Design Thinking Research Achieving Real Innovation

Professor Dr. Christoph Meinel is Director and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering gGmbH (HPI), Potsdam, Germany and a full professor for computer science and serves as department chair of Internet Technologies and Systems at HPI.  He teaches at the HPI School of Design Thinking and is Vice Dean of the Digital Engineering Faculty of the University of Potsdam. In addition he is an honorary professor at the Department of Computer Sciences at Beijing University of Technology, guest professor at Shanghai University and concurrent professor at Nanjing University. Meinel is a member of acatech, the German “National Academy of Science and Engineering”, and numerous scientific committees and supervisory boards. Together with Larry Leifer from Stanford University he is program director of the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program.

Larry Leifer is professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, CA, USA. Dr. Leifer's engineering design thinking research is focused on instrumenting design teams to understand, support, and improve design practice and theory. Specific issues include: design-team research methodology, global team dynamics, innovation leadership, interaction design, design-for-wellbeing, and adaptive mechatronic systems. He has started many design initiatives at Stanford including the Smart-Product Design Program, Stanford-VA Rehabilitation Engineering Center, Stanford Learning Laboratory, and most recently the Center for Design Research (CDR).