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.
Mohanbir (Mohan) Sawhney
McCormick Foundation Professor of Technology
Clinical Professor of Marketing
Director, Center for Research in Technology & Innovation
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
mohans@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Prof. Sawhney is a globally recognized scholar, teacher, consultant and speaker in business innovation, modern marketing and enterprise analytics.
Prof. Sawhney has written seven management books as well as dozens of influential articles in leading academic journals and managerial publications. His most recent book, The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Business Decision Making, was published in October 2017 and was on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. He has also written a book of poetry called Love, Longing and Loneliness in 2014. His research has been published in leading journals like California Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Management Science, Marketing Science, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He is a contributor to Forbes and his articles have been published in Fortune, Financial Times, CIO Magazine and TheHill.com.
Prof. Sawhney has won several awards for his teaching and research, including the 2006 Sidney Levy Award for Teaching Excellence at the Kellogg School, the 2005 runner-up for Best Paper in Journal of Interactive Marketing, the 2001 Accenture Award for the best paper published in California Management Review in 2000 and the Outstanding Professor of the Year at Kellogg in 1998. He has been nominated for the Outstanding Professor of the Year at Kellogg in 2008 and 2009. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 2011. In 2014, he was ranked 16th on the list of most influential thinkers of Indian origin by Thinkers50 and the Institute of Competitiveness. In 2016, he received the Thought Leadership Award from NASSCOM, India’s consortium for the IT and BPO industry.
Prof. Sawhney advises and speaks to Global 2000 firms and governments worldwide. His speaking and consulting clients include Accenture, Adobe Systems, AT&T, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Dell, DuPont, Entergy, Ericsson, Fidelity Investments, GE, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, Honeywell, Intuit, Jenner & Block, Jones Lang LaSalle, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg Company, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Nissan Motor, Raytheon Missile Systems, Rockwell Automation, SAP, Sony, Teradata and Textron Inc. He serves on the boards and advisory boards of several technology companies, including Bahwan Cybertek, Cross-Tab Group, Reliance Jio Infocomm, Georama, Kognetics, LawGeex, PomVom, Pypestream, Sprinklr, Smartmedia, StartupWind and vMock. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Study for Business Markets (ISBM) at Penn State University and a member of the Advisory Board at Chicago Innovation.
Prof. Sawhney holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; a Master’s degree in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta; and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.
James Conley
James Conley is a faculty member of multiple schools at Northwestern and holds visiting professor positions at affiliated institutions such as the WHU in Europe. Beyond Kellogg he is a Charter Member of the National Academy of Inventors and served on the Public Advisory Committee of the US Department of Commerce Patent and Trademark Office from 2008-2012. His 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 the
California Management Review, Sloan Management Review and more mainstream media such as
The Wall Street Journal. Additionally, he is diffusing CRTI research findings through custom executive programs and authoring white papers on policy matters of interest to the World Intellectual Property Organization.
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
Holger Ernst is fullab professor of business administration, esp. technology and innovation management at the Otto Beisheim School of Management (WHU), Vallendar, Germany. He is a regular visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, USA. He studied business administration at the University of Kiel, Germany and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He received a degree in business administration (1992), his Ph.D. (1996) and the Habilitation (2001) from the University of Kiel, Germany.
Between 2009 and 2011 he was the chairman of the technology, innovation and entrepreneurship division of the association of professors of business administration (Verband der Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaftslehre) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
His main research interests lie in the fields of strategy, innovation, commercialization of technologies, new product development and intellectual property. He has published in leading international journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Product Innovation Management, California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, R&D Management, Research Policy, Small Business Economics and others. He has received multiple best dissertation and best paper awards. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and Creativity and Innovation Management.
Prof. Ernst has 17 years of experience in executive education. He has taught in multiple executive MBA programs, e.g. the Kellogg-WHU Executive MBA Program (since KW01), the Melbourne Business School Executive MBA Program (since start in 2004) and in various WHU and Kellogg Executive Customized Programs (e.g. for companies such as 3M, Dt. Börse, Esai Pharmaceuticals, Merck, L’Oreal, Süd-Chemie, Sony, Nissan, DuPont, Sita and Sony-Ericsson). In 2006, he received the Best Teacher Award in the WHU Fulltime MBA Program. In 2008, he received the Best Teacher Award in the Bucerius-WHU Master of Law and Business Program. In 2012 he received the Best Teacher Award in the WHU part-time MBA Program.
Prof. Ernst advises and speaks to corporations worldwide. Clients include, e.g., Allianz, BASF, Biocon, Bosch and Siemens Hausgeräte, Constantia Hück, Cognis, Dt. Telekom, Elster Group, General Electric, Henkel, Johnson & Johnson, LTS Lohmann, Novo Nordisk, Otto Bock, Randstad, Sabic, SAP, Sebapharma GmbH & Co., Siemens, Simon, Kucher & Partner, SITA, Swiss Re, Trox GmbH, Zühlke AG and others.
Prof. Ernst is co-founder of the firm Patentsight, located in Bonn, Germany, that specializes in the development and selling of software products and consulting services in the field of business intelligence based on patent data. He also serves on the board of start-up firms.
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.
Thomas D. Kuczmarski
Thomas D. Kuczmarski, senior partner and president of Kuczmarski Innovation, is a nationally recognized expert in the innovation of new products and services. Over the course of his career he has helped hundreds of clients, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 100 corporations, learn to systematically unlock the value of innovation. Mr. Kuczmarski teaches product and service innovation at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management where he is an Academic Director in the Center for Innovation and Technology. For more than three decades his executive education courses at the Kellogg School have attracted students from around the world. He is the author of six books and many publications on innovation and leadership. He is also the founder of the Chicago Innovation awards program that identifies, improves and celebrates the regional innovators who are making an impact on the commercial landscape.
Pallavi Goodman
Pallavi writes and edits business stories and case studies produced from the Center in collaboration with Professor Mohan Sawhney and industry experts. Her professional interests include issues and themes in technology, innovation, strategic marketing, and product management. She manages the Technology and Innovation in Development Fellowships, a unique program offered by the Center to first-year MBA students. Selected students participate in 10-week summer internships at social enterprises in India and East Africa that leverage technology for economic development. In addition, she manages the Center’s relationship with corporate partners. Prior to working at CRTI, Pallavi spent ten years in branding and communications for Chicago-area companies.
Rahi Gurung
Rahi Gurung oversees and manages operations and business administration 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-administration details. Gurung has held a position with the Kellogg School of Management for over ten years, working previously with the Marketing Department. He is also an entreprenuer, managing a retail business in the city of Chicago.
