SRI International President and CEO Curtis R. Carlson Named to National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

MENLO PARK, Calif., Aug. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- SRI International, an independent nonprofit research institute, announced that its president and CEO, Curtis R. Carlson, Ph.D., has been appointed to the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Innovation leaders selected to serve in this group will help support President Obama's innovation strategy by developing policies that foster entrepreneurship and identifying new ways to take ideas to the marketplace in order to help create jobs and economic growth. Carlson joins the advisory council along with a leading group of entrepreneurs, university presidents, investors and nonprofit executives.

"I am honored to be selected to serve as a member of this council to help move our economy forward. This is the best time for innovation with unlimited opportunities – it is potentially a time of abundance – but it is also the most competitive time. For a company or a country to thrive, all parts of the innovation ecosystem must continuously improve. Industry, government, and academia need to work together to create government policies that encourage and support innovation along with the workforce required so we can thrive in our innovation economy."

Dr. Carlson was appointed president and CEO of SRI International in December 1998. He created SRI's Five Disciplines of Innovation™ workshops, which are held at SRI and organizations throughout the world and are based on the institute's innovation best practices. Organizations attend the workshops to learn how to maximize the return on R&D investment and create high value for their organization and its customers. Dr. Carlson also co-authored the book Innovation: the Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want, selected by BusinessWeek as one of the Top Ten Business Books for 2006. It describes how SRI's unique process for innovation can be applied to all types of commercial and nonprofit enterprises, including the government.

Previously, Dr. Carlson spent more than 20 years with Sarnoff Corporation, a wholly owned SRI subsidiary, where he currently serves as Chairman. Over the course of his career, he has helped form dozens of new companies and products. He started and helped lead the high-definition television (HDTV) program that became the U.S. standard and in 1997 won an Emmy® Award for the team's outstanding technical achievement.

Dr. Carlson has been on numerous public and private boards, including Nuance Communications (computer speech recognition), Pyramid Vision (computer vision), Sensar (iris biometric identification), and Sarif (LCD displays). He serves as co-chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation. He is also a charter member of the Innovation Council for the World Economic Forum.

He has published and presented many technical publications and holds fundamental patents in the fields of image quality, image coding, and computer vision. He received honorary degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Kettering University. He received his B.S. in physics from WPI, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rutgers University.

About SRI International

Silicon Valley-based SRI International is one of the world's leading independent research and technology development organizations. SRI, which was founded by Stanford University as Stanford Research Institute in 1946 and became independent in 1970, has been meeting the strategic needs of clients and partners for more than 60 years. Perhaps best known for its invention of the computer mouse and interactive computing, SRI has also been responsible for major advances in networking and communications, robotics, drug discovery and development, advanced materials, atmospheric research, education research, economic development, national security, and more. The nonprofit institute performs sponsored research and development for government agencies, businesses, and foundations. SRI also licenses its technologies, forms strategic alliances, and creates spin-off companies. In 2009, SRI's consolidated revenues, including its wholly owned for-profit subsidiary, Sarnoff Corporation, were approximately $470 million. Sarnoff Corporation, a leader in vision, video, and semiconductor innovations, will be fully integrated into SRI effective January 1, 2011.

SOURCE SRI International

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