William L. Miller

Dr. Bill Miller graduated with a BSE in electrical engineering with honors from Princeton University and received both his MS and PhD from Pennsylvania State University in electrical engineering. His PhD thesis applied stochastic information methods extended with an early version of artificial intelligence to enable people to detect and fix failures in complex, real-time systems such as blackouts in electric power systems and other systems such as political, economic or legal systems.

In 2005, Bill received an unique award from NASA as one of the Ten Best Global Innovators.

Bill has global experince over 30 years implementing innovation in business, but is best known for his work researching and describing the four generations of best practices in R&D and innovation management that have existed since 1900. The latest generation is the fourth generation (4G).

The best practice in entrepreneurship is now recognized as a subset of 4G which is Steve Blank’s lean start-up methodology (LSM) that has been by adopted the NSF as the core curriculum in I-Corps to teach university entrepreneurs attempting a startup.

For a number of years, Bill was also a university adjunct professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business teaching innovation management.

Bill is CEO of the Innovation Extension Center LLC that he founded in 2008 to help guide successful radical innovation projects in major corporations. From his experience as Director and VP of Research at Steelcase in the 1990’s, Bill became an expert in office design and the creator of a breakthrough design of facility space, furniture and information media for project teams.