Why Structure Is the Enemy of Innovation

Richard Dasher has been Director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center since 1994 and served concurrently as Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Systems since 1998. He holds Consulting Professor appointments in Electrical Engineering (technology management), Asian Languages (Japanese business), and at the GSB (with the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship). From 2004, Dr. Dasher became the first non-Japanese person ever asked to join the governance of a Japanese national university, serving as an outside Board Director and then on the Management Council of Tohoku University until 2010. He serves on selection and review committees of major government funding programs for science, technology, and innovation in Canada, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong, and he maintains an active management consulting practice in regard to company creation and growth, strategic management of technology, and new business opportunity identification. He is on the boards of several companies and nonprofit organizations, and he is an advisor to start-up companies in the U.S., Japan, and China. His current research centers on innovation systems and technology-and-business forecasting. Dr. Dasher received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics from Stanford University and is co-author of the book â??Regularity in Semantic Change.’ From 1986 – 90, he was Director of the U.S. State Departmentâ??s advanced training centers in Japan and Korea that provide full-time language and area studies training to U.S. and Commonwealth Country diplomats assigned to those countries.