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Innovation Strategist

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Two decades ago me and my wife moved to California, USA with IBM to help save the world from the Y2K bug. After thirteen wonderful and adventurous years of three corporate tours (IBM, Siemens, UEI), one academic tour (Caltech University), surfing, cycling and prosperous family growth, we moved to South Africa to complete my PhD research there.  

 A jack-of-many-traits, never afraid to jump into the unknown to become an expert and to invent new solutions.  This will explain why my experience ranges from genomics, information technology, systems engineering, systems thinking, radiopharmaceuticals, intellectual property, innovation management and academic research.    

Successfully promoted 2 early stage inventions to investors which eventually received several million US$ in funding.  

US citizen.


(IMRI)
July 2016   -   Present (3 years)	South Africa
• Founded the Innovation Management Research Institute(TM) as a platform for future collaborative research and publications.
• In his PhD thesis he verified with qualitative data that the significant majority of corporations still underperform in the context of corporate innovation when measured against revenue, earnings and share price growth.
• From his early findings he postulated that while almost all corporations globally have a corporate innovation strategy in place, it is significantly inadequate to guide the corporation to deliver the desired growth results over a long-extended period of time.
• As a solution, he first architected the Strategic Corporate Innovation Management(TM) framework, and then thereafter he modelled a Dynamic Contextual Corporate Innovation Strategy Formulation Management System.
• This system was verified and validated against the historical events and data from Tesla Motors Inc., one of the most innovative corporations in the world.
• Collaborate with world experts in the field in various countries across several continents.
• Published a new article each year since 2015.
• With ResearchGate, he is rated within the top 8% in the world who started to publish since 2015.
• Over 15,000 views of his articles on LinkedIn, ResearchGate, SSRN, etc.
• This research was also peer-reviewed and accepted by Emerald Publishing, to be printed and distributed globally as an academic handbook.
• Negotiated an agreement with INTEUM Company to become the only independent INTEUM software consultant for the Southern African region.
• Automated and optimized the management of Intellectual Property (IP) at technology transfer offices at NECSA and at NWU, significantly reduced the time to produce reports to government from 6 weeks of 2 weeks.

South Africa
• Accepted an internship position at the university to continue PhD research.
• Had the open responsibility to automate and optimize business processes to increase productivity.
• Scouted and implemented Adobe PDF file format as the de facto new document standard for all forms and electronic signatures, which significantly reduced the operating costs on paper and printing machines.  This also significantly reduced the time to obtain several signatures required for forms driving business processes.
• Implemented the publication of a bi-weekly electronic newsletter with carefully curated information for researchers at the university regarding future conferences, collaboration and funding opportunities.  This significantly reduced the time to answer individual phone calls or to respond to individual e-mails.
• Scouted, evaluated, acquired, implemented and configured the INTEUM enterprise software platform to automate and optimize the management and reporting of the Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio's status and financial expenses as a replacement for distributed Excel spreadsheets.
• Acquired Adobe Dreamweaver to develop HTML5 and CCS pages for a new website UI to simplify navigation and to improve the UX for the Research Support and Innovation Institutional Offices at the university.

Research and Innovation Digital Business Analyst

(USA)
• Was hired by the VP of Global IT to ensure a flexible and productive software development environment within a rigid IT operations enterprise architecture.
• After a full contextual business requirements analysis, I evangelized the conceptual solution to allow software development to be done in the cloud on either an IaaS (AWS) or PaaS (Azure) platform.
• Took almost 12 months of due diligence investigations and functional testing to ensure cloud computing was a safe, flexible, cost-effective, legally sound and stable option.
• Eventually gained approval to migrate software DevOps from internal systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and architected an IaaS cloud computing infrastructure that including Active Directory, Group Policy Management, DNS, SMTP, NTP, FTPS, Antivirus, System Monitoring, Disk Encryption, and PowerShell.
• This provided the necessary flexibility for software DevOps and the corporation save up to 40% in IT hardware CAPEX and OPEX expenditure.
• Was also responsible for the production systems serving customers globally to provide fast and reliable services.
• Implemented SolarWinds monitoring systems to analyse system load, system status, system uptime and the necessary performance to ensure agreed Business SLAs will be met.
• Desktop support for software engineering users: included software, hardware, antivirus, network, access, upgrades, etc.

IT DevOps Systems Engineer and Cloud Computing Analyst

(USA)
• Established and managed a bioinformatics comparative genome sequence analysis research environment at Caltech within the Eric Davidson Laboratory.
• Increased Dr. Roy Britten's research operations throughput up to 50%, which enabled him to complete a new genome research project within 16 months.
• Managed the collection, storage, preparation, processing, analysis and display of genomic sequence data with bioinformatics or computational biology utilities such as WUBLAST and Biopython classes.
• Dr. Britten published his research paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
• Received recognition for my research contributions, see http://www.pnas.org/content/107/46/19945.

Bioinformatics Research Assistant

(USA)
• Was initially hired by Siemens as an IBM Lotus Domino expert to integrate the product with Siemens' own Teamcenter PLM product offering.
• Due to a change in the market that project was cancelled and I was transitioned to a manager who was to responsible to startup the Siemens software engineering performance and scalability lab.
• Was given 6 months to transform myself into a Systems Engineer to work with HP-UX, IBM-AIX, Windows, Oracle database as a DBA, Teamcenter PLM and afterward also had to pick up how to manage Apache HTTP Server, Windows IIS, HP OpenView, HP WinRunner, HP LoadRunner, Windows Perfmon, Cisco switches, EMC and NetApp appliances, etc.
• Also had to learn UNIX Shell scripting to automate back-end function and Java programming for front-end tools development.
• Developed and implemented a software system that completely automated the setup and installation of a server environment for Teamcenter PLM, reducing installation time from 3 days to 50 minutes.
• Eventually as more systems engineers were brought into the group, was given the responsibility to manage all operations and other engineers in the US$ +1million laboratory to deploy, configure and secure systems availability according to expected SLAs.
• Started to manage projects where new technologies in collaborative partnerships with other OEM Product Managers were tested to certify operational readiness to support Teamcenter PLM software.
• Wrote product performance data, technical research papers and chapters for the product deployment guide.

IT R&D Performance Lab Systems Engineer and Operations Manager

(USA)
• Responsible for daily operations, product innovation, business development and marketing for startup company.
• Developed company name, corporate logo, product pricing and market rollout strategies.
• Developed web site and e-commerce solution.

COO & Product Manager

(USA)
• Document and Knowledge Management expert, deliver Lotus Domino solutions at Chevron and Standard Bank.
• Specialized in Lotus Domino product deployments, integrated solutions with clients' infrastructures.

Global Business Services Consultant

Find out detailed information about Louis Bouwer, Innovation Strategist in Hartbeespoort, NW

Louis Bouwer: Innovation Strategist in Hartbeespoort, NW

Louis Bouwer

Caltech

North-West University

North-West University