Professor W. G. "Will" Zhao is a faculty member of Organization and Human Behavior at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo. He holds cross-appointments with the Department of Management Science and Engineering and the Department of Systems Design Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering, and is a University of Waterloo-Approved Doctoral Dissertation Supervisor. A French-Canadian dual national, Prof. Zhao earned his PhD from the French Grande Ecole EMLYON Business School and pursued postdoctoral research at Stanford University as a SCANCOR scholar. Over the course of his academic career, he has received multiple awards for teaching and research at both faculty and university levels.
At the heart of Professor Zhao’s work is Human-Centered Innovation Research (HCIR), a field-forging research agenda that investigates how technological development—when guided by artistic sensibilities and ethical reflection—can meaningfully enhance human well-being. His multidisciplinary scholarship draws on diverse approaches, including linguistic and semiotic analysis, arts-based and embodied research methods, and computational techniques such as machine learning and data analytics. While his work originates in the study of business organizations, it extends deeply into adjacent domains such as arts and cultural institutions, education systems, and healthcare environments, where innovation plays a critical role in shaping human experience. His current research focuses on three interrelated streams that converge on the question of how innovations can be understood, governed, and reimagined in socially meaningful ways. The first investigates organizational innovation, with a focus on how innovations are generated, acquired, and scaled within complex and dynamic environments. The second explores the governance of emerging technologies, critically examining the ethical and regulatory challenges posed by developments in artificial intelligence and related fields. The third engages applied engineering in artificial intelligence and extended reality, designing and analyzing human-centered applications that aim to enrich experiential quality and promote well-being. Professor Zhao’s multidisciplinary orientation enables him to contribute across both the social sciences and engineering fields. His research has been published in leading journals such as Research in the Sociology of Organizations and IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. Beyond academic publication, he regularly engages with broader societal stakeholders through research partnerships, invited talks, and industry events.
In the classroom, Professor Zhao brings an integrative perspective to his teaching of organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, innovation, strategy, and design thinking. His pedagogy blends technological fluency with artistic, embodied, and critical practices, inviting students to engage thoughtfully with the interplay between the social and the technological. His aim is to cultivate not only technical competence but also the capacity for human-centered leadership in complex organizational and societal settings.
