Visiting Research Scientist

Dave Blakely is a Visiting Research Scientist at IHMC. He is also an innovation consultant who helps his clients to explore links between emerging technologies, business opportunities and customer needs. Blakely’s project work involves helping companies to build innovative teams who can deliver breakthrough products and services to the market. He also helps organizations foster a culture of innovation to maintain market leadership.

Blakely helps global companies understand how attributes of Silicon Valley culture can transcend political borders and organizational charts. He also advises executives at a number of different technology companies, serves on advisory boards for business and academia, conducts innovation workshops, and speaks frequently to academic and business groups. Blakely serves on the UC Berkeley Engineering Advisory Board. He also is a faculty advisor to Singularity University, a new academic institution that understands and facilitates development of exponentially advancing technology to address broad challenges to humanity.

Blakely earned a bachleor’s degree in engineering physics with honors in 1982, and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a controls specialization with honors in 1983, both from the University of California at Berkeley. Blakely’s experience comes from 25 years at IDEO, most recently as Director of Technology Strategy. In this role he built and managed strategic business relationships with several of IDEO’s technology-focused clients such as Cisco, Johns Hopkins and Qualcomm. In his earlier years at IDEO, Blakely built and led the “smart products” business unit, which focused exclusively on electromechanical systems with embedded controls. He and his 35-person team provided the market with full-service design and development of embedded systems by assembling an interdisciplinary staff of human-factors experts, interaction designers, and electrical, mechanical and firmware engineers.

Working with his team, Blakely helped visualize the future of computing for Microsoft, created streaming media players for Philips, and created a new category of appliances for Whirlpool. Blakely holds six patents.