November 18, 2004

Center fuels shifts in business

Corporate and non-profit executives went back to college last month for the First Annual Innovation Lab convened by Northwestern’s Center for Learning and Organizational Change (CLOC).

The forum was designed to give executives from Motorola, Exxon Mobil, the Department of Defense and other CLOC business partners an opportunity to explore methods for generating new strategies to make possible fundamental shifts in their professional practices.

Facilitating the program was Jeanie Egmon, director of CLOC, a community of scholars, practitioners and students whose aim is to understand and improve the performance of business and non-profit organizations by applying the sciences of learning and cognition to practical business issues.

CLOC is built on the expertise of the learning sciences faculty at the University’s School of Education and Social Policy, which hosts some of the top cognitive scientists and cognition-related faculty in the country. It serves as a source for understanding how the “knowledge” of the “knowledge economy” is created, shared and distributed across disciplines and industries and helps its business partners make use of this knowledge.

CLOC conducts academic research and offers undergraduate and graduate programs, business memberships and research efforts among academic and organizational thought leaders. The Center collaborates with faculty at Northwestern and other academic institutions, including those in business, engineering and computer science.