Professor Larry Leifer is the director of the Center for Design Research (CDR) at Stanford University and one of the directors of the of the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program. Once a design student himself at Stanford University, he has started many design initiatives at Stanford including the Smart-Product Design Program and Stanford Learning Laboratory. He has taught the ME310 course for over 20 years and continues to redesign the course ever year with new methodologies and technologies.

For the past 20 years Bettina has been a visionary and original thinker at the boundary between business and academia, working in the field of her passion: innovation. While she values academic rigour, her main concern is practical relevance. During her independent career she has always taken great pleasure and pride in combining and balancing a number of different activities such as research, teaching, writing, running networking initiatives and engaging in public speaking.