Joel West, Ph.D. Keck Graduate Institute

Since July 2011, Dr. Joel West has been Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in Claremont, California, east of Los Angeles. He previously served as Program Director for the MBS in Business of Bioscience and Interim Program Director for the PPM degree programs, both in KGI’s School of Applied Life Sciences.

Founded in 1997, KGI is one of seven members of the Claremont Colleges. It has two schools: the School of Applied Life Sciences (established 1997) and the School of Pharmacy (established 2012). In the former, the largest degree program is a two-year Master of Bioscience (MBS), which combines science and business courses for students pursuing careers in biomedical, healthcare or bioagricultural industries. The school also offers the Postdoctoral Professional Masters (PPM), a unique one year business degree program for life science PhDs.

At KGI, Joel teaches business classes in innovation and entrepreneurial management, and supervises Team Master Projects. He is also active in KGI’s technology transfer efforts and is continuing his research on high-tech companies.

Biographical Information

An internationally known researcher on innovation management, Dr. West has been invited to speak at industry and academic events on five continents. He is particularly known for his work on open innovation, which includes being co-editor of Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Oxford, 2006) and New Frontiers in Open Innovation (Oxford, 2014). From 2012-2014 he co-edited the “Open Innovation: New Insights and Evidence” special issue of Research Policy. In 2014 he was named an associate editor of Research Policy.

His overall research program focuses on how technology-based firms combine open and proprietary strategies to create and capture value, with a particular interest in innovation networks such as innovation communities and ecosystems. He has studied a variety of technology-oriented topics, including renewable energy, technology entrepreneurship, intellectual property, open source software, and IT standards competition. He regularly comments on the business of technology in his weblogs, including Engineering Entrepreneurship (about technology-based startups) and the Open Innovation Blog.

He is professor emeritus at the College of Business, San José State University, where he worked from 2002-2011. He has also taught in MBA programs and/or served on Ph.D. committees at UC Irvine and other schools. He has a Ph.D. in Management from the University of California, Irvine and an S.B. in Interdisciplinary Sciences (Meteorology) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to becoming an academic, he had an extensive industry career as an engineer, manager and entrepreneur in the software industry.

According to Google Scholar, his research has been cited more than 8,000 times. More biographical information is available at LinkedIn, from his curriculum vita, or from his papers indexed by Google Scholar.

Contact Information

His contact information is:

Professor Joel West
Keck Graduate Institute
535 Watson Drive
Claremont, CA 91711-4817

Direct: (909) 293-8550 (preferred)
Office: (909) 607-0130 (no voicemail)
Fax: (909) 607-8086
E-mail: 

His official KGI web page is at http://www.kgi.edu/joelwest

Last Updated March 19, 2016

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