Mary Drotar
Partner and Co-founder
Mary’s new product development expertise is in process, strategy, business model development, lean product development, risk management, organizational development, and team dynamics.
Mary began her career at Ford Motor Company, and she progressed through various positions in marketing and development. Mary then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories, concentrating in the areas of strategy, the voice of the customer and scenario planning. Mary transitioned to consulting and was Director of Consulting at Cambridge Management Consulting and subsequently appointed to the position of Vice President at Targetbase Marketing / Omnicom, a firm specializing in marketing analytics.
Mary was recently a Faculty Coach for the New Product Development Lab course at the University of Chicago. She is a member of the Society of Women Engineers and has an MBA from The University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.
She graduated from the Lean LaunchPad Educators Seminar through the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently co-authoring a book with her business partner, Kathy Morrissey, on a new way to develop products called Exploratory Product Development (ExPD). It is an adaptive process that is based on reducing the biggest project uncertainties.
Out of the ExPD process, they developed the Product Risk Framework business intelligence software tool. They received a grant for the Product Risk Framework in 2018 from the NSF STEM I-Corp program sponsored by the University of Chicago. Most recently, the Product Risk Framework received two nominations: 2019 Edison Award in the area of Innovation Services and 2019 Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award.
Partner and Co-founder
Kathy has over 30 years of experience with Fortune 100 companies specializing in market and customer research, strategy, business processes, and models. Kathy’s new product development expertise is in developing innovation, product, technology, and market strategies, as well as product and technology roadmaps. Also, she also has considerable experience in portfolio management and flexible and lean process techniques.
She has an MS in Statistics from Carnegie-Mellon University and has completed the doctoral core courses. She also has an MBA from The University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. She is an active and long-standing board member of the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association and currently Vice-Chair of the national ASA Council of Chapters.
Kathy is a Faculty Coach for the New Product Development Lab course at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. She recently graduated from the Lean LaunchPad Educators Seminar through the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kathy is currently co-authoring a book with her business partner, Mary Drotar, on a new way to develop products called Exploratory Product Development (ExPD). It is an adaptive process that is based on reducing the biggest project uncertainties. Out of the ExPD process, they developed the Product Risk Framework business intelligence software tool. They received a grant for the PRF in 2018 from the NSF STEM I-Corp program sponsored by the University of Chicago. Most recently, the Product Risk Framework received two nominations: 2019 Edison Award in the area of Innovation Services and 2019 Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award.