Creators

In 2012-2013 Dr. Robert McNamee & Dr. Andrew Maxwell embarked on a journey to re-imagine how technology commercialization could be undertaken by the university. For the past decade or more they had each been working on aspects of the problem.

Dr. McNamee has been focused on building structured creative processes that help recognize novel opportunities and generate high-potential ideas throughout a series of positions and research projects—most recently in his role as Managing Director of Temple University’s top-ranked entrepreneurial programs, as Assistant Professor of Strategic Management where he designed and runs a course on creativity & organizational innovation that has served thousands of students university-wide, and as a subject matter expert for the Industrial Research Institute where he has run a series of Research-on-Research projects focused on social networks, creativity, and innovation.

Dr. Maxwell has worked to formalize the process of evaluating technology opportunities while striving to understand investor decision making and technology-based new venture success through positions at the University of Toronto where he founded a technology incubator (the Exceler@tor) and taught courses in technology entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Business, as an industry advisor for CBC’s Dragon’s Den, as Chief Innovation Officer of the Canadian Innovation Centre, and most recently as Director Entrepreneurial Engineering at Lassonde School of Engineering.

Together they envisioned, tested, and evolved the Innovation Cartography process over several iterations and with the participation of hundreds of professionals, students, and technologists. The process they assembled built on the thought-leading approaches and research to provide a more structured approach to considering commercialization paths as well as for exploring adjacencies.