of Strategic Marketing, to name a few, and she is coauthor of the book Radical Innovation: How Mature Firms Can Outsmart Upstarts (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Gina is coauthor of the chapter “Bringing Radical and Other Major Innovations Successfully to Market: Bridging the Transition from R&D to Operations” in the 2004 version of The PDMA Toolbook 2 for New Product Development of the Product Development Management Association (PDMA). Her executive education experience includes programs with companies such as General Motors, IBM, and Albany International, and she is consulting with others to help them develop, embed, and sustain radical innovation management capabilities. Prior to joining RPI in 1988, Dr. O'Connor earned her PhD in marketing and corporate strategy at New York University, and before that worked at McDonnell Douglas and Monsanto Chemical.
In 2008, the book Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation (Jossey-Bass) was released based on the insights from the second phase of RPI's research. This book won the Strategy + Business magazine Innovation Award as one of four most influential books for 2008, along with Innovation Nation, Wikinomics, and Patent Failure.
Professor Lois Peters
Dr. Peters is Associate Professor, Lally School of Management and Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), New York; Area Coordinator for the Enterprise, Management, and Organization Group at Lally; and Director of the Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship Masters Program. As a board member of the IEEE Engineering Management Society, she organized three IEEE international conferences related to the management of technology and innovation. She was an invited visiting professor at the Max-Planck-Institute für Gesellschaftsforschung and has been an invited speaker in Japan, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), European Community (EC), Latin America, India, China, and Thailand, among other places. In 2000 she received an IEEE Millennium Medal. She is also past board member of the International Trade and Finance Association, a past Principal Investigator of the RPI National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored Nanoscale Engineering Research Center, and a past director of the Lally School PhD program. In January 2010, the first Annual Global Conference on Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation (AGCETI) was organized by Professor Peters and B. V. Phani of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT)–Kanpur, in India. She is a founding member of the Asian Entrepreneurship Association (AEA) and currently a member of the governing council of AEA. She continues to be an organizer of the AGCETI conference, the most recent one having been in December 2012.
Dr. Peters has conducted extensive research on technological innovation and entrepreneurship; on R&D globalization technological networks, including public-private partnerships; and on commercialization of emerging technologies. Her 1982 study, Current U.S. University/Industry Research Connections, sponsored and published by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), marked the beginning of a research stream and consultancy on the role of the university in industrial innovation. Since 1995 she has been studying breakthrough innovation and is coauthor of Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) and Grabbing Lightning: Building Capability for Breakthrough Innovation (Jossey-Bass, 2008). Current work on innovation includes institutionalizing breakthrough innovation through people. A recent stream of research in the latter area involves the role of emotions in the opportunity recognition process. Dr. Peters's work on breakthrough innovation provides a foundation for her research on decision making under uncertainty in the international context. She is part of a team of six (two of the collaborators are professors at the IIT-Kanpur in India) who built the Strategic Innovation Game (SIG), an interactive digital workbook that is employed for education and research on entrepreneurship and innovation. Goals of this research stream are to investigate decision making under uncertainty, cognitive biases, and team behavior, especially international teams' behavior.
Dr. Peters teaches courses in business implications of emerging technologies, commercializing advanced technology, technological entrepreneurship, invention, innovation and entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, policy issues in energy and environment, and technological change and international competition. She has a PhD in biology and environmental health science from New York University.