Dr. West combines a high-tech entrepreneurial background with more than a decade of leadership in graduate business education. He received an SB degree in Interdisciplinary Sciences from M.I.T. with a concentration in Meteorology, and has worked more than 20 years in the software industry as an engineer, manager and entrepreneur. He was co-founder and president of Palomar Software as well as co-author of the Modsim programming language.
Dr. West has earned a PhD in Management from the University of California, Irvine and taught at Temple University Japan, Pepperdine and UC Irvine before joining the San Jose State University College of Business. At SJSU, he taught innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship classes, and was co-founder of the SJSU Solar Workforce Project and Silicon Valley Open Source Research Project.
Dr. West is known as a researcher, public speaker, and blogger on the topic of open innovation, including editing (with Henry Chesbrough and Wim Vanhaverbeke) the books Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Oxford, 2006) and New Frontiers in Open Innovation (Oxford, 2014). His research has been published in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Technology Transfer, R&D Management, Research Policy, and Telecommunications Policy, among other journals.