Description
Contributors
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Robert Cooper, President, Product Development Institute
Dr. Robert G. Cooper
Professor Emeritus, McMaster University
ISBM Distinguished Research Fellow, Penn State University
President, Product Development Institute
Developer of the Stage-Gate new product development process -
Anita Friis Sommer, PhD, Senior Innovation Manager, The LEGO Group
Dr. Sommer finalized her PhD in product development management at Aalborg University, Denmark, in April 2014 and afterwards worked as Research Associate at the Engineering Design Centre, Department of Engineering at University of Cambridge until September 2015.
Since September 2015, she has been working as a Senior Consultant in Continuous Improvement in The LEGO Group. She is responsible for rollout of a continuous improvement programme in the Nordic, Benelux and Baltic countries supported by a European peer-team. She finds that she ‘much enjoys the teamwork and the challenges involved in managing change and development of new organisational capabilities’.
In Cambridge, Dr. Sommer was a project team lead in two industrial research projects with Rolls Royce and Zurich Insurance respectively, and co-lead on a research project with British Telecom. All projects aimed at exploring how emergent capabilities in process modelling can improve process management and enable new decision support for product and process resilience. She was also responsible for the annual industrial conference on process simulation hosted by the Engineering Design Center, University of Cambridge.
Dr. Sommer’s academic interest and involvement remains during her shift to an industrial position. She is currently in the board of editors of the journal Research-Technology Management, and also a subject matter expert for the Research on Research group of the Industrial Research Institute, USA, aiming to explore trends in Virtual Experimentation and Simulation. Dr. Sommer has published more than 25 academic peer-reviewed papers, and continues to contribute to the development of new knowledge.