Speaker Bios

Amer Catic is a mechanical engineer with focus on product development and mechatronics from Chalmers University of Technology. After his studies he worked as the content manager in a start-up  based on a newly developed content/knowledge management software.

He is currently in the final stages of his work with a PhD thesis on Knowledge-based Engineering and Knowledge Management in product development. The research behind the PhD thesis is based on a five year long research project together with the Volvo Group and has also entailed a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz Cars R&D.

Amer’s interests are the knowledge-orientation of Lean Product Development and he has been developed, evaluated and implemented methods and tools to increase the ”knowledge flow” in industrial product development processes.

With a background in Electrical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, Mats Espling has been working as RF engineer, project manager, R&D team manager and during the past 15 years as Manager R&D at Ascom Wireless Solutions.

Ascom Wireless Solutions (www.ascom-ws.com) is a market leader in on-site wireless communications for manufacturing and process industries, hospitals and elderly care, secure establishments, the retail sector and hotels. The ambition is to create value for our customers by providing them with solutions that optimizes their mission-critical processes. Ascom solutions can include on-site paging, messaging, alarms, mobile devices, voice and data communications.

Mats is active in the Swedish Lean Product Development community and is one of the drivers for Lean within Ascom Wireless Solutions.

Jörgen Furuhjelm is Lean Coordinator for Product Development at Saab Aeronautics. He supports and drives the lean product development initiative within a 1200 person R & D department. Their work focuses on visual management and continuous improvement.

From 2003 - 2009, he held a similar position within Toyota Material Handling (TMH). He was the Swedish representative within a global workgroup, responsible for understanding and implementing Toyota's principles at all TMH sites.

He holds a Ph.D. from Linköping University, Sweden in Product Development, and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Lund University, Sweden.

Rich Gildersleeve is Chief Technology Officer at DJO, Inc., a company specializing in rehabilitation, repair, and regeneration products for the orthopedic, spine, and vascular markets. Throughout his career, Rich has been involved in developing new products and product development processes. His team at DJO earned the Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) 2005 Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) award by demonstrating sustained excellence in the development and profitable commercialization of new products and services.

Rich received a BS in Applied Mechanics at the University of California at San Diego and a MS in Mechanical Engineering and a MBA at San Diego State University. He is a registered professional engineer in the state of California and possesses 16 issued US patents. His book, Winning Business, How to Use Financial Analysis and Benchmarks to Outscore Your Competition, details many business metrics used to improve
company performance

Göran Gustafsson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Product and Production Development at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He holds an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Fluid Mechanics and is experienced in industrial PD work. He is particularly interested in lean principles and methods, and his current undertaking includes responsibility for developing and coordinating a new Lean PD course at Chalmers School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Dr. Gustafsson is also Director of Studies of two PD Graduate Schools, one local (Chalmers) and one national (Swedish). The latter embraces more than 80 Ph.D. students from universities all over the country who share a common course program and participate in research projects with leading industrial companies.

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Eva G:dotter Jansson is a Design Anthropologist, and she is working as an Analyst and Senior Researcher at Kolding School of Design in Denmark www.dskd.dk . Mainly she is working with the etrans project www.etrans.dk  with the aim to develop systems for Electric Cars and create opportunities for new services and products in the sector.  Eva is also involved in projects dealing with social welfare innovation.

She has been collaborating with the Department of Engineering Design and Materials working as a consultant in Lean Product Development in combination with Design Anthropology at NTNU (the Norwegian University of Science and Technology), at KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology ) in Sweden and with different innovation structures and industries in Denmark. She has also been working with R&D in the industry in Sweden and been collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Business School in the US.
Eva is specialized to diagnostic and to develop organization of innovation and to involve end-users early in development processes.

Dr. Tine Jørgensen is a cLean Program Manager fromNovo Nordisk in Denmark. Dr. Jørgenson began her career with Novo Nordisk as a scientist in medicinal chemistry. She holds 48 publications and patents.

