Katherine Otway
Katherine Otway is currently Chief Strategy Officer at The Engine, a deep tech incubator and accelerator built by MIT, and independently consults with startups on how to build, fund, and market their ventures. She also advises companies or serves as a fractional CXO in fintech, emerging tech, and life sciences companies. She was formerly Chief Marketing Officer of Zapata Quantum (a quantum computing software company) where her mandate included market-making for an emerging technology, fundraising, shaping the company’s offering, and designing its brand and business model.
Prior to that, she was a Senior Director at IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy, where for eight years she used Design Thinking to create new ventures for enterprises seeking transformational growth and helped startups go to market. She worked across industries for clients like Michaels, Liberty Mutual, Exelon, and PillPack (acquired by Amazon). Her IDEO work included a venture design curriculum, which has informed her executive MBA lecturing as a Faculty Associate at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and delivery of Executive Education modules at Babson College.
Katherine brings experience in strategy and marketing and her entrepreneurial mindset to every challenge. She thrives when designing new value propositions, brands, business models, and products, digital or physical. Katherine holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson and an undergraduate degree from Georgetown.
Commercializing Innovations (ENTR-958-0)
Success for new technology is driven by the ability of a business to create and capture value through innovation - from product innovation to business model innovation. This experience-based course, conducted in partnership with the Querrey InQbation Lab, offers students a chance to put innovation to work by developing commercial opportunities for new, unique Northwestern University technologies, innovations and inventions. The course will be most beneficial to students with an interest in starting a business, entrepreneurship, business design, business strategy consulting and commercialization. The objective of this course is to support the researchers in determining commercial viability as they work towards potential commercial launch. More information on the opportunities for this quarter is available here. Entrance to this course will be by application only. Team formation and project matching will be based on your application and background.
