David Schonthal is an award-winning Professor of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management where he teaches courses on new venture creation, design thinking, healthcare innovation and creativity. In addition to his teaching, he also serves as the Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Kellogg and is the Faculty Director of the Zell Fellows Program, a selective venture accelerator program designed to help student entrepreneurs successfully launch or acquire new businesses.

Along with his colleague Loran Nordgren, David is one of the originators of Friction Theory – a ground-breaking methodology that explains why even the most promising innovations and change initiatives often struggle to gain traction with their intended audiences – and what to do about it. This work is popularized in David’s bestselling book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas (Wiley).

Outside of Kellogg David has been practitioner in the world entrepreneurship, design, and innovation for over 20 years. He previously spent a decade working at world-renowned design firm, IDEO, and currently serves as an Operating Partner at 7Wire Ventures, a healthcare technology-focused venture capital firm. David is also a Global Advisor at Design for Ventures (D4V), a Tokyo-based early-stage venture capital fund that invests in design-led Japanese startups, and fromerly served as an Operaring Partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, a consumer and enterprise-focused fund. David is the Co-Founder of MATTER, a 25,000-square-foot innovation center in Chicago focused on catalyzing and supporting healthcare entrepreneurship. 

He is a contributing writer to Forbes, Inc., Fortune, Fast Company and Harvard Business Review magazines, authoring articles on strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, design and change.  David has been honored on Crain's Chicago Business magazine's "40 Under 40" list (back when he was under 40) and was a Distinguished Achievement Award Finalist for Thinkers50, an international organization that identifies, ranks, and shares the leading management ideas of our age. He has won Kellogg’s Executive MBA Outstanding Professor award 7 times as well as a Faculty Impact Award for excellence in teaching.

David earned his MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and his BA in International Relations from Boston University.

As much as David would like to think he’s one-of-a-kind…he’s actually a triplet.

• MBA, 2009, General Management, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
• Bachelors of Art, 1999, International Relations, Boston University, Boston University, Magna Cum Laude

• Visting Professor, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
• Visting Professor, Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University
• Clinical Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 8/31/2016
• Faculty Director of the Zell Fellows Program, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
• Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, 12/31/2012
• Adjunct Lecturer of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 8/31/2013
• Clinical Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 8/31/2021
• Clinical Professor of Strategy and Innovation, Strategy, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

• Operating Partner, 7 Wire Ventures, 2020-present
• Venture Partner, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, 2020-present
• Global Advisor, Design For Ventures (D4V), 2019-present
• Operating Partner, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, 2018-2020
• Senior Director, IDEO, 2011-present
• Co-Founder and Board Member, MATTER, 2013-2020
• Council Member, ChicagoNext, 2012-2019
• Partner, Fusion Ventures, 2010-2014
• Director, Strategy and Venture Development, The Tavistock Group, 2005-2010
• Chief Operating Officer, Iapyx Medical, 2005-2008
• Entrepreneur in-Residence, CONNECT, 2009-2015
• Manager, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, LLP, 2004-2005
• Senior Consultant, Deloitte, LLP, 2002-2004
• Senior Consultant, Arthur Andersen, LLP, 1999-2002
• Product Manager, Arthur Andersen, LLP, 1999-2002

• Thinkers50 Radar Honoree, Thinkers50
• Outstanding Professor, Elective Course, EMBA, Kellogg School of Management
• Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award Finalist, Thinkers50
• Outstanding Professor, Elective Course, EMBA, 2022
• Thinkers50 Radar Honoree, Thinkers50, 2021
• Thinkers50 - Most Influential Management Thinkers Finalist, Thinkers50, 2022
• Outstanding Professor, Core Course, EMBA, 2021
• Outstanding Professor, Core Course, EMBA
• Outstanding Professor, Elective Course, EMBA
• Outstanding Professor, Elective Course, EMBA, 2021
• Outstanding Professor, Elective Course, EMBA
• Outstanding Professor, Core Course, EMBA, 2020-2021
• Outstanding Professor, Elective Course, EMBA, 2020-2021
• Outstanding Professor, Core Course, EMBA
• Outstanding Professor, Elective Course, EMBA, 2019-2020
• Kellogg Impact, Award, a student initiated award that recognizes excellence in the classroom

Advanced Marketing Management

For executives navigating an ever-changing marketing landscape, this program gives participants practical knowledge of marketing management tools and how to implement them into a successful strategy across multi-level teams.

