John Seely Brown is the Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. Prior to that he was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) a position he held for nearly two decades. At PARC, Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, knowledge management, complex adaptive systems, and nano/mems technologies.
John serves on numerous boards (Amazon, Corning, and Varian Medical Systems) and has published over 100 papers in scientific journals. He was awarded the Harvard Business Review's 1991 McKinsey Award for his article "Research that Reinvents the Corporation" and again in 2002 for “Your Next IT Strategy.” With Paul Duguid he co-authored the acclaimed book The Social Life of Information (HBS Press, 2000), and with John Hagel he co-authored the book The Only Sustainable Edge about new forms of collaborative innovation.
JSB received a BA from Brown University in 1962 in mathematics and physics and a PhD from University of Michigan in 1970 in computer and communication sciences