Larry Downes – Keynote Speaker

Larry Downes is an internet industry analyst and author on developing business strategies in an age of constant technological disruption.

Downes is author of the New York Times and Business Week business blockbuster, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance, which sold over 200,000 copies and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five most important books published on business and technology.

Another best-seller from Downes, Big Bang Disruption challenges the conventional wisdom of business strategy and disruptive innovation, arguing that exponential improvements in core technologies have created a new kind of disruptor, one that enters the market better, cheaper, and more innovative than existing products. The book argues that incumbents must radically change their approach to strategy to survive the devastating impact of these new disruptors.

Downes writes regularly for The Harvard Business Review, Forbes, CNET, and The Washington Post, covering the intersection of technology, politics and business, and has written for a variety of other publications, including USA Today, Inc., Wired, CNET, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and The New York Times.

Downes has held faculty appointments at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Northwestern University School of Law, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he was Associate Dean of the School of Information. From 2006-10, he was a non-resident Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. From 2014, he was appointed a Project Director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy’s Evolution of Regulation and Innovation project, housed at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He also serves as Research Fellow for the Accenture Institute for High Performance.