Brian Vogel Consulting
Professional Interest Section Vice President: 1998
Brian Vogel is president of Brian Vogel Consulting, providing personalized business coaching to the principals of design and engineering firms and heads of corporate design and product development groups. Prior to starting his business, he was president of Scientific Generics Inc., an international consulting firm specializing in innovation, technology development, breakthrough products and business creation.
After tours of duty as an officer in the U.S. Navy, Vogle began his career at GE where he progressed from mechanical engineer, to project leader, program manager and manager of all programs. He has held senior leadership positions at product design firms, including senior vice president of Product Genesis Inc. and president of Altitude Inc. He has extensive experience in the areas of customer-led innovation, product strategy and planning, product development, sales and marketing, multiple program management and people management. He holds mechanical engineering and MBA degrees.
Vogel has been a member of APDF and has held senior leadership roles within IDSA, helping the society adapt to meet the rapid changes occurring globally in the industry. Most recently, he was engaged by IDSA's Board of Directors to assume the role of interim executive director of IDSA. During this five-month assignment, he helped IDSA recover from some major operational issues and led the search for the next permanent executive director. For this and for his past contributions as an IDSA officer, he was named a Fellow at the IDSA's 2010 international conference in Portland.
Learn more about Brian Vogel .
Here is what the Fellowship committee had to say about Brian's appointment as an IDSA Fellow.
2010 Academy of Fellows Committee Statement
Brian Vogel exited the stage at last year’s IDSA International conference in Miami in typical fashion with little fanfare and only a few in the audience aware of what he had just accomplished. He had stepped into the Society’s breech to help find a new executive director and he did so in very short order.
Brian joined IDSA in 1988. As a trained engineer, he never felt there was an IDSA equivalent for him so he found a way to serve the design community instead. During his career, he has accumulated deep executive experience in all four major components of product development: design, engineering, business and management.
In 1998, Brian won an election to become the very first vice president of IDSA’s professional interest sections. In that capacity, he elevated the role and influence of professional interest sections within the Society by creating a funding mechanism for the sections, initiating electronic communications among them and guiding the sections toward greater participation in IDSA conferences and educational programs.
Soon after he won election to serve as IDSA’s executive vice-president in 2000, Brian led the first wholesale restructuring of the governing bodies of the Society and created a new five-year strategic plan that was adopted and followed by the Board. His strategic plan shaped IDSA’s business and operational models for a key stretch of the first decade of this century.
During a period of leadership transition in 2009, the current Board of Directors asked Brian to put on hold both his consulting work and his family life in Boston to take on an assignment in IDSA’s Northern Virginia headquarters: finding a new executive director. And, for good measure, the Board asked him to sort out a financial mess the Society faced in the midst of the tanking global economy.
Brian accepted both tasks in the spring and pledged to have a new executive director in place before the international conference opened in September. He gave himself six months. It took about five. During that time, he identified and screened nearly 100 executive candidates narrowing the field to a dozen or so viable choices. He helped conduct a series of interviews of the top candidates with the Board of Directors and IDSA’s National Staff that ultimately produced Clive Roux as IDSA’s executive director.
While conducting the executive director search, Brian also oversaw an overhaul of IDSA’s accounting protocols which yielded a clean audit. In order to carry those protocols forward, he identified and hired an accounting firm to perform the day-to-day work that had traditionally been done by IDSA’s in-house Chief Financial Officer. IDSA really owes Brian a debt of gratitude for performing all of those duties on such short notice.
Brian Vogel has earned the respect of our membership and we are honored to welcome him to our Academy of Fellows.
