Dr. W. G. "Will" Zhao is Assistant Professor of Organization and Human Behavior at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, University of Waterloo. A French-Canadian dual national, he draws on his diverse cultural and academic background to enrich his interdisciplinary research on innovation, exploring its myriad facets and manifestations. He earned his PhD from the French Grande Ecole EMLYON Business School and pursued postdoctoral research at Stanford University as a SCANCOR scholar. Before joining UW Stratford, he received his first promotion to tenured Associate Professor at an AACSB-accredited Canadian business school, where he had won several teaching and research awards at both faculty and university levels.
Dr. Zhao’s overall career goal is to advance Human-Centered Innovation Research (HCIR), focusing on innovations that fundamentally enhance human and societal well-being. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Dr. Zhao is interested in mobilizing approaches such as applied semiotics, applied AI, and multimodal analysis to investigate how innovations can improve quality of life, centering on sectors that impact well-being, such as health, education, and recreation. Dr. Zhao's current work addresses three main innovation areas: (1) organizational innovation, examining the processes of fostering, acquiring, and institutionalizing new innovations; (2) technology ethics, focused on the ethical implications of developing and deploying emerging technologies, including AI; and (3) applied machine learning techniques, exploring transformative applications within sectors that enhance well-being, such as health, education, and recreation. His research has been published in influential social science, engineering, and interdisciplinary journals, such as Research in the Sociology of Organizations and IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, as well as presented at conferences like the Academy of Management meetings. As a UW Approved Doctoral Dissertation Supervisor, Dr. Zhao welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in studying innovation interdisciplinarily, particularly at the intersections of organization, semiotics, applied machine learning, ethics, arts-based methods, and sectors that prioritize well-being.
