David Crain, Lecturer
Professor Crain
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Contact information
Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Southern California
3620 S. Vermont Avenue, KAP 210
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2531
Tel: (213) 740-0603 main office
Fax: (213) 744-1426
Email: crain@usc.edu
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Biographical information
Ph.D. — Materials Science — USC
M.S. — Materials Science — USC
B.S. — Physics — USC
David Crain has more than 25 years experience managing the marketing, strategy, and engineering functions in a corporate setting. He was Director of Markets and Strategies for Fluor Corporation which, at $12 billion in revenues, is the largest engineering and construction firm in the world. While at Fluor, Dr. Crain managed a staff of six MBA market researchers performing analysis of the engineering & construction industry: the marketplace, competitors, partners, merger-and-acquisition targets, and related economic, business and geo-political conditions. He advised Fluor on strategy issues such as branding, mission/vision formulation, market research and segmentation, and geographical positioning and marketing strategies.
Prior to joining Fluor, Dr. Crain managed competitive analysis and strategic planning for Los Angeles-based Pacific Enterprises (now Sempra Energy), a $3 billion energy-services conglomerate. There, he helped shape Pacific Enterprises' international diversification objectives, and established that organization's competitive-intelligence function. Earlier he managed the engineering-design department for Pacific Enterprises' principal subsidiary, the Southern California Gas Company, progressing to manager of a staff of 60 professionals and an annual budget of $50 million.
In earlier professional activities, Dr. Crain was with the United States Naval Research Center in San Diego where he was responsible for development of microelectronics for anti-submarine-warfare systems. It was there, while working on undersea television exploration technology, he conceived and received the first patent on what became the “1st and Ten” concept introduced on ESPN football telecasts in 1998, now widely used in network sportscasting.
For more than 20 years, Crain was a Lecturer and Adjunct Professor at Cal Poly Pomona and instructed graduate and undergraduate students in electronics and computer sciences. At USC and Pepperdine, he teaches business-strategy formulation and market research to MBA students in the Marshall School of Business and in the Graziadio School of Business and Management, respectively. He is past President of the California Chapter of the Strategic Leadership Forum—an international organization dedicated to fostering the art and discipline of strategic planning in business—and he recently co-founded a new organization, the Association for Strategic Planning, for which he served as its first president (1999-05).
Crain presently consults to large corporations in marketing and business strategy. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering from USC where his dissertation focused on semiconductor materials development for flash memory applications some 25 years before commercialization of the technology. His interests are varied and include video technology and movie making, collecting motion-picture soundtracks, fitness, hiking, and golf.
He has two grown children and resides with his wife Sheila in Hacienda Heights.
