Larry Downes

Technology, Strategy and the Law

Larry Downes is author of the Business Week and New York Times business bestseller, “Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance” (Harvard Business School Press, 1998), which has sold nearly 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, “The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces that Govern Business and Life in the Digital Age” (Basic Books 2009) offers nine strategies for success in the emerging world of information law. It combines Downes’s unique perspective on economics, law, and innovation in the digital age.

Downes is also a Partner with the Bell-Mason Group, which works with Global 1000 corporations, providing corporate venturing methodologies, tools, techniques and support that accelerate corporate innovation and venturing programs.

He has written for a variety of publications, including USA Today, Harvard Business Review, Inc.,Wired, CNet, Strategy & Leadership, CIO, The American Scholarr and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. He was a columnist for both The Industry Standard and CIO Insight. He writes regularly for both Forbes and CNET, covering the intersection of technology, politics and business.

Downes has held faculty appointments at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University School of Law, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he taught courses on corporate strategy and technology law. From 2006-2010, he was a nonresident Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. He is currently a Senior Fellow with TechFreedom, a non-profit, non-partisan technology policy think tank.