Alvin P. Lehnerd has held executive positions at Black & Decker, Sunbeam, and Steelcase. He has led several well-known developments and innovations resulting in new product successes, including Black & Decker's Dustbuster, Sunbeam's first electronic auto-shut off and global iron product lines, and the complete redesign on Black & Decker's double insulated consumer power tools. He teaches at Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania, and at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Marc H. Meyer is the Robert J. Shillman professor of Entrepreneurship at Northeastern University, as well as a Matthews Distinguished University Professor. Dr. Meyer is the founder of Northeastern University's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group in the College of Business Administration, where he has helped numerous students and alumni start their own companies. He is also director of High Tech MBA, a program focused on innovation within established corporations. He also helps direct Northeastern's Center of Entrepreneurship Education, an interdisciplinary, experiential "system of entrepreneurship" where undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni learn the principles of entrepreneurial… thinking and planning, and then launch new companies.An internationally recognized scholar in the field of research and innovation, Dr. Meyer is the author of The Power of Product Platforms (written with Alvin P. Lehnerd, The Free Press, NY, 1997) and The Fast Path to Corporate Growth: Leveraging Knowledge and Technologies to New Market Applications, for which he received the Maurice Holland Award from the Industrial Research Institute (Oxford University Press, NY, 2007). Dr. Meyer is a graduate of Harvard College and holds his master's and doctoral degrees from MIT.