Dr. Liisa Välikangas is Managing Director and Research Director of the Woodside Institute—a non-profit professional research organization dedicated to advancing innovative management practice and organizational resiliency in organizations of public interest. She founded the professional research group Woodside Institute with Dr. Gary Hamel in 2002. Previously, she was the Director of Research at Strategos, an international consulting company. Her research on innovation, strategy and organizing has resulted in a number of publications and presented to various executive audiences. Her research has won recognition in professional societies such as the Academy of Management where she hosted on All-Academy Symposium on actionable knowledge in New Orleans, August 2004. The Strategic Management Society also recently awarded her a prize for integrating theory and practice (May 2003, Connecticut). Beyond her research activities, she regularly gives presentations to executive audiences, including the annual conferences of the Woodside Institute. She is an advisor to a number of leading corporations and governmental organizations in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

For the past fifteen years, Dr. Välikangas has been a researcher and consultant both in academia and in the business world. At the Tampere University in Finland, she was a manager of the executive education program started in 1986. She was the senior researcher of the World Competitiveness Report, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, at IMD (International Management Development Institute) in Switzerland 1989-1992. At Keio Graduate School of Business in Japan she studied leadership and organizational change between 1992-1994 with Professor Akihiro Okumura and continued as a post-doc focusing on organizational learning at Stanford University in 1995, studying with Professor James G. March. At SRI International’s Business Intelligence Center in Menlo Park, California, she led the innovation and knowledge management practice between 1996-1998. She authored a number of research reports as part of the Business Intelligence Program and consulted to some 50 companies on their implications. In 1998, she contributed to the formation of KNEXUS, a research project on regional and organizational knowledge networks at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. degree in business administration at the University of Tampere in Finland in 1994.

Dr. Välikangas serves as the Honorary Consul of Finland in San Francisco/Bay Area area.

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