Roger was an early member of the PDMA and attended the first PDMA conference held outside the US—in Montreal when he was a professor at McGill University. Roger received his PhD from UMASS Amherst. There, he worked with Parker Worthing, who provided a broader view to the concept that included marketing as well as other effects such as latent perceptions of price-led quality biases. He did a dissertation on market segmentation and learned two things: 1. Consulting jobs generate very good data sources; 2. His extensive computer work at the Smithsonian Astrophysics lab in Cambridge Mass. taught him (from the fellows studying the Red-shift and other celestial phenomena) that the simple but elegant model beats the overly complex garbage can model.

Roger went on to teach at McGill in Montreal. There, he met the enigmatic and inspirational Bob Cooper. While there were economists and engineers who itemized the steps in developing a prototype, none attacked the nexus of organizational factors, technological necessities, and customer dynamics both micro and macro as Cooper did. Roger wrote several papers with Bob and learned much more about the state of the art and science than he can ever enumerate. He increased his energy and learned to learn from managers wherever found. Cooper saved him from being too geeky.

After a term as associate dean for research & PhD, he worked part time at Rutgers with Bob Rothberg, who got him involved with Bell Labs. Un-Shelving technologies for monetization was INTERESTING and challenging. An exemplar was using the Voice of the Customer as post hoc calibration for VE/VA. He then moved to Kentucky. There he joined up with his former doctoral student Tony Di Benedetto. Tony is the co-author who was the perfect complement. They were matched very well in knowledge of economic theory and understanding of econometrics at a practical level and Roger says Tony exceeded him in talking efficiently to their principal data sources, namely managers. Tony and Roger wrote several books, many book chapters, and dozens of articles. Tony was the penultimate closer, who would check a few technical details with Roger and produce a finished manuscript in an afternoon. Roger moved on to Michigan State University in 1991 and established a very large course in New Product Development with Bob Hubbard, a professor of Engineering Mechanics and Biomechanical engineering. They matched marketing seniors with engineering students doing their final projects. The course was the largest engineering elective for almost two decades. The course regularly enrolled more than 250 students. The course helped generate multiple job offers for almost every participant. With some finances provided by an innovating provost, there are now more than 15 similar joint venture innovation courses including music, the arts, and agriculture. Not to allow the students to have all the fun, Roger and Bob designed CONCEPT AUCTIONS, SKILLS RENTALS, TECHNICAL Pull Lectures and various other tools NOT used in the 1990s.

Roger has 54,148 citations of his research and an H-index of 101, according to Google Scholar.* This is an extraordinary number of citations and H-index. He has over 400 journal publications and proceedings. His research interests included new product design & development processes and technological innovation and diffusion. His article co-authored with Rosanna Garcia, “A critical look at technological innovation typology and innovativeness terminology: A literature review” published in JPIM 2002 has over 5,000 citations.

Roger has approximately 38 publications in JPIM, most published with faculty who had been his doctoral students. He has also published in many other journals including Journal of Marketing, Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Operations Management, Strategic Management Journal, Decision Sciences, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. In 2009, he received the IAMOT Award for long-term research achievement in the field of technology management.

* The H-index is the number of papers that have received at least h citations. An H-index of 60 is considered exceptional.

Read Roger's full bio here.