PROVIDENCE – Industrial designer and educator Mitchell “Mickey” Ackerman has joined the leadership team at Business Innovation Factory, the group said today.
Ackerman – a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, and an internationally recognized designer and project leader – will oversee the next wave of BIF’s “Experience Lab” collaborative innovation projects.
As the former director of RISD’s industrial design department, he established a portfolio of sponsored projects, creating real-world design solutions for companies including Intel, Rubbermaid, Frigidaire and General Mills. He also established strategic partnerships between RISD and the Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Age Lab and the Brown University School of Engineering, as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the NASA Center for Space Medicine at Yale University and Boston’s Center Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, among others.
A graduate of Skidmore College, Ackerman earned his master of industrial design at RISD, where he has spent decades teaching students to design problems clearly and solve them through a multidisciplinary approach.
He’ll now be putting those same skills to work in a new way in the Experience Labs, BIF said.
“It is exciting to transition from being a spectator to what BIF is doing to being an active participant in the organization’s evolution and success,” Ackerman said in a statement today.
It is essential that business, academia and government get better at solving problems in a collaborative way. The BIF Experience Lab platform is a powerful mechanism for redefining concepts of collaboration, communication, creative thinking, and customer service and, most importantly, what it means to be a sustainable innovator.”
The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) is a Providence-based community of innovators collaborating to explore business-model innovation, seeking to move ideas off the white board and onto the ground as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. Additional information is available at www.businessinnovationfactory.com.
