Dave Robertson is a go-to innovation expert for people charged with innovating around existing and mature brands. Dave has devoted his working life to innovation in existing markets and brings an uncommon breadth of experience and perspective to the subject. Over the past three decades, he has authored two books and dozens of articles and served as a practitioner, teacher, and ongoing student of the subject. For the past five years, he has led the MIT Executive Education course “Innovating in Existing Markets: Reviving Mature Products and Services.”
As Practitioner
Dave has served as a senior executive, including CEO, in four enterprise software companies and two consumer products startups. Prior to that he spent five years at McKinsey in the US and abroad where he led their Product Development Practice globally. He understands the pressure and challenges of innovation, particularly of established brands constrained by customer demands, company inertia, and market limitations.
As a Teacher of Innovation
Dave is a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and currently runs MIT’s largest and highest-rated executive program, the Executive Program in General Management. From 2010 through 2017, Dave was a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and from 2002 through 2010 was the LEGO professor of Innovation at IMD is Switzerland.
As an In-demand Author and Speaker on the Subject
Dave is a well-known speaker who addresses Fortune 1000 companies as well as general audiences on innovation. He has authored two books on innovation, the award-winning Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry (Crown, 2013) and The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, May 2017). He has also published articles or had his research featured in Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Strategy & Business, Sloan Management Review, The Financial Times, and many other business journals. He also was host of the radio show Innovation Navigation while at Wharton where he interviewed leaders around the world about creativity in business.
As a Member of the Cherokee Nation
Dave was raised by his father as a member of the Cherokee nation and has long studied the values and practices of this community. Through his study, Dave recognized the deep insights that come from understanding the perspectives and passions of a specific community groups. This has afforded him an uncommon lens on creating meaningful innovation, and his driving his current work on community-centered innovation.