Overview
William (Bill) Clark is a technology industry leader, entrepreneur, inventor, and adjunct professor who is fascinated by the ever quicker pace and increasing scale of technology innovation and the resulting opportunities and challenges to society that these changes bring.
Professor Clark’s experience spans across Telecommunications, Utilities, Automotive, Public Sector, High Tech, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Petrochemicals, Retail, Consumer Industries, Sports, Healthcare and Education. Bill has held numerous strategic leadership positions. At SAP, Bill was a Global Vice President leading mobile innovation strategy and partnerships, focusing on AI, edge computing and computer vision. Bill was selected as Managing Vice President for Application Innovation at Gartner, focused on application of artificial intelligence, blockchain, user experience, and consumer facing application platforms. Prior to managing, Bill was a Gartner Research Vice President covering mobile and low-code application development, user experience, wireless networking, and location technologies.
In addition, Professor Clark held multiple roles at Ericsson, including Director. He was responsible for Ericsson’s wireless internet strategy, reporting to the CTO office and he led standards efforts in W3C/WAP that led to the adoption of internet browsing on mobile phones, and he led the team that created the world’s first Bluetooth implementation. Bill started his career in industrial automation at Texas Instruments, researching and implementing textual and graphical language compilers and writing operating systems and applications used for continuous manufacturing processes.
As an entrepreneur, he first founded a firm focused on mobile application development, and had customers as varied as the Chicago Board of Trade, WalMart, and Hersheys. Later he led business development in a field service management software startup (acquired by SAP) serving capital-intensive industries. He founded a third startup to focus on digital transformation through mobile applications, AI, and IoT, and led a small team that developed a machine learning library to analyze cracks in buildings and other structures as input for predictive maintenance software.
Professor Clark was awarded significant patent at Texas Instruments for Industrial Automation software tool and patent at Ericsson for context aware computing application for mobile phones, leading teams that have innovated, developed and marketed wireless products from 1G through 5G.
Professor Clark’s appointments as an Adjunct Professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Pratt School of Engineering allow him to explore academic research in AI and quantum computing and to share new frameworks that build upon the pillars of digital business: social, mobile, cloud, big data and blockchain.
Bill authored and co-authored over 200 pieces of research at Gartner, covering topics ranging from artificial intelligence, explainable AI, application development, blockchain, and context aware computing. He has presented on “Strategic Innovation in IoT and “AI-Human in the Loop” with Purdue University Engineering’s Robotics and IoT lecture services in 2021. As a lead analyst for wireless technologies at Gartner, Prof. Clark was quoted and interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, China Morning News, CNBC, and others and has keynoted at dozens of technology and business conferences.
Along with his teaching and research, Professor Clark consults on Artificial Intelligence (focused on responsible generative AI), Machine Learning (including devops), integration and dev/op platforms, application development, mobile, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and process automation.
Professor Clark holds an MBA from Duke University Fuqua School of Business, and B.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University.