Jon Moroney
Co-founder, Tiger Drive
Chair, KCAD Industrial Design
Jon Moroney is a designer, educator and entrepreneur with a passion for developing business growth strategies driven by product innovation. With an educational background in industrial design, business and consumer behavior, he gathered diverse experiences in product design, branding and communications leading inter-disciplinary teams at a design studio consulting with small manufacturing businesses, startups and corporate research and development.
Moroney’s newest ventures, Pretch and Sled Legs, were created as he served as the co-founder of Tiger Drive, a design incubator company. And as the chair of industrial design at Kendall College of Art and Design (KCAD) of Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, MI, he has fused entrepreneurial thinking and user-centered design together to create unique learning models that send students on a journey to start their own product businesses.
Successful Ideas Start with the Team
The success of an idea hinges on a team with the right mix of disciplines—and an agile three-step process that: fosters creativity to define the business; quickly determines if the idea can become a viable business; and efficiently executes the development and launch of the product.
Through several experiments within corporate intrapreneurship, professional workshops, startup businesses and entrepreneurial education models, a formula for creating a dynamic team that can execute, begins to emerge.
As corporations have begun to adopt a “lean startup” approach to innovation, the team constructs have become more interdisciplinary. Many corporations have adopted intrapreneurship as part of their culture to create a heightened sense of ownership in ideas among employees. The design process typically utilized in industrial design education is evolving to prepare students to join a corporate innovation team or startup business. Jon Moroney, co-founder, Tiger Drive and chair, KCAD Industrial Design, finds the result is a new breed of design leaders that will support the need for greater innovation in corporations and startups alike.
