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.
Recent posts
What was the biggest surprise of the year?
The continued success of Apple. It’s been a quiet period after Jobs’s disappearance and it is very difficult to step into those shoes,... Read more »
The global market for unemployment care is huge, waiting to be disrupted. The US alone spends ~$100 billion yearly on unemployment benefits. But the value of under-used resources is much bigger... Read more »
One purpose of writing this piece is a vague hope of being proven wrong by some economist who knows better than me. That would be nice. Because what I have come... Read more »
Yahoo + Tumblr is a good match because Tumblr has the huge and vibrant social network, but no revenues, while Yahoo lacks social, but knows how to earn money on ads.... Read more »
Meet VeeMe, my “virtual me” that acts like me and reacts like me. I’ve written about him/me before (here and here).
If you think VeeMe sounds creepy, I agree!... Read more »
This article was written by David Nordfors, president of IIIJ Innovation and Communication; Sven Otto Littorin, former Minister for Employment of Sweden; and Anders Flodström, vice chair of the executive committee... Read more »
Sand Hill Road is a chasm. On one side: the lion’s share of prime Silicon Valley venture capital firms. On the other side, less than half a mile away: the SLAC... Read more »