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John Seely Brown is currently a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center at USC and 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. While head of PARC, He expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, complex adaptive systems, ethnographic studies of the workscape and both MEMS & NANO technologies. He was a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). John, or as he is often called—JSB— is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and of AAAS and a Trustee of Brown University and the MacArthur Foundation. He serves on numerous public boards of directors (Amazon, Corning, Polycom, Varian Medical Systems) and on various private boards. He has published over 100 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business Review's 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, "Research that Reinvents the Corporation" and again in 2002 for his article “Your Next IT Strategy. With Paul Duguid he co-authored the acclaimed book The Social Life of Information (HBS Press, 2000) that has been translated into 9 languages with a second addition in April 2002. Also, with John Hagel, Dr. Brown has just finished a book The Only Sustainable Edge which is about how to do more with less. It also provides a novel framework for understanding what is really happening in off-shoring in India and China and how each are inventing powerful news ways to innovate. Part scientist, part artist and part strategist, JSB’s views are unique and distinguished by a broad view of the human contexts in which technologies operate and a healthy skepticism about whether or not change always represents genuine progress. Dr. Brown holds a Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan.