Larry Downes

Keynote Speaker

Larry Downes's Biography

Larry Downes is an expert on developing business strategies in an age of constant technological and legal disruption.
Downes is author of the New York Times and Business Week business blockbuster, "Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance" (Harvard Business School Press), which has sold over 200,000 copies and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five most important books ever published on business and technology.

His new book, now a best-seller, is "Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in an Age of Devastating Innovation" (Portfolio). Co-authored with Paul Nunes, "Big Bang Disruption" challenges the conventional wisdom of business strategy and disruptive innovation, arguing that exponential improvements in core technologies have created a new kind of disruptor enters the market better, cheaper, and more innovative than existing products.

He writes regularly for The Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The Washington Post, and CNET, covering the intersection of technology, politics and business.

He has written for a variety of other publications, including The New York Times, USA Today, Inc., The Economist, Wired, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Recode, The Hill, Congressional Quarterly, Slate, The European Business Review, The Boao Review, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Downes has held faculty appointments at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he was Associate Dean of the School of Information. From 2006-2010, he was a nonresident Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society.

He currently serves as Project Director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.