Banny Banerjee

Banny Banerjee is Director of Stanford ChangeLabs, and teaches Design Innovation and Strategy at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (Stanford University's d.school). His area of expertise is the use of Design Thinking for strategic initiatives and large-scale transformations directed towards sustainable futures. He founded Stanford ChangeLabs, which has ongoing research in Innovation Methodologies and transdisciplinary initiatives aimed at developing a new field: Innovation of Scaled Transformations.

His research initiatives are centered on processes, paradigms, and integrated strategies to address complex challenges such as the future of water, energy, governance systems, and organizational transformations. He is active in helping academic and corporate organizations create new innovation programs and institutions. His work involves combining innovation methodologies with social entrepreneurship, behavioral economics, business, and technology resulting in new approaches, which maintain necessary short-term advantages as well as long-term benefits.

Prior to ChangeLabs, Banny Banerjee served as the Director of The Design Program at Stanford from 2007 to 2010. He was responsible for restructuring the curriculum and rubric of the undergraduate and graduate design programs. During his tenure as director, Prof. Banerjee increased the applicant pool by over a factor of 3. Before his academic appointment at Stanford, Banny spent nearly a decade as a Technology Innovation Lead at the reknowned design firm IDEO.

Banny Banerjee is regarded as one of the leading experts on innovation strategy in the area of sustainable transformations, and is invited frequently to speak on emerging innovation methodologies. He has been invited as an advisor to multiple universities and institutions including Harvard’s Center for International Development, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Danish Design Council, The Government of India, among others. He is currently helping Stanford Dean of the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences Pamela Matson in shaping a new academic degree program around System Transformation, and he has been recently approached by the World Economic Forum to incorporate his methodologies into their processes.