Creating the Next Generation of Innovative Practices

With the advent of the Internet Revolution in the mid 1990s, Susan Duggan co-founded the Silicon Valley World Internet Center to provide a neutral place to gather innovators from large and small companies to shape the future of technology innovation. With Deutsche Telekom as the first client, the Center took off, drawing in Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard Company in the first two years. Amdocs, Cable and Wireless, Fujitsu, IBM, and SAP joined over the next years, providing a strong base for a growing community of innovators willing to share ideas in this dynamic think tank and showcase for Internet-related technologies. From 1996-2009 the World Internet Center provided professional design and facilitation of internal and multi-corporate think tank sessions to its clients. The success of this methodology prompted SAP Research to engage the Center to run a multi-year series of two-day think tank sessions at their various labs around the world. The notes generated from myriad sessions at the Silicon Valley World Internet Center are still available at http://www.worldinternetcenter.com

After twelve years of providing innovation management services around the Internet “industry,” Dr. Duggan closed the company with the idea of opening a successor organization that could address topics around smart technologies and smart approaches to cross-sector collaboration.  She leads her company to bridge into a variety of industries and fields.

Susan Duggan, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Smart World Center, has spent the past twenty years designing and facilitating specialized sessions for high technology clients, for federal and state-based initiatives, and working with the agricultural sector.  Dr. Duggan holds a Ph.D. in education from Stanford University; a Masters and Bachelors of Arts degree from Stanford; and a Masters in political science from Université Laval. A Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, she is professionally proficient in German and French and conversant in Italian and Spanish.

“[Susan Duggan] is the rare professional that combines the skills of education and business and has the breadth and depth of experience to build new and highly innovative programs.” 

Robert O. Slater, Ph.D., Retired Director, National Security Education Program, Department of Defense