Today, Dr. Jørgensen heads the Diabetes Research Unit (DRU) cLean® department, driving the DRU cLean® strategy, planning and implementation for 600 diabetes researchers. Prior to that, she was responsible for the compound management group for the joint Novo Nordisk-Lundbeck compound library, ran the Department of Scientific Computing, and led the Research Informatics project to develop improvements to the research infrastructure at Novo Nordisk.

Michael N. Kennedy had a 30 year career at Texas Instruments Inc., where he was the lead engineer on many development projects including missile system products and manufacturing systems. During his last years at TI, he was a leader in reengineering the core engineering and manufacturing processes, including adopting concurrent engineering, solid modeling CAD systems, CAD/CAM integration, and leading quality initiatives.

For the past ten years, Mr. Kennedy has researched and is applying the principles of Toyota’s outstanding product development system to dramatically improve companies’ productivity metrics. His first book “Product Development for the Lean Enterprise” has raised awareness and presented the underlying philosophy behind Toyota’s success. He is the co-founder and CEO of Targeted Convergence Corporation with the mission of developing models, training, and tools for implementing the book principles into manufacturing industries. He is currently assisting many companies to implement the principles introduced in his book.

Mikael Lundgren has worked as a programmer, project manager and development manager since 1994. He became increasingly frustrated with trying to manage the variability of software development with traditional management methods, but he has had success in using Lean and Agile thinking not only todevelopment work, but in how people are being coached and organized. He became a Scrum Trainer 2006, and today he specializes in helping others work with lean and agile practices. He does this through consulting, training, mentorship, and a lot of patience.

Jim Luckman is a partner at Lean Transformations Group, LLC. He is the Past President and CEO of iPower Technologies, a company serving the distributed generation market of electrical power. He is also the President of Luckman Consulting, which provides coaching for companies interested in profound transformations. Luckman has worked in the auto industry for 34 years working at Delphi Automotive (formerly part of General Motors). He has had significant experience in Strategic Planning, Engineering and Manufacturing.

In his most recent position, he was Site Manager at the Technical Center of Rochester and Chief Engineer for Fuel Systems. He led a transformation at the Engineering Center by adopting lean manufacturing principles and developing lean principles in Engineering. He took a systems approach to making change and integrated this across all functions that support the development process. As the executive champion and change agent for Lean Engineering, he spent most of his time coaching and leading workshops for all Delphi Engineering organizations. He also held benchmarking workshops with many companies.

Jim has an Electrical Engineering Bachelor's degree from Tri State University and a Masters degree from Case Western University in Computer Engineering.

Christer graduated from Chalmers University of Technology with a M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management in 1994. Ever since his master thesis – Consider manufacturing capabilities in concept development – he has been looking for a paradigm shift in Product Development.

Christer has worked in the automotive industry for 20 years. The first 9 years were at Scania Commercial Vehicles in various positions both as engineer and manager, in Production and in Design Engineering. At Scania Christer learned the basic fundaments of lean manufacturing. Scania had already in the 1990’s come far on their lean journey.

For the last 11 years, Christer has been with Kongsberg Automotive, a global automotive system supplier, with headquarters in Kongsberg, Norway. Since beginning of 2010, Christer is working as Program Director at Kongsberg Automotive in Mullsjö, Sweden.

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Katherine Radeka has a rare combination of business acumen, scientific depth and ability to work with people. In the past six years, her consulting firm, Whittier Consulting Group, Inc. has engaged with clients such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Buckeye Technologies, The Toro Company, Alticor and over fifty other leading organizations .In 2005, she logged over 11,000 miles driving around the country to research how the best companies got more ROI from product development. In 2007, she founded the Lean Product & Process Development Exchange, a nonprofit organization to promote the use of lean thinking to improve ROI from product development. In 2009, she launched the Lean Product Development Resource Center, a Web-based Knowledge Supermarket for capturing and sharing best practices in lean product development. In 2010,

She is a regular speaker for the Product Development Management Association and the Association for Manufacturing Excellence. Her articles regularly appear in PDMA’s magazine, Visions, where she is the most frequently featured cover author in the last three years. She was recently inducted into the Million Dollar Consultant® Hall of Fame, one of only twenty consultants worldwide recognized for her client results, integrity, business growth and personal development. Katherine has climbed seven of the ten tallest peaks in the Cascades and spent ten days alone on the Pacific Crest Trail until an encounter with a bear convinced her that she needed a change in strategic direction.

