Per-Kristian (Kris) Halvorsen

Per-Kristian (Kris) Halvorsen is a leader in the management of innovation, with a record of building exceptionally creative and effective teams in some of the world’s top R&D centers.  He has also served on the boards of leading public and private companies in the US and Europe.

Per-Kristian (Kris) Halvorsen is the chief innovation officer and a senior vice president at Intuit, the world’s leading maker of financial and tax software for small businesss and consumers.  He joined Intuit in 2006 as a vice president and chief technology innovation officer, and he served as chief technology officer from 2007 to 2009. Prior to joining Intuit, Halvorsen was vice president and center director at HP Labs. There he started the innovation activities in support of HP's services business and grew them to consist of 4 laboratories in the US and Europe.   Halvorsen also led the effort that resulted in the US IT industry's first research labs devoted to creating products and services for emerging markets, like India and China. 

Halvorsen worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for 17 year. In 1992 he founded PARC's Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory (ISTL) focused on the then entirely new problems which the explosive growth of the web posed for information access.  Along with technical innovation that was widely recognized, several companies spun off from the lab, some of which have since been acquired by Google (Outride nee Groupfire) and Microsoft (Contentguard).  Kris joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1983 in John Seely Brown’s Cognitive and Instructional Sciences group, where he became a principal scientist.

Halvorsen has also held positions at MIT, the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University and the University of Oslo.

Halvorsen has served on the board of directors of Autodesk, Iron Mountain, Finn.no, FinnTech, and Symantec.  He is a member of the National Advisory Board of the Doneghy Cybercollege at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, and has served on the National Academies of Sciences committee on Internet Navigation and the Domain Name System.  He was the producer for Ranjit Makkuni's Gita-Govinda exhibit at the Indira Ghandi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in New Delhi, for which Ranjit received ID Magazine’s design prize in 1998.

Halvorsen lives in Los Altos Hills with his wife, Dr. Meg Withgott.