James McQuivey received his Ph.D from Syracuse University and also holds an MBA concentrating in marketing. He has been a graduate fellow at Syracuse University, research director at WGBH in Boston, and he taught marketing research and media management at Boston University’s College of Communication. At Forrester, Dr. McQuivey was a senior analyst and founding member of the online retail strategies practice, vice president and director of Consumer Technographics North America, Forrester’s consumer research effort, and he now focuses upon digital disruption of traditional businesses, primarily working with Chief Marketing Officers, and often working with companies in consumer media and consumer electronics. He is the author of Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation, and has appeared in numerous keynotes, publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on both NPR and CNBC.

Dr. McQuivey talked about the way digital disruption is changing the face of the innovation landscape. With 10 times more people seeking to bring their products to market and all doing so at 1/10th the cost, innovation is 100 times more powerful. He discussed how innovative firms have reshaped the paradigm of engineers producing what they can and handing the product off to marketers to sell it; now, successful firms are figuring out what the customer wants first, and then thinking about what the firm can reasonably produce to fit those customer wants. A lot of this innovation will take place in adjacent spheres, not the immediate ones that firms might think of, but that is the key to success in digital innovation.