Enterprise Leadership Program

Leadership at the enterprise level means rising to the challenge. No longer is your growth linear — it’s exponential. The focus moves past the single team or unit to the enterprise as a whole, beyond functional skills to strategic decisions based on a broader perspective. Kellogg Executive Education’s Enterprise Leadership Program prepares you to lead at height and scale and helps you develop an anticipatory mindset.

Leading for Impact within Family Enterprise

As an aspiring leader within family enterprise, you’ll discover how to establish your credibility and authority in the business community, among family shareholders, with the board and management team. As an established leader, you’ll explore the complexities of mentoring the next generation and of managing succession and letting-go. For all, the program can enable you to better manage the nuanced paradoxes that are characteristic of family business leadership.

Leading High-Impact Teams

From the thought leaders that set the standard for building and leading effective teams, this intensive program delivers deep insight into Kellogg’s proven approaches and practical tools and techniques you can use immediately to solve complex team challenges.

The PHYSICIAN CEO™ Program

Capstone Course (STRTX-470-0)


Phase 0: Designing, Building and Communicating Compelling New Ventures (ENTRX-475-0)
This course has been designed to demystify the "fuzzy front end" of starting a new venture and to give you the tools and confidence to build and launch something of your own. You will learn how to identify problems worth solving, test your assumptions about possible solutions, adjust your initial hypothesis based on experimentation and market feedback, and ultimately accelerate the time between inspiration, execution, operations, and growth. We will focus on the importance of achieving "Product Market Fit" - developing the right offer for the right customer - and convincing others to support you on your journey. The tools and skills learned in this class are equally as applicable to startups as they are to corporate innovation projects. The course is geared to: 1) those who want to pursue an entrepreneurial career and are taking this course to develop and pursue a business idea; 2) those interested in a career path in business innovation, whether it's in a new venture or innovating inside a larger firm 3) those who are curious about a career in entrepreneurship and innovation and want to better understand what it entails and explore if it fits well with their inherent personality traits and talents. The construct of the class is a blend of lecture, hands-on workshops, in-market research, site visits, simulations and guest speakers. We will take full advantage of being in San Francisco and do a lot of our learning outside of the classroom. Coursework will be team-based.

Forging and Funding Healthcare Startups (HCAK-627-0)

The first five weeks will be focused on forging and each team will be paired with a company that has successfully navigated the early-stage challenges facing health care companies. The teams will be asked to investigate the actions taken by the company to place them in a successful position and asked to present their findings to the remainder of the class. The second five weeks will be focused on funding during which the course will explore the key drivers and trends in early-stage financing and venture capital. Guest speakers will include experienced venture investors and CEOs of early-stage companies raising capital. Teams will be asked to evaluate early-stage investment opportunities and make an investment recommendation.

Field Study (ENTR-498-0)
Field Studies include those opportunities outside of the regular curriculum in which a student is working with an outside company or non-profit organization to address a real-world business challenge for course credit under the oversight of a faculty member.

New Venture Discovery (ENTR-462-0)

New Venture Discovery is designed to help students navigate the earliest stages of starting a new venture beginning with the identification of a problem in the market that is worth solving. The class teaches students tools and techniques to translate these problems into viable business concepts, with an emphasis on enabling an aspiring entrepreneur to get as far as possible, with as little as possible, as FAST as possible.

Student teams begin the quarter with nothing more than a series of hypotheses about a new venture, then design and execute a series of in-market experiments that either validate these assumptions, or force them to iterate aspects of their business model in real time. The objective of the course to guide students toward the achievement of "product-market fit" as a crucial first step in in the creation of a startup. From here, students can evolve their businesses by enrolling in the "Develop" and "Launch" courses that serve as the continuation of the new ventures curriculum.

New Venture Discovery course material ranges from customer discovery and design thinking, to rapid prototyping (of both offers and business models), bootstrapping methods and communicating/selling the vision for a new venture. The course format is a blend of lecture, fieldwork, cross-team collaboration and ideation sessions, outside speakers and expert mentoring.

**This course may not be dropped after the second week of the quarter**