Andrew B. Hargadon, Ph.D.

Andrew Hargadon is the Charles J. Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Technology Management at the Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis and a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation.

He is the author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate (Harvard Business School Press 2003). His research focuses on the effective management of innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly in the development and commercialization of sustainable technologies. He has written extensively on knowledge and technology brokering and the role of learning and knowledge management in innovation and has published numerous articles and chapters in leading scholarly and applied publications.

His research has been used to develop or guide new innovation programs in organizations as diverse as Hewlett-Packard, Avery Dennison, Clorox, Edmunds.com, Mars, Canadian Health Services, and Silicon Valley start-ups.

He teaches corporate executive programs and serves on the advisory boards for Physic Ventures and American River Ventures.

As the founding director of two key centers at the University of California, Davis—the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Energy Efficiency Center— he is at the forefront of teaching, research, and practice in cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship. The centers are dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship and innovation through educational programs bridging science, engineering, and business and they provide a successful framework for university scientists and engineers to move their ideas out of the lab and into the world.

He received the 2009 Olympus Emerging Educational Leader Award in recognition for his strong entrepreneurship curriculum and success with the two centers.

He founded the Center for Entrepreneurship at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management in 2006. The center’s programs are designed for science and engineering graduate researchers and faculty and include four one-week entrepreneurship academies as well as a year-long fellows program. The academies provide a framework for universities to build a network between their research and the investment community and combine a comprehensive and pioneering curriculum developed by him with hands-on exercises that participants use to develop business opportunities and investigate the potential opportunities for commercialization around their research. The curriculum is taught by university faculty and practicing professionals: venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs, intellectual property lawyers, and others.

He also launched the nation’s first university-based Energy Efficiency Center at UC Davis in 2006 and served as the founding director. As Director, he built relationships with the three largest independently-owned utility companies (PG&E, Sempra, and Edison International), the California Public Utility Commission and the California Energy Commission, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in the market, and major customers like WalMart and Chevron Energy Solutions. The EEC works with faculty researchers to identify and develop the commercial potential of their research as well as prepares graduate students in engineering, science, and business to build successful businesses advancing technologies in energy efficiency, including buildings, transportation, and agriculture and food processing.

He received his Ph.D. from the Management Science and Engineering Department in Stanford University’s School of Engineering, where he was named Boeing Fellow and Sloan Foundation Future Professor of Manufacturing. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Stanford University’s Product Design Program in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Prior to his academic appointment, he worked as a product designer at Apple Computer and taught in the Product Design program at Stanford University.