Corporate Information

Founder

About Kohei Nishiyama

Along with a colleague from design school, he founded elephant design. to commercialize the DTO system in 1997. Prior to founding elephant design, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company where primarily handled new product development projects. One notable project was the wireless telecom carrier. His mission was to identify business opportunities for a client's data-transmission technology, which at that time was completely new to the market. It is now one of the client's core businesses.

Muji, a popular Japanese design lifestyle retailer, began to use DTO in 2002. Products developed by this system rank in the top 3 in sales revenue. Because of his expertise in product development, Nishiyama is now a design consultant for companies such as Sony. For the past three years, he has been a judge for the Good Design Award Committee, which is organized by the government.

Nishiyama lived in South America until age 19. He is a graduate of the University of Tokyo and the Kuwasawa Design School, where he studied product design. He is the recipient of several design awards, including the Kuwasawa Design Award and Japan Venture Awards in 2001. In addition to these awards, one of elephant design's hit product, "Compact IH" received "Good Design Award" in 2006.

Advisory Board

Peter Coles

Peter Coles is a member of the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School. He received his A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University and his PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to attending Stanford, Prof. Cole spent a year studying at the Technische Universitaet in Berlin on a DAAD Fellowship. His current research deals with the market design, and the incentives for participants in markets. A recent paper, "Signaling in Matching Markets," investigates how the introduction of mechanisms to credibly signal preferences might improve the efficiency of decentralized markets.

Robert Hammond

Robert Hammond is a co-founder of Friends of High Line (http://www.thehighline.org/), an organization brought the High Line, a 1.5-mile-long disused elevated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side, from the brink of demolition, in 1999, to the start of construction. As a founding team member and then as a board member, Mr. Hammond helped to launch thebody.com, the largest online HIV/AIDS information resource in 1996. In 1994 he helped launch and subsequently sell an in-hotel catalog company. Mr. Hammond holds a BA with Honors in History from Princeton University. Born and raised in San Antonio, TX he has lived in the West Village since 1994.

Eric Von Hippel

Eric Von Hippel is a Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. Prof. Von Hippel also develops and teaches about practical methods that firms can use to improve their products and service development processes.

Joichi Ito

Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage. He is on the board of CCC. He is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at SFC in Japan. He is the Chairman of Six Apart Japan, the weblog software company. He is also on board of a number of non-profit organizations, including The Mozilla Foundation. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan and Infoseek Japan, and was an early stage investor in Six Apart and other Internet companies. He has served and continues to serve on various Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues.
Ito was selected by the World Economic Forum in 2001 as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow", chosen by Newsweek as a member of the "Leaders of The Pack" in 2005, and listed by Vanity Fair as a member of "The Next Establishment" in 2007. Ito was also named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008.

Karim R. Lakhani

Karim R. Lakhani is an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in the management of technological innovation and product development in firms and communities. Prof. Lakhani also holds an MS degree in Technology and Policy from MIT (1999), and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University in Canada (1993).

Hidehiko Nishikawa

Hidehiko Nishikawa (Ph.D., Kobe University) is a Professor, Department of Business Administration, College of Business Administration, Ritsumeikan University. He was COO Director of MUJI.net CO., LTD. from 2001 to 2005. The subject of his research is emergent mechanism of mass collaboration.

Yoav Shapira

Yoav Shapira is an experienced software engineer, architect, team leader, and manager. His experience spans the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, automotive, public sector, and consulting industries, where he has managed software projects from initiation, through specification and design, to implementation and customer delivery. Mr. Shapira is also active in the open-source software world, having participated in multiple capacities within the Apache Software Foundation, including most recently Vice President for Apache Tomcat.

Alan Webber

Alan M. Webber is an award-winning, nationally-recognized editor, author, and columnist. In 1995, he launched the Fast Company magazine, a fresh, dynamic entry in the business magazine category. Headquartered in Boston, MA, the magazine became the fastest growing, most successful business magazine in history. Fast Company won 2 national magazine awards; one for general excellence, one for design and Webber was named Adweek's Editor of the Year in 1999, along with co-founding editor William Taylor.

Yoshinori Yokoyama

Yoshinori Yokoyama is a graduate of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. After working at Kunio Maekawa & Architects in Tokyo, Mr. Yokoyama has received his Masters in Urban Design Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In addition, Mr. Yokoyama is holding a Masters in Management studies from MIT Sloan School of Management. After joining McKinsey & Company Inc. in 1975, Mr. Yokoyama had become the company's Tokyo Office manager between 1989 - 1994. From 2006, he has been working as the director of a Medical and Health Development NPO, as well as serving as an advisor for the President of Mori Building. Currently Mr. Yokoyama lives both in Japan and France and works on developing the field of social system design.