Kirk Hawkins - Before graduating from Stanford Business School in 2005 and founding ICON, Kirk Hawkins flew F-16s in the U.S. Air Force and 767s for American Airlines. Prior to the USAF, he worked in both aviation and aerospace engineering most of his early career.
After earning his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University, he was the Director of Engineering at an aerospace contractor before returning for his Masters in Engineering from Stanford University in 1995, specializing in manufacturing.
Hawkins grew up racing motocross and has been an avid sport and flying enthusiast for 25 years. He has built and flown ultralight and experimental aircraft, and has logged nearly 1000 skydives. He is also a seaplane instructor pilot with hundreds of hours bush flying in Alaska. Today he is an active snowboarder, wake-boarder, and SCUBA diver, as well as a devoted member of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America for more than 10 years.
William Moggridge - Award-winning designer Bill Moggridge is a founder of IDEO, one of the most successful design firms in the world and one of the first to integrate the design of software and hardware into the practice of industrial design.
He has been Visiting Professor in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London, Lecturer in Design at the London Business School, member of the Steering Committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, and is currently Consulting Associate Professor in the Joint Program in Design at Stanford University.
Moggridge's career has had three phases; first as designer, then as a manager of design, and now as a communicator, working as a writer, graphic designer and video maker. His fascination with design, and with what people want from everyday things, has given him a broad view of the information revolution.
Steen Strand - Steen Strand is a seasoned sports product entrepreneur with 14 years of hands-on operational startup experience. Strand's expertise is in product design, marketing and brand building. Early in his career he worked at IDEO, one of the world's leading design consultancies before founding Freebord, a skateboard company with a global subculture of fanatical riders.
He later served as COO and Director of Product at Secara, a funded healthcare startup. Steen received his MS in Product Design from Stanford University, where he periodically instructs courses in Product Design. Steen's designs have been featured in numerous TV shows, websites and magazines, including Time, Forbes, Newsweek and Wired.
He has lectured on design and business in many venues, including Stanford, Yale, MIT's Media Lab, and Xerox PARC. Prior to attending Stanford, Strand worked in finance at Lehman Brothers and co-founded Fletcher Asset Management, an early hedge fund with over $500 million in assets. He received his AB in Economics, magna cum laude, from Harvard.
Kirk and Steen speak to design's power to unleash new markets. They tell the story of how ICON Aircraft set out to maximize the vast potential of the FAA's regulatory changes by creating, for the first time, a recreational powersport for flying.
They discuss the challenges in the development of the ICON A5, an airplane that makes flying more accessible, safer, and more enticing than ever before.
Very innovative & exciting, and I'd love to have one. As a licensed land and seaplane pilot, however, I think the difficulties in popularizing this amphibian in the target audience (upscale sports enthusiasts) and in the target environment (recreational waterways) will be very limiting. The existing financial and regulatory environment for airplanes is becoming more restrictive and not less; and this new flashy toy crosses directly into that well protected and difficult environment as soon as it leaves the ground. Good Luck! I'll be watching with interest.
Beautiful! What a team. You guys appear to be a case study of innovation excellence and are certainly inspirational. May good fortune rain down on you all, you deserve it. Now for me, how to raise the dosh? Non-Pilot 'Brad' from New Zealand.
