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, will be 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.
"To Dream the Invisible Dream" opened a special section of
the August 1996 issue of Communications of the ACM, entitled "New
Paradigms for Computing," edited by Ted Selker. It is posted here with
permission.
Some recent papers written by John Seely Brown
Curriculum Vita
Send mail to: John Seely Brown
