David Ricketts

Dr. David S. Ricketts

Innovator, Scholar, Harvard Innovation Fellow

For the past decade, Dr. Ricketts, together with his colleagues at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center (TECH) at Harvard, has taught the next generation of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs how to create disruptive innovations.  His keynotes share those insights and, through entertaining real world examples, he helps leaders and front line innovators understand how to develop disruptive innovation in their organizations.

Dr. Ricketts has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations, such as General Motors, Disney Research and the U.S. Military.  His innovations have been featured in: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX News as wells as ESPN, Smithsonian Innovation and Popular Science. With an engaging and down to earth style, David works easily with organizations and individuals on many aspects of business and technology.  His driving passion is to understand how individuals create new value—and how to harness that understanding—for increased business growth.

Before joining academia, Dr. Ricketts was a former head of R&D in the semiconductor industry, where he lead front-line innovators in product development and research departments, from initial concept and intellectual property (IP) development through to testing and customer service. His work on identifying and developing high-value products in the corporate environment provides a real-world context for his research into innovation, and his process for discovering high-impact problems.

Seeking to innovate and solve difficult problems, Dr. Ricketts is an award-winning academic researcher. He has held appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and North Carolina State University.  He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Investigator Award. His work has appeared in the prestigious scientific journal Nature as well as many other leading engineering journals.