Diego Rodriguez
Diego Rodriguez is a pioneer, advocate, and practitioner of design thinking. He is a partner at IDEO and a founding professor and member of the board at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school). A leading thinker on innovation in business, technology, and design, Diego leads IDEO’s Palo Alto location, working with design thinkers who span diverse disciplines in engineering, design, and business. He works with clients on issues involving venture design, organizational processes, and marketing. Diego pioneered a new discipline called Business Design, now a central part of the firm’s offering.
At Stanford, Diego created a new paradigm for active learning in his class, “Creating Infectious Action,” where business, engineering, and social scientists use design thinking to prototype disruptive new offerings and services.
Diego’s influential blog, Metacool, is an opinion leader on design, business, and “unabashed gearhead gnarliness.” Fast Company called the site, “…a must-read for anyone who wants to incorporate design thinking into their work.”
Prior to IDEO, Diego held operating positions at Nissan, Hewlett-Packard, a software startup flameout, and Intuit. He is the recipient of a Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award and holds multiple patents.
Diego has undergraduate degrees with honors in engineering and humanities from Stanford and an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School. He also sits on the advisory board of the Harvard Business School California Research Center, which facilitates faculty research and case writing in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Topics Diego speaks on:
- Consumer Experience Design
- Design Thinking
- Going to Market
- Human-Centered Design
- Innovation Strategy
- Invention & Engineering
- Loyalty
- Networked Culture
Speaking engagements:
October 2009, CIO Executive Summit, keynote
July 2009, "Education Next: No More Pencils No More Books," Fortune Tech Brainstorm, Pasadena, CA, panelist
May 2009, Keynote Address, “Create the Offering” conference, Intuit
October 2008, “Building Your Creative Confidence,” Stanford University
April 2008, Glass House Conversation with John Maeda
December 2007, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future Conference, Harvard Business School
October 2007, “When Design Thinking Meets Marketing,” Marketing Science Institute conference
December 2006, “Finding Customer Zero,” Guidewire Group Fall Leadership Forum
November 2006, “Innovation in Traditional Industries”, Roads to Innovation conference
October 2006, “Innovation Measures”, International Design Management Conference
September 2006, Fireside Chat with John Maeda, Signal Vs. Noise
September 2006, “Innovation Environments”, AMD Global Vision Conference
July 2006, “Creating Infectious Action”, AlwaysOn conference
June 2006, “Products and their Ecosystems”, Design 2.0
Published works:
April 2009, “How Consumer Brands Can Thrive in the Years Ahead,” Harvard Business Review Online
October 2008, Quoted in “Creativity and the Role of the Leader,” Harvard Business Review
Winter 2007, “Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go,” Design Management Review
Spring 2007, “Embracing Risk to Learn, Grow, and Innovate,” Rotman magazine
June 2007, “Turning Green into Red,” Neue Zurcher Zeitung
Summer 2007, “Leadership and Innovation in a Networked World,” innovations
Fall 2007, “What is Strategy?” DigitAll
Diego's blogs: