Robert R. Harmon is Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Service Innovation and Cameron Research Fellow at Portland State University. He held positions as Chair of the Marketing Department, Founder and Director of the Management of Innovation and Technology MBA Program, and Joint Professor of Engineering & Technology Management in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. His areas of expertise are service innovation, product development, marketing strategy and research. He holds a Ph.D. in Marketing and Information Systems from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and B.S. and MBA degrees in Finance from California State University, Long Beach.
Dr. Harmon is a recipient of the Oregon State Legislature’s Faculty Excellence Award and the Tektronix Teaching Excellence Award. He is an American Marketing Association Doctoral Fellow. Previous faculty affiliations include the University of Oregon Executive MBA Program, Oregon Health & Science University MBA Program, Arizona State University, and the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird).
Dr. Harmon has over 30 years’ experience in industries that include finance, semiconductors, information systems, healthcare, renewable energy, displays, and software. Industry positions include Financial Analyst, VP of Marketing, Director of Marketing and Sales, Director of Strategic Planning, and Director of Service Innovation & Development for firms in the pharmaceuticals, mobile payments, IT portfolio management, and water infrastructure industries. He has worked for over 17 years as a consulting partner with Oregon-based L.B. Day & Company, Inc., a strategic planning consultancy, in the areas of business strategy, market intelligence, and forecasting.
Dr. Harmon serves as Senior Editor and editorial board member for the Electronic Markets journal and on the editorial boards of Technological Forecasting and Social Change and the International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management. He is a former Associate Editor-in-Chief for IEEE IT Professional Magazine, a publication of the IEEE Computer Society. Dr. Harmon has published over 100 research articles and conference papers in addition to delivering academic presentations, keynote addresses, and workshops at research conferences, universities, corporations, and government agencies both domestically and internationally.
Dr. Harmon’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Intel Corporation, IBM, WebMD, and Tata Consultancy Services, among others. His current research interests focus on service innovation and the strategic transformation of manufacturing firms from a product focus to service-innovation driven business models. He recently published Cloud as a Service: Understanding the Service Innovation Ecosystem, Apress Publishers, with Dr. Enrique Castro-Leon, a leading cloud technologist and strategist at Intel Corporation. Dr. Harmon is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the International Society of Service
Innovation Professionals (ISSIP).
