Dr. William H. Gruber is president of Cambridge Innovation Research (CIR) a consulting firm focused on the cultural and technological transformation in the delivery of health care.  Dr. Gruber’s health care assignments include:

·       consulting with Pfizer for 25 years, a time of extraordinary Pfizer progress in the use of information technology-enabled strategic business initiatives;

·       assignments with the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Research Association;

·       the development of a computer system for a large chain of nursing homes; 

·       providing strategy and information consulting services for Harvard University Health Services for over a decade;

·       Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Risk Management Foundation (RMF) of the Harvard Medical Institutions, the malpractice insurance company for the Harvard-affiliated hospitals and HMOs.  Dr. Gruber was a major force in launching an extension of the Risk Management Foundation scope from serving only the Harvard-affiliated medical institutions to a new business venture, funded with venture capital from the Board, to sell information technology-based systems, data and educational services to a worldwide market. In this assignment he assisted in the business planning to justify this venture investment and he was a  major player in the sale of the first two clients and the launch of these client assignments;

·       principal investigator for a study of telemedicine applications to be carried on the National Information Infrastructure.  His research on telemedicine was reported in Beyond Telecommuting: A New Paradigm for the Effect of Telecommunications on Travel and

·       teaching courses in health care economics and management as an adjunct professor in the Boston College Graduate School of Management.

See the Health Care section of this website for a list of Dr. Gruber’s publications and talks at conferences in this field.

Dr. Gruber’s teaching, research and consulting in health care utilizes his experience in how the research and development (R&D) invention/innovation process and information technology have transformed business and the practice of management. This focus of interest was launched in research for a doctorate in economics at MIT on how technology transformed the post-World War II economy of the United States. Early in his academic career on the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management, Dr. Gruber was the co-inventor of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) concept, a major contributor to the key ideas on supply push and demand pull in technology innovation (MIT Press), the integration of research and development with corporate strategy (American Management Association), and the technology factor in international trade and investment of United States companies (Harvard Business School). Dr. Gruber was a contributor to the launch of the MIT Sloan School Research Program on the Management of Science and Technology (1962) and the MIT Sloan School Center for Information Systems Research (1975). Dr. Gruber co-taught courses with the directors of these two pioneering MIT Sloan School programs.

Dr. Gruber’s research, consulting, teaching and publications in technology innovation and information technology-enabled strategy were input to the next stage of his career in which he focused on the transformation of business from experience-based intuition to research-based and IT-enabled innovations in the practice of management (The New Management, 1976). This book presented Dr. Gruber’s ideas from his MIT Sloan School courses for advanced graduate students on Strategic Planning, Management Information Systems, Organizational Systems, and Strategic Integration of Research and Development.

Dr. Gruber’s career went from academic to business when he launched Research & Planning, Inc. (R&P), now part of Commerce.One (NASDAQ), a leader in web-enabled eCommerce. As president of R&P, Dr. Gruber managed assignments with over a dozen major vendors of information technology and data services in programs of market niche dominance strategy based on understanding customer needs (client list includes IBM, HP, Lotus, Wang, DEC, Reuters, Telerate, and the Data Resources Division of McGraw-Hill). He also managed many business client assignments in the strategic use of information technology and programs of massive change management (reengineering).