Gideon's Bio
Gideon Shaanan has been working with and contributing to Amirror since its establishment and with Dr. Amir Kfir years before that. Gideon brings his high-tech experience as an executive and an entrepreneur to help lead organizational change processes with client companies and cement them into actions. Concurrently with his work with Amirror, Gideon teaches, trains and consults on Organizational Entrepreneurship from his home base in Los Altos, California.
Gideon is a seasoned high-tech executive, consultant and entrepreneur with over 25 years of success in commercial development, innovation, productization, technology and management. Gideon has worked with large and small US and international corporations in various executive, management and consulting positions. Among these are Apple, National Geographic Society, Santa Fe Institute, Alchemedia, U3, Vitro, Soil Tech, UC Santa Cruz, FishWise and many other. As an executive, Gideon has initiated and led full product development cycles from innovation to market on a wide range of products with a variety of companies.
In recent years, Gideon has focused his consulting work on Organizational Entrepreneurship. Combining his experience, methods and connections Gideon, helps established companies to develop and/or recapture their innovative and entrepreneurial capabilities. Directly as well as through ecosystems, Gideon also works with young small startups that are looking for their early traction.
A foundational principle to Gideon’s work has been constructive and cross-functional collaboration, both internal and external. He welcomes and fosters collaboration in all its forms and manifestations, whether between individuals of a workgroups, between workgroups or between organizations.
Several principles of Gideon’s work, including those mentioned above, evolved during, after and based on his time at the Santa Fe Institute. They stem from the science of Complexity and Complex Adaptive Systems.
In 2013, Gideon helped found the Technology Ventures Launch Program (tvlp.co) and remained an instructor and the lead mentor there. The program brings groups of entrepreneurs from Europe to the Silicon Valley where they receive instructions from top SV Institutions’ lecturers, mentoring, introductions and visits to local hot-spots, investment firms, incubators, etc..
In 2011, Gideon was invited by the University of California Santa Cruz to contribute his knowledge and experience to entrepreneurship studies at the School of Engineering. Over a period of two years, he established the Entrepreneurship Studies Initiative and designed, developed and taught entrepreneurship courses and seminars. These included: The Startup Challenge, The Expert Seminar Series, and Organizational Entrepreneurship.
Prior to his work at UCSC, Gideon designed, developed and taught a course on open innovation in science and engineering at the Technion.
Gideon holds a B.S. Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and an M.S. Engineering from Cornell University where he attended on a full academic scholarship.