Allen Ward Many consider Allen Ward the patriarch of Lean product development. According to James Womack (Founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute) although many have studied Toyota as astute observers, very few truly understood what they were observing and extracted the principles that made Toyota methods effective. Because it is generally not possible (or even reasonable) to duplicate Toyota's Product Development System in other companies directly, it is critical to understand why it works in order to leverage the principles in other companies. Based on a decade of direct research at Toyota, Allen provided tremendous insight into what is important for effective development processes and how they work. Although Allen died in 2004, he is still seen as the founder of the lean product development movement and held in highest esteem by those who want to learn lean development methods. . Durward Sobek Durward K. Sobek II is a Professor and Program Coordinator of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at Montana State University. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an A.B. degree in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College. Dr. Sobek has been researching lean product development and lean healthcare for nearly two decades, focusing on how organizations can increase their performance capacity through the application of lean principles. He is co-founder of the not-for-profit　Lean Product and Process Development Exchange, Inc. whose mission is to share and expand the body of knowledge around lean product and process development. He is a frequent presenter, and has written published articles in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management among other publications. He is co-author of Lean Product and Process Development, 2nd edition　with Allen C. Ward; and is co-author of the Shingo Prize winning book Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System.　  Dantar Oosterwal Dantar Oosterwal is a Lean product development practitioner, advisor, speaker, and author. He co-founded the Milwaukee Consulting Group focused on helping organizations implement continuous improvement principles. Before founding the Milwaukee Consulting Group, he was Global Vice President of innovation at Sara Lee where he drove over 30% improvement in product development throughput and increased revenue from new innovation from 5% to 20% through the implementation of Lean product development methods. Prior to Sara Lee, Dantar was Director of Product Development at Harley-Davidson where he first learned and drove implementation of lean product development methods. This effort led to a 4-fold improvement in product development throughput and over 50% acceleration in time to market with a customer satisfaction level of 98% repurchase intent Dantar authored the popular book, The Lean Machine, which describes the lean product development transformation at Harley-Davidson. As an avid proponent of lean product development, he　continues to promote lean product development and share his experiences to help companies learn and institute Lean development practices. He writes articles and is a popular speaker at events as diverse as delivering the keynote address at Lean Lab 2012 in Stockholm Sweden, to participating in Innovation Roundtable at the University of Chicago. Dantar holds degrees from The University of Michigan, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).