John Seely Brown (also known as JSB) is the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation.
At Xerox, he has been deeply involved in corporate strategy and in expanding the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, ethnographies of the workplace, complex adaptive systems and techniques for unfreezing the corporate mind. His personal research interests include digital culture, ubiquitous computing, user-centering design, organizational and individual learning. A major focus of JSB's research over the years has been in human learning and in the creation of knowledge ecologies for creating radical innovation.
JSB is a co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning, a non-profit institute for addressing the problems of lifelong learning. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He also serves on numerous advisory boards and boards of directors. He has published over 95 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business Review's 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, "Research that Reinvents the Corporation." In 1997 John published the book Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation by Harvard Business School Press. He was an executive producer for the award winning film "Art : Lunch : Internet : Dinner" which won a bronze at Worldfest '94, the Charleston International Film Festival. More recently, he has been awarded the 1998 Industrial Research Institute Medal for outstanding accomplishments in technological innovation and the 1999 Holland Award in recognition of the best paper published in Research Technology Management in 1998. The Social Life of Information, written with Paul Duguid, is available from March 2000.
He has a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Brown University and an M.S. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan.
As for recreation, JSB is an avid enthusiast of high-performance vehicles who likes nothing better than to take to the open road on his BMW R1100RS.