Solomon Darwin is an American professor of business and the executive director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known as the visionary leader of the Smart Village Movement and for developing "smart village frameworks" for rural villages with support of state and local governments in India and UC Berkeley. He published two books to support his thesis :"Smart Villages of Tomorrow: The Road to Mori" and "The Untouchables" and is known as the Father of Smart Villages.
Biography
Solomon Darwin is the executive director of the Garwood center at the Haas School of Business and previously was an associate professor at the University of Southern California from 1996 until 2005 before joining UC Berkeley. Under his leadership, the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at UC Berkeley established its first smart village prototype in India. Darwin defines a Smart Village as "a community empowered by Digital Technologies & Open Innovation platforms to access global markets." He argues that such villages are a means of "empowering people with access to tools, resources, real time transparent information and uninterrupted internet connectivity." Darwin has a BA from San Francisco State University, an MBA from Golden Gate University, and a MCCP from Harvard University's Graduate School of Business. As an expert on the subject of "Open Innovation and Business Models" with many years of corporate experience, Darwin is invited as a visiting professor to a myriad universities around the world: Shanghai Jiao Tong, Pecking, Wuhan, UIBE in China; University of Zurich in Switzerland; Cambridge, Oxford, UCL and Lancaster in United Kingdom; Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden; Aachen, WHU and Fraunhofer Society in Germany; University of Turku in Finland; BI Norwegian Business School in Norway; Moscow State University in Russia; Korean University in South Korea; Euro‐Med and EM Lyon in France; Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, IIM Ahmedabad, India, Stanford University and Claremont Colleges in CA
Selected publications
"Enhancing Your Brand with Open Innovation. Takeaways from Berkeley Innovation Forum 2019". White Paper, 2019.
"Prototyping a Scalable Smart Village ". Harvard Business Review, 2018.
"Smart Villages of Tomorrow: The Road to Mori." Peaceful Evolution Publishing, 2018.
"The Untouchables: Three Generations of Triumph Over Torment". Peaceful Evolution Publishing, 2018.
"Digital Transformation for Sustainability. Takeaways from WOIC 2018 practitioner sessions". White Paper, 2018.
"Managerial Takeaways. What We Learned From the Academic Sessions at WOIC 2018". White Paper, 2018.
"Creating Business Value from Open Innovation. Takeaways from Berkeley Innovation Forum 2018". White Paper, 2018.
"Prototyping a Scalable Smart Village to Simultaneously Create Sustainable Development and Enterprise Growth Opportunities". Harvard Business Review, 2017.
"Strategizing open innovation: How middle managers work with performance indicators". Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2017.
"Smart Village Ecosystems. An Open Innovation Approach". White Paper prepared for Bill Gates and Hon. Chief Minister Naidu of Andhra Pradesh, 2017.
"Solving Business Model Challenges. Takeaways from WOIC 2017 practitioner sessions". White Paper, 2017.
"HCL's Digital Open Innovation: Enhancing Business Model Effectiveness through Talent and Customer Acquisition, Development, and Retention." Harvard Business Review , 2015.
"Community Outreach Clinics: Sustainability, Schooling Dental Students and Overcoming Oral Health Inequalities". Journal of Dental Research, 2015.
