Making a Difference — Collaboratively

Adjunct lecturer Dan Kraemer talks about his work as co-founder and co-CEO of IA Collaborative and his new course being taught to students in Northwestern's MMM program.

Dan Kraemer has always enjoyed making things.

As a kid, he and his family routinely watched movies on Sunday nights, and while Kraemer would be with his family, his focus was rarely on the movie. Instead, his attention was on the life-sized airplane cockpit he'd constructed out of a refrigerator box, or the schematics he'd sketched of a conceptual spacecraft, or the plans he drafted for a futuristic house. 

"I was always making something," Kraemer said. "That desire to make has never left me."

Kraemer is still making things today. As co-founder and co-CEO of IA Collaborative, he leads a company driven to create the future of human experience by elevating the strategic value of design for businesses, organizations, and society. IA Collaborative's client list reads like a who’s who of innovative and successful companies –Airbnb, Apple, Audi, FedEx, Nike, and Sonos, to name a few. 

“The list goes on, and those ongoing relationships keep me going,” said Kraemer, who is quick to credit those he works with as the drivers of success. “Whether you identify as a designer, researcher, strategist, architect, technologist, or all of the above, if you work at IA, I know that you are endlessly inquisitive and creative, intelligent and rigorous, passionate and tenacious.”

The names on that employee roster over the past 20 years have included a number of graduates of Northwestern's MMM program, a dual-degree program that provides its students with a rigorous business education combined with a strong foundation in design innovation. 

“The common denominator is that both MMM and IA attract individuals who are best-in-class at what they do but show great humility and are always looking to learn from others,” said Jenn Beske (MMM ‘15), who spent six years with IA Collaborative, most recently as director of business strategy. “Plenty of what we do can be taught, but only if someone is driven by a desire for excellence and the understanding that, in a cross-disciplinary team, nobody is ever the smartest person in the room.”

Kraemer is doing some of that teaching, both at IA – which stands for Insight to Action – and as an adjunct lecturer with MMM. He leads the class “Master Series: Innovation Viability,” which teaches MMM students how to be disrupters in established organizations where innovation may be squelched by long-standing practices. The course relies on real-world examples from IA clients and pushes students to expand on knowledge they learned in previous MMM classes, including concepts related to marketing, finance, operations, and strategy. 

The course is focused on viability, but the topics of desirability and possibility are also addressed. 

By sharing his knowledge and experiences, Kraemer is continuing the maker journey he started years ago in front of the television, only this time, he's not just making an idea — he's making a difference.

"Students learn how to break down complex problems into workable components," Kraemer said. "They learn what questions to ask and what outputs to create to solve complex problems and capture elusive opportunities."