Larry Keeley is a strategist who has worked to develop more effective innovation methods for over twenty-six years. He is president and co-founder of Doblin Inc, an innovation strategy firm known for pioneering comprehensive innovation systems that materially improve innovation success rates. Larry has worked with a wide variety of pioneering enterprises since 1979, among them firms like Aetna, Apple, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, Hallmark, McDonald's, Motorola, Pfizer, Steelcase, Texas Instruments, and Zurich Financial Services. BusinessWeek recently named him one of seven Innovation Gurus that are changing the field, and specifically cited Doblin for having many of the most sophisticated tools for delivering innovation effectiveness. Larry is a board member for the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he is also an adjunct professor teaching graduate design strategy classes. He is a lecturer in innovation at Kellogg and University of Chicago and at many executive education programs, and a board member for WBEZ-FM in Chicago, where he has been instrumental in charting strategies that have made it the nation's most innovative public radio station.

The IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference is an international executive forum addressing how businesses can use design to explore emerging opportunities, solve complex problems, and achieve lasting strategic advantage.

Global businesses increasingly appreciate how design and design thinking can provide them with high-level, strategic value and competitive advantage. In an intensely competitive market, with ever more diverse and demanding customers, executives are often left unsure of exactly what products, communications and services to create for what segments of the market. Design, with its ability to understand users, redefine problems and create systemic, human-centered solutions, can help companies better understand their customer's daily lives, and lead directly to valuable (and valued) offerings that are effectively tailored to their market.