Marlisa Kopenski
Director of Business Design
Design Concepts
As director of business design at Design Concepts, Marlisa Kopenski helps clients ground innovation projects in business reality. Her role involves managing a delicate balance of free-wheeling ideation and idea-squashing number crunching. Success is when a good idea lives and no one suffers too much in the process.
Kopenski has worked at Kraft Foods, E&J Gallo Winery, Penguin Books and Gourmet and Fast Company magazines. She earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Kopenski recently took a six-month sabbatical to travel the world with her husband and two young daughters and learned a profound lesson in living with uncertainty.
You say Prototype, I say Scenario… and Other Ways Business and Design Speak the Same Language but Don’t Know It
Why is it we believe business and design speak completely different languages when all they do is use different vocabulary? Director of Business Design at Design Concepts Marlisa Kopenski will ask attendees to forget everything they think they know about business people and to start thinking of “them” as designers, too.
She will illuminate the similarities between the two groups, revealing that a sketch for a traditional designer is akin to a hypothesis for a business person; building a prototype is similar to modeling a scenario; user testing is much like BASES testing, and so on.
Attendees will learn how valuable business and design points of view are—since everyone really has the same goal: for good design to succeed in the world.
