John Winsor Biography

John Winsor is a leading strategic marketing and product innovation thinker known for his work in open innovation, collaboration, co-creation, crowdsourcing and marketing. He is the CEO and founder of Victors & Spoils, the world’s first creative advertising agency built on crowdsourcing principles a business that Harvard Business School has covered in a case study and The New York Times Sunday Magazine wrote about in a cover story.

Before founding Victors & Spoils, Winsor was vice president and executive director of strategy and innovation at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, helping the company become Creativity magazine’s Agency of the Decade.

Prior to CP+B, he founded his own company, Radar Communications, in 1998 and sold it to CP+B in 2007. At Radar, Winsor used co-creation, strategy and academic-based market intelligence tools to help some of the country’s most progressive companies learn from key voices in their communities.

Winsor was a journalist before founding Radar, building a magazine publishing company devoted to sports that included mountain biking, in-line skating and extreme skiing. In 1990, he acquired the rights to publish a then-struggling magazine, Women's Sports & Fitness. Within three years, he turned that magazine around and launched several other highly profitable titles and events, including The Gravity Games. He sold the business to Condé Nast in 1998.

Winsor is a frequent industry speaker and respected author. He is also frequent writer for The Harvard Business Review, The Guardian and several marketing journals.

His books include: Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers Is Essential to Winning in Business; Spark: Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation; Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves (with Alex Bogusky) and Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-Creation Is Replacing Top-Down Innovation. Baked In, a best seller, was named an award winner in the marketing category for the 2009 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards.

He was recently featured in the book Pioneers of Digital, a showcase of success stories from leaders in advertising, marketing, search and social media, which credited him with turning his “…wealth of communication and digital experience…into a crowdsourcing (ad)venture.”

Throughout his career, Winsor has been deeply involved in the start-up and technology communities. He was a founding investor in Nau, the sustainable clothing company, and has been on the board of directors of Black Diamond Equipment and Lijit Technologies.

Outside of work he pursues his passions of climbing, skiing, cycling and surfing. Among his accomplishments, he set the world record for the ascent and round-trip of Kilimanjaro.

Winsor earned a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College and an MBA from the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver.

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