Dave Ross is the Vice President of Core Values, Processes and Systems for Volvo Construction Equipment, based in Brussels. Prior to this, he spent ten years as the Vice President of Engineering, Motor Graders at Volvo in Canada where he had full responsibility for his team's product development programs. He has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Andrew Seddon is a Senior Director in Continuous Improvement at Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development in Groton, Connecticut, where his work is focused on approaches to enhance innovation, team effectiveness and efficiency from idea to proof of concept. He has 15 years of research management experience with Pfizer leading multi-disciplinary departments in Drug Discovery and prior to that was a researcher for over 12 years at Cornell Medical College, the American Cyanamid Company and Wyeth.

He is the co-author over 40 research papers and book chapters and holds 8 issued US patents.  Andrew earned his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Essex in the UK and conducted his postdoctoral research in mechanistic enzymology at Cornell University Medical College -New York Hospital, USA.

Durward K. Sobek II is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Montana State University. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an A.B. degree in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College. Dr. Sobek has been researching lean product development for over a decade, focusing on how organizations can increase their performance capacity through the application of lean principles. He is a frequent presenter, and has published numerous articles in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He is co-author of the prologue to Allen Ward's seminal book, Lean Product and Process Development, and is co-author of the book Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System.

Bernt Svensson has worked with R&D activities within the major household appliance business for more than 25 years. Since 2002 he has been responsible for R&D activities within Asko Appliances group.

Before “Lean methods” were popular in Sweden, Asko started to utilize standardised working methods and modularization for Asko´s core Wet products to improve development productivity.

But Asko also found out that implementing Lean production and development could create tension in the company and therefore you need to create a balance with Lean management within the executive group. Today Bernt works among other topics how to best utilize innovation in combination with Lean.

Jan Sørensen is Project manager for lean project in new product development (NPD) at BK Medical in Denmark. BK Medical is developing and producing ultrasound scanners for medical imaging. The scanners are sold worldwide to hospitals and clinics.

Jan is overall responsible for all the lean and agile projects and improvements in NPD, which includes both Software, Hardware and Mechanics. The lean work in BK Medical has so far been focused on being in control in the development projects. In the future the lean thinking will be brought to the next level by improving the efficiency and be even more customer driven.

Jan has earned a Mechanical Engineering bachelor degree from Copenhagen University College of Engineering, and has more than 20 years’ experience with product development. He has been NPD project manager for 16 years, and has the last 4 years worked intensively with lean in NPD. Jan is certified Project Manager IPMA level B, certified Coach and has a Lean Manager education.

Suzanne van Egmond was born on July 15, 1974 in Enschede, The Netherlands. She went to the Technical University of Eindhoven to obtain a Master’s degree in Applied Physics. After that, she started working for Philips end of 1998, and did work in innovation for Lighting and Consumer Lifestyle since then.

Suzanne gained experience in various roles within innovation, such as manager of complex innovation projects, being development representative in a business team and development group leader. In the last two years she started as Manager Business Improvement and is responsible for the improvement program of Innovation Personal Care, a site where 250 employees work to develop shavers, grooming devices and wake up lights.

This site has been implementing aspects of lean development since 2007 and many improvements are achieved using lean development insights. By combining the conceptual and analytical skills from her physics background, her experience in various innovation roles, people skills and good understanding of the concepts of lean development Suzanne has already proven to be effective in developing practical lean development approaches for the site.