Dwayne Spradlin, President and Chief Executive Officer, InnoCentive

Topic: “The Innovation Revolution: It’s All about Crowdsourcing”

Dwayne Spradlin has spent nearly 25 years driving business performance to its limits. He is intensely focused on two goals: finding new ways to unleash and focus human potential on solving particularly daunting problems, and defining the role of leadership in driving change in our businesses and culture.

Dwayne has served as President & Chief Executive Officer of InnoCentive, Inc., the global leader in Challenge Driven Innovation, since 2006 (www.innocentive.com). InnoCentive’s clientele consists of over 300,000 of the brightest minds in the world who have registered as problem Solvers, on the one hand, and on the other hand companies, foundations, and governmental agencies that offer cash prizes to the Solvers for providing solutions to their problems that are expressed as Challenges posted on the InnoCentive web site.  As examples, recent Challenges offer $100,000 to a Solver who knows how to create glucose-responsive insulin for better treatment of diabetes, $25,000 for original science lesson plans for grades 6-8, and $25,000 for a solution to street potholes.

Mr. Spradlin’s previous positions include: President of Hoover’s Online, the leading business information company; President and Chief Operating Officer of StarCite Inc., an online meeting and events planning business; Senior Vice President at VerticalNet Inc., the world’s largest portfolio of online industry marketplaces; and Director at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where he spent ten years delivering technology and e-business solutions to Fortune 500 clients. He is frequently interviewed and has been featured on CNBC, ABC, NPR, and BBC and quoted in the Economist, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and many other journals and periodicals. In April 2011, Dwayne and Alph Bingham, co-founder of InnoCentive, co-authored the groundbreaking book, The Open Innovation Marketplace, published by FT Press. 

Dwayne holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics as well as an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. He lives in Southlake, Texas with his wife and three children.