June 15th, 2009

Networks Are What Make Real Innovation Possible:
An interview with UC Davis professor Andrew Hargadon

By Terry Waghorn, Forbes Magazine

The next great life-changing technology may already have been invented. But it also may have been forgotten, left on a shelf gathering dust in some corporate or university science lab. How can that be, you ask? Because innovation becomes meaningful only when there is a network that can take that great idea and turn it into an invention that matters.

So says Andrew Hargadon, professor of technology management at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis, and author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate.

Hargadon, who is the founding director of both the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Energy Efficiency Center at Davis, is devoted to figuring out not only how companies and universities can continue to make more things possible through their research, but also, and just as important, how they can capitalize and bring to life innovations they've already come up with, by connecting up the realms of science, engineering and business.

The key, he says, lies in harnessing social networks to bring innovators and thinkers together with venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs, intellectual property lawyers and others who can help commercialize great ideas so they can change lives.

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