Full Name
David Schonthal
Job Title
Professor, Kellogg School of Management
Company
Northwestern University
Brief Biography
David Schonthal is an award-winning Professor of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management, where he teaches courses on new venture creation, design thinking, healthcare innovation and creativity. In addition to his teaching, he also serves as the Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Kellogg and the Faculty Director of the Zell Fellows Program, a selective venture accelerator program designed to help student entrepreneurs successfully launch or acquire new businesses.
Along with his colleague Loran Nordgren, David is one of the originators of Friction Theory: a ground-breaking methodology that explains why even the most promising innovations and change initiatives often struggle to gain traction with their intended audiences – and what to do about it. This work is popularized in David’s bestselling book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas (Wiley).
Outside of Kellogg David has been partitioner of entrepreneurship, design, and innovation for over 20 years. He has spent a decade working at world-renowned design firm, IDEO, and currently serves as an Operating Partner at 7Wire Ventures, a healthcare technology-focused venture capital firm, and a Venture Partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, a consumer and enterprise-focused fund. David is a Global Advisor at Design for Ventures(D4V), a Tokyo-based early-stage venture capital fund that invests in design-led Japanese startups, and is the Co-Founder of MATTER, a 25,000-square-foot innovation center in downtown Chicago focused on catalyzing and supporting healthcare entrepreneurship.
He is a columnist for Inc. Magazine and a contributing writer to Forbes, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review magazines, authoring articles on corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, change, and design. David has been honored on Crain's Chicago Business magazine's "40 Under 40" list (back when he was under 40) and is currently a Distinguished Achievement Award Finalist for Thinkers50, an international organization that identifies, ranks, and shares the leading management ideas of our age. He has won Kellogg’s Executive MBA Outstanding Professor award 5 times as well as a Faculty Impact Award for excellence in teaching.
He earned his MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and his BA in International Relations from Boston University.
Along with his colleague Loran Nordgren, David is one of the originators of Friction Theory: a ground-breaking methodology that explains why even the most promising innovations and change initiatives often struggle to gain traction with their intended audiences – and what to do about it. This work is popularized in David’s bestselling book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas (Wiley).
Outside of Kellogg David has been partitioner of entrepreneurship, design, and innovation for over 20 years. He has spent a decade working at world-renowned design firm, IDEO, and currently serves as an Operating Partner at 7Wire Ventures, a healthcare technology-focused venture capital firm, and a Venture Partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, a consumer and enterprise-focused fund. David is a Global Advisor at Design for Ventures(D4V), a Tokyo-based early-stage venture capital fund that invests in design-led Japanese startups, and is the Co-Founder of MATTER, a 25,000-square-foot innovation center in downtown Chicago focused on catalyzing and supporting healthcare entrepreneurship.
He is a columnist for Inc. Magazine and a contributing writer to Forbes, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review magazines, authoring articles on corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, change, and design. David has been honored on Crain's Chicago Business magazine's "40 Under 40" list (back when he was under 40) and is currently a Distinguished Achievement Award Finalist for Thinkers50, an international organization that identifies, ranks, and shares the leading management ideas of our age. He has won Kellogg’s Executive MBA Outstanding Professor award 5 times as well as a Faculty Impact Award for excellence in teaching.
He earned his MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and his BA in International Relations from Boston University.
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