For over 20 years, Maria has been involved in Design Thinking for Business. She is a creative entrepreneur, researcher, and educator passionate about game-changing tools and methods that open up new opportunities and inspire teams to work with creativity and imagination.

Maria is director of Design Thinking Center, Asia, an interdisciplinary educational platform for Design Thinking and Client Experience and founder of Wonderfull, client experience, research and design laboratory. She has been contributing to the Harvard Business Review and is a scientific editor for the local editions of Jeanne Liedtka and Michael Lewrick’s books on Design Thinking.

She got her first degree at the Faculty of Philosophy and proceed with postdraduate studies in Marketing Management at Hochschule Ahnhalt, after which she got a degree in Art and Design from Staffordshire University, where she studied Design Thinking. She is the author of “Playing the Future,” a trend construction methodology and a game for product and service design teams to generate ideas based on global trends which is applied at the Idea Generation stage of Design Thinking process in varied educational institutions worldwide.

For 13 years being both in business and education she was an academic member of Design Management Institute (DMI), also leading faculty programmes on Design Management, Creative Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking at the British Higher School of Art and Design (the University of Hertfordshire branch), helping to make first steps to now world-reknowned services such as Miro and Tilda.

Throughout her career, Maria has worked on both global and regional client experience strategies, trends, business, and organizational design projects for a wide range of companies such as SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, Mars, Miro, Pepsico, Boehringer Ingelheim, Astra Zeneca, Leroy Merlen, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Bionorica, Volkswagen, Hyundai.

Based on the philosophy and methodology of Design Thinking, Maria has built a business expertise in client-centric strategies, organizational design, foresight, trend analysis, and innovation development. She is passionate about envisioning and developing new philosophy and “culture of making”, transforming organizational processes in business and academia.

As a member of the GDTA Governing Board, Maria is focused on developing the vision and strategy of the GDTA to enrich the experience of its members. She is committed to introducing new activities, fresh tools, and formats that will help GDTA members take a step into the future with Design Thinking.