Our Team
Design for Service Innovation is led by two Graduate School of Business professors and an enthusiastic team of other contributors.
Stefanos Zenios
Charles A. Holloway Professor of Operations, Information, and Technology and Professor of Health Care Management
Stefanos was the first professor at the GSB to introduce courses on the interface between medicine, engineering, and management into the MBA curriculum. He is the leader of the school’s Program in Healthcare Innovation and a former instructor of the Biodesign Innovation course. When he’s not at Stanford running models, doing research, or teaching MBA and PhD courses, you can find him on the island of Cypress picking grapes.
Jim Patell
Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management
Jim is an operations, accounting, and computer modeling GSB professor with an engineer’s training. He is a cofounder of the d.school and the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability course. His GSB office is a semi-organized mélange of discrete-event simulation software, socket wrenches, and ultra-low-cost drip irrigation systems, surrounded by photos of his daughters and of Alaskan fishing trips with his son.
Julian Gorodsky
Psychologist, Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford d.school
Our d.shrink, Julian has been a clinical psychologist in Silicon Valley for several decades, providing services for young and old, families and teams. At the d.school Julian's approach is aimed at direct engagement with early interpersonal and team issues before they bloom into even bigger road blocks in the collaborative process. The opportunity to be available to people in the early stages of building an organization all about innovation, radical collaboration, and human-centered design, may be this people-helper's dream work. With a PhD from Berkeley in 1965, Julian remains a 60′s dude at heart, a humanist, a seeker of the clear truth, with a passion for free speech, community values, spiritual awareness and rock and roll!
Ioulia Kachirskaia
Design for Service Innovation Fellow
Ioulia has a PhD in cell/molecular biology, was a postdoctoral fellow in epithelial biology, and is passionate about design thinking and health innovation. When not chuckling in front of the TV at Frasier, Two and a Half Men, and the Big Bang Theory, Ioulia can be found taking various dance classes and fiddling with various projects from painting to growing peas to learning how to play Bongo drums. Ioulia was a student in the initial offering of Design for Service Innovation in 2011.
Lauren Chaparro
Design for Service Innovation Fellow
Lauren is an MBA2 at the GSB this year. She has a varied background with a molecular biology undergrad, an internship at a pharmaceutical lab, health policy experience in D.C., time at Google and in management consulting, and most recently health care investing at a private equity firm. Underlying all of these activities, Lauren has a strong passion for design and the presentation of information.
Lyn Denend
Director, Program in Healthcare Innovation
Prior to joining the Program in Healthcare Innovation, Lyn authored case studies at the GSB in the area of healthcare and was the principal writer of the Biodesign textbook. She is currently assisting with the Design for Service Innovation course because it’s one of the exciting new initiatives going on in healthcare at the GSB this year.
Joan Dorsey
Course Coordinator
Joan is often introduced as the “adult supervision” or “playground mom” for the Design for Service Innovation course and the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability course. She manages the people, places, and things involved in the courses, including setting up our beloved NGP CoLab. Before joining the Design for Service Innovation team, Joan managed the daily operations of a global solar lighting nonprofit based in Palo Alto and directed the children’s education program at an organic, public garden in Dallas.
The Gong
“IP” the Interval Parser
The Gong lives in the NGP Collaboration Lab aka the CoLab, a design facility in the new Knight Management Center. The CoLab gives our teams a 24/7 workspace where they have persistent assets dedicated to their project for the duration of the course. The CoLab extends the footprint of the physical culture of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) to the GSB.