Sara Beckman
Professor, University of California, Bekeley
Sara Beckman is Earl F. Cheit Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business where she designs and delivers courses on design, innovation and product management and a Teaching Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department in the College of Engineering. Her 25 years of experience teaching design and innovation-related topics at the Haas School of Business culminated in creating a course, Problem Finding, Problem Solving, which draws from design thinking, critical thinking and systems thinking literature. That course is now offered to all business students at Haas, and prepares them both for their Applied Innovation projects as well as for their work in their own jobs.
Her recent research focuses on the role of learning style diversity on design teams, and on the pedagogy of teaching design. For the past two years, she leveraged her teaching and research experience in serving as the Chief Learning Officer of the recently founded Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation within University of California, Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Sara directs the Product Management Program for the Berkeley’s Center for Executive Education, serving 350 product managers from around the world each year. Before joining Berkeley-Haas, Sara worked in the Operations Management Services group at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and ran the Change Management Team at Hewlett-Packard. Sara received her BS, MS and PhD degrees from Stanford University in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management.