Speakers | Oliver Kempkens

Oliver Kempkens

Oliver Kempkens participates in the main program of our camp with a Skype lecture. He will also share his experience with us remotely in a workshop on day 3.

Main program

Business-program

Lecture: "Implementation of Design Thinking in Organization"

Workshop: "Implementation of Design-thinking. Experience of 500+ projects"

“

I started studying law and realized that I do not think that a 3rd person settling a conflict is sustainable. I moved on and studied Mediation, a concept how to empower two parties to solve a conflict. The next logical step for me was Design Thinking: An approach which tries to develop conflict-free, human-centered solutions.

Oliver is the Managing Director of ITMP — a design consultancy spin-off of the University St. Gallen, the leading expert on Design Thinking in Europe. For over 9 years, the ITMP supports large organizations to become more innovative, by developing the workforce to think human-centered and by building new innovative solutions.
Oliver also is a Managing Director at Adapt or Die Ventures, LTD. Adapt or Die ventures is the leading design thinking provider in Europe and helps corporations to develop their own innovation capabilities. With clients from more than 13 countries, Oliver Kempkens team has served more than 100 clients in their pursuit to become more innovative and human-centered.

Before Oliver joined ITMP, he was Executive Director at the American executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates, and was placing several international Executives to Fortune 500 companies. He also was the global lead for the Design Thinking implementation at SAP. In this position, Oliver has overseen the largest implementation project of the world: by enabling about 22.000 people applying Design Thinking as the way to work with current and future users. He and his team were responsible for running 500+ projects internally and working with more than 1200 users and customers.

Oliver studied law and mediation, attended several executive trainings at Northwestern, Wharton, HBS and Stanford. He also received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Southampton. He now teaches as a visiting professor/guest lecturer Design Thinking at the Skolkovo School of Management in Moscow, at the University of Applied Sciences in Upper Austria and at the VERN Business School in Zagreb.

Return to the main page

Wonderfull
User experience research and design laboratory