Center for Social Innovation

Published: June 28, 2010 Download  16 minutes, 7.6mb, recorded 2010-01-08

Named for the only insect that is able to move in any direction when its four wings are working in concert, the “dragonfly effect” has to do with how everyday people achieve unprecedented results in social enterprise through harnessing the incredible power of social media. In this university podcast, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jennifer Aaker introduces the dragonfly effect model to business school students at Stanford who want to learn how to use technology to advance business and social missions. Her lecture was part of her new experiential class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, “The Power of Social Technology” (PoST).

A social psychologist and marketer, Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research spans time, money, and happiness. She focuses on questions such as: What actually makes people happy, as opposed to what they think makes them happy? How do small acts create significant change, and how can those effects be fueled by social media? She is widely published in the leading scholarly journals in psychology and marketing, and her work has been featured in a variety of media including the Economist, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CBS MoneyWatch, NPR, Science, Inc, and Cosmopolitan.

A sought-after teacher in the field of marketing, Aaker teaches in many of Stanford’s executive education programs as well as MBA electives including Designing Happiness, Brands, Design & Social Technology, How to Tell a Story, and The Power of Social Technology. A recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, Citibank Best Teacher Award, George Robbins Best Teacher Award, and both the Spence and Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholar Awards, she has also taught at UC Berkeley, UCLA,  and Columbia. A homegrown Californian, Aaker has studied at the Sorbonne.

Resources

• The Dragonfly Effect
• A Kickstarter for Creative Types, a Stanford Social Innovation Review article (subscription required)
• Design Thinking for Social Innovation, a Stanford Social Innovation Review article