A native German, Martin moved around a bit having lived in ten+ cities, not including a Senior High School year in the USA. He finished his Bachelors Degree (Vordiplom) at the University of Passau, majoring in economics. After stints in Spain, at the University of Navarra and at the German Chamber of Commerce in Madrid, he moved to the very beautiful bilingual City of Fribourg in Switzerland. There, he finished his Master or Arts in Management (lic.rer.pol.) and some years later his PhD (Dr.rer.pol.) with a focus on Technology and Innovation Management (TIM). The following years he spent as Assistant Professor (Maître-Assistant) in Fribourg, teaching on a master level TIM (general course) and Research Methodology and Strategy (EMBA for engineers). He got hooked on Design Thinking when he spent some time at CDR in 2008 as visiting scholar. In 2009 he continued to explore the field by joining the Product Design and Development group of Prof. Warren Seering, PhD at MIT, again for a semester as visiting scholar. Martin fully “converted” to Design Thinking Research by joining Stanford and Larry’s group in April 2010 as Deputy Director of CDR.

His special interest is to combine empirical research methods of quantitative and qualitative nature to create a comprehensive research designs. The usual suspects are disruptive technologies or innovations induced by the same and the fuzzy front-end of product design and development.