Contact Information
Dr. Will Zhao is a faculty member in a limited duties capacity at Ivey Business School, where he leads and develops cases on Entrepreneurship and New Ventures. At his home institution, the University of Waterloo, Dr. Zhao is an Associate Professor with Tenure in the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, with additional cross-appointments to both the Department of Management Science and Engineering and the Department of Systems Design Engineering. He earned his PhD from the French Grande École EMLYON Business School and completed postdoctoral research at Stanford University as a SCANCOR scholar.
Dr. Zhao's research program, Human-Centered Research on Innovation and Emerging Technologies, begins with a simple observation: innovations are rarely neutral. They often carry particular assumptions about attention, cognition, social relationships, and cultural context, and those assumptions may systematically fail the people who fall outside them. The program asks how innovation and emerging technologies might instead be designed, commercialized, and governed to better serve the communities these assumptions often leave behind, among them rural and underserved populations, older adults, neurodiverse users, and culturally distinct groups.
Recognized for excellence in both teaching and research throughout his career, Dr. Zhao bridges academic rigor with entrepreneurial practice. He has extensive experience advising startups from ideation to scale and consulting with large corporations on innovation strategy and the governance of emerging technologies, helping organizations build core competencies for artificial intelligence and sustainable enterprise. This deep practice in venture creation and organizational transformation directly informs his scholarship and pedagogy, creating learning experiences that integrate theoretical frameworks with real-world entrepreneurial challenges.