Jean Philippe Deschamps

Jean-Philippe Deschamps is an emeritus professor of technology and innovation management at IMD in Lausanne (Switzerland). He focuses his research, teaching and consulting activities on the management and governance of innovation and on the profile and focus of innovation leaders, those senior executives who stimulate, steer and sustain innovation.

At IMD, he designed and directed IMD's highly rated program, "Managing the Innovation Process" and was a key faculty member on "Mastering the Technology Enterprise", offered by IMD together with Polytechnic Universities of Zurich (ETA) and Lausanne (EPFL). He was also part of the faculty of the program, Driving Strategic Innovation, offered jointly by IMD and MIT, and of IMD’s High Performance Board program. In addition to these open-enrolment programs, he has designed and directed a number of specific programs on product management, product strategy and innovation management for a variety of multinational companies.

Prior to joining IMD in 1996, he was a corporate vice president with consulting firm Arthur D. Little (ADL). At ADL, he occupied successively the position of European practice leader for strategy consulting, then founded and became the Chairman of the firm's Technology and Innovation Management practice. He has close to 40 years of hands-on top management consulting and teaching experience with multinational corporations throughout Europe, the USA and Asia and has coached a number of start-ups. He has worked in most industrial branches.

Throughout his consulting career, he has dealt with top management teams and boards, mainly on strategic issues. He has served as advisor of several Chairmen and CEOs on merger and acquisition issues, top management evaluations and successions, and even a major "post-bankruptcy" company revival. For several years he served as external director on the board of a global Nordic $ 4 billion company and on the board of a highly promising, Nasdaq-quoted medical technology company.

Prof. Deschamps graduated in business management from Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) in Paris; from the European Institute of Business Administration, INSEAD in Fontainebleau, and from the Harvard Business School. He is the author of numerous cases, articles and book chapters, and co-author with Ranganath Nayak of Product Juggernauts – How Companies Mobilize to Generate Streams of Market Winners, translated in six languages and long featured in the best-selling list of the Harvard Business School Press. His last book, Innovation Leaders: How Senior Executives Promote, Steer and Sustain Innovation has been published by Wiley/Jossey-Bass in April 2008 and appeared in Wiley’s list of best-selling leadership books. His new book: Innovation Governance: How Top Management Organizes and Mobilizes for Innovation, co-authored with Beebe Nelson, has been published by Wiley/Jossey-Bass, in April 2014.

He has given conferences and lectures throughout the world, including twice in front of heads of states and entire governments, as well as at the prestigious 2010 Millenium Prize in Helsinki, the equivalent of the “Nobel prize” for technology. He was a regular speaker at Management Centre Europe in Brussels and was invited three times as a speaker and faculty facilitator at workshops organized by the International Association of Product Development (IAPD) in the US, and twice as a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos.