Carlos Osorio

Carlos Osorio is Professor and Founding Director of the Master on Innovation Program at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez (Chile), fellow at the Center for Social Innovation at “Un Techo para mi País” (A Roof for my Country, a Latinamerican NGO with more than 20,000 active college and graduate students in more than 20 countries), and founder of Designing Better Futures InnovationLab. He has been visiting researcher at the Basque Institute for Competitiveness, visiting scientist at MIT Media Lab, research associate at the Information Technologies Group at Harvard’s Center for International Development, associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, among other institutions.

His motivation is enabling ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results by unleashing their creative capacities and reaching their potential. For achieving it, his research and teaching had focused on (i) knowing and understanding the processes, methods and techniques used by the most innovative teams in the World, (ii) developing ways for effectively enabling learning of those methods by “normal” groups of people, and (iii) democratizing such methods to those less advantaged, so they are better prepared to fulfill their own needs. He counts with several publications including “The Art of Failing” and “Critical Decisions for Innovation” in Harvard Business Review LatinAmerica, “The Missing Link: Why Does ICT Matter for Innovation?”, published by the World Economic Forum in 2008, the first research report about the economic impact of broadband in the American Economy (prepared for the US Dept. of Commerce), and “Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Internet Commerce”, as chapter in “Trust in the Network Economy” published by Springer-Verlag (Berlin, Germany), among others.

Carlos has advised companies and governments in the Americas and Europe, including some Fortune 100, on innovation strategies, processes and methods. He has been invited speaker to universities, firms and multilateral organizations in the United States, Europe, and along Latin America. For two years was host of a cable television program on innovations in Chile, he is on the board of “ForoInnovación”, an NGO leading the creation of innovation culture in Chile and, among other things, serves on the jury panel at Chile’s National Innovation Award, AVONNI.

Carlos holds a PhD in Technology, Management and Policy, and a MS in Technology and Policy from MIT Engineering Systems Division, a Master in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (as Fulbright Scholar), and a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Chile (with maximum distinctions). He lives in Santiago, is father to three sons, and enjoys hiking, running, cooking and playing the piano.