Heck, Johannes, Dr.

For almost a decade, Johannes Heck has been passionate about improving the performance of organisations. He studied business engineering at University of Karlsruhe (KIT) and co-founded the student society LEAN to learn more about problem-solving and iterative process improvements. While studying at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, he specialised in innovation management and founding start-ups. His final thesis on the evaluation of product development process models is the result of a stint at Cambridge University as a visiting student.

Related Topics and Projects:

In order to increase the innovation capability of Swiss SMEs, he focussed his doctoral studies on the impact of fast learning cycles (iterations) in the fuzzy front end of product development processes. Direct outcome of this research project is the ideation space Mobiliar Forum Thun at Castle Thun, in which companies can participate in DesignThinking-inspired "Ideation Workshops" to work on their grand innovation challenges. So far, over 50 companies benefitted from the positive long-term impact of these ideation workshops.

Currently, he is transferring these insights into teaching by leading the Innovation Project 2017, a project- and challenge-based engineering design course, and utilizing a unique research setting with 80+ teams to investigate performance drivers in agile product development processes.