David Nordfors

David Nordfors is active in the field of science, innovation, and society. He is the CEO and co-founder of IIIJ. As the initial Director of Research Funding of the Knowledge Foundation (KK-stiftelsen) he designed and implemented the Swedish research funding system for university colleges, which broke down the earlier distinct borders between the universities and colleges as research environments and introduced a formula for collaboration between university and industry that became a standard. He was the first to offer colleges of art the opportunity to head proposals for research and innovation consortia, proposing that innovation may be driven by the meeting between artistic creativity, technology and business.

Nordfors was the founding Executive Director of the Center for Innovation and Communication at Stanford University, where he headed the Innovation Journalism Fellowship program. He is an adjunct professor at IDC Herzliya, Israel, and a visiting professor at Tallinn University, the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (Tech Monterrey) in Mexico, and the Deutsche Welle DW-Academy. He was Special Advisor to the Director General at VINNOVA, the Swedish National Agency for Innovation Systems.

Nordfors is on the Poynter Institute National Advisory Board and on the Advisory Boards of Serendipity Innovations, Discern Analytics, the Center for International Media Ethics, and the Black & Veatch Global Marketing Advisory Board. He was named to the World Economic Forum Innovation 100 in 2009, and was a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media in 2009 and Journalism in 2010. He headed the first symposium about the Internet in the Swedish Parliament in 1994. David has a PhD in Computational and Experimental Quantum Molecular Physics from Uppsala University, Sweden, where he was appointed as doctoral student by Nobel Laureate Kai Siegbahn.