In the late nineteen eighties, Vijay Kumar pioneered the early developments in design-driven innovation and spearheaded its widespread growth through powerful structured methods and frameworks for conceiving reliable human-centered innovations and turning them into strategic plans for organizations.
Vijay Kumar is the Charles L. Owen Endowed Chair and Professor Emeritus at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design in Chicago. He leads Strategic Innovation Planning and Design Methods programs. www.id.iit.edu
For more than 12 years he was the Chief Methodologist at Doblin Inc. (now the innovation unit of Monitor Deloitte) a leading global strategy and innovation firm. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/strategy/topics/doblin.html
Vijay's research, consulting, coaching, and advising are focused on framing up emerging opportunities in social, government, technology, and sustainable innovations.
Academic, professional, non-profit, and government organizations around the world have been successfully using his innovation methods for their programs for more than 35 years.
Vijay is widely published. He is the author of the best-selling book on design innovation process, "101 Design Methods: A Disciplined Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization".
Design Futures Council named Vijay Kumar as a Senior Fellow in 2014. Fellowship is granted to outstanding individuals who have provided noteworthy leadership toward the advancement of design innovation and for their “significant contributions toward the understanding of changing trends, new research, and applied knowledge that improve the built environment and the human condition.” Prominent Senior Fellows include John Seely Brown, Clayton Christensen, Buckminster Fuller, Al Gore, John Maeda, and Peter Schwartz.
At the invitation of UAE Prime Minister’s Office in 2015, Vijay served in the 8-member International Advisory Board for the Muhammad Bin Rashid Center for Government Innovation (MBRCGI). He also advised the Center for its “Edge of Government Innovations”, a collection of impactful innovations initiated by governments from around the world and exhibited at the World Government Summit in 2016 and 2017. Vijay chaired sessions on SDG (United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal) at the World Government Summit in 2017.
