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 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.
Prof. Zhao’s overall career goal is to advance Human-Centered Innovation Research (HCIR), focusing on innovations that fundamentally enhance human well-being. As an interdisciplinary researcher, he integrates linguistic and semiotic analysis, applied AI techniques, and multimodal frameworks to investigate how innovations improve quality of life across a range of institutional contexts—including health, education, the arts, finance, and various business environments. Prof. Zhao’s current work addresses three main innovation areas: (1) organizational innovation, examining the processes of fostering, acquiring, and institutionalizing new innovations in different organizational (and entrepreneurial) contexts; (2) emerging technology governance, examining the ethical and regulatory dimensions of emerging technologies, including AI, in both business environments and broader societal applications; and (3) applied AI and XR for welling, exploring transformative applications of machine learning and extended reality in health, education, the arts, finance and other institutional contexts where emerging innovations can enhance human well-being. 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.
