Joel West has been a lecturer in the Strategy area at the Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine since the 2013-2014 academic year. He teaches courses in innovation and entrepreneurship in UCI’s FEMBA and HCEMBA programs.

Since  2011, he has been Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, one of the seven Claremont Colleges in Claremont (40 miles north of UCI). He is professor emeritus at San José State University, where he spent nine years as an associate professor and then professor at the College of Business until retiring in 2011. He previously taught at Pepperdine, at Temple University Japan, and (from 2000-2002) at the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management.

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), New Frontiers in Open Innovation (Oxford, 2014). His other research areas include standards competition, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, open source software, international business and strategies for IT vendor firms. According to Google Scholar, his research has been cited more than 6,000 times.

He has a Ph.D. in Management from the UCI Graduate School of Management, 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. From 1987-2012 he was president and co-founder of Palomar Software, and today he is co-founder and CEO of a KGI-spinoff pharmaceutical company.

More biographical information is available at LinkedIn, from his curriculum vita, or from his papers indexed by Google Scholar. He regularly comments on the business of technology in his weblogs.

His UCI web page is here and his official KGI web page is at http://www.kgi.edu/joelwest