Professor Rajkumar Roy led Competitive Design research at Cranfield for over ten years before promotion to Head of Manufacturing Department in 2009. Competitive Design is a fact based approach to study whole life of technology intensive products and services and optimise their design, along with efficient design information and knowledge management. Professor Roy is known for his qualitative cost modelling, requirements management and design optimisation research and has published over 20 Journals and 100 conference papers. He is currently the Principal Investigator of three Product-Service System (PSS) projects (IMRC and EPSRC funded) in the areas of whole life cost and service knowledge capture. He is also the Principal Investigator of an IMRC funded Network of Excellence in Affordability Engineering. BAE Systems is a major sponsor of his research along with Airbus, Rolls Royce, MoD, BOC Edwards, Nissan and Ford Motor Company. He is currently leading the new initiative on Competitive Creative Design at Cranfield and collaboration with University of the Arts London, and has also developed an innovative PSS Futures Lab at Cranfield. Professor Roy has a PhD in design optimisation using soft computing techniