Ex-IDSA President and designer Mark Dziersk is an expert speaker in the field of Industrial Design who holds over 100 US patents. He also runs an Essentials of Industrial Design class in Northwestern University's Master of Product Development program.

The five-year-old program was created as an out-of-your-comfort-zone hybrid to fill the gap between the finance, marketing, and leadership courses students get in business school and the topics they'd cover--materials selection, specification, and validation--at the university's engineering school. A soupcon of wacky design thinking leavens the innovation process and teaches creative risk taking.

Dziersk's MPD students at Northwestern have designed products that have won awards as well as received direct VC funding. An example of his teaching methods:

"Take out some paper," he instructs. "You have 30 seconds to write down 15 ways in which a cat is like a refrigerator."

Read an article about the class by FastCompany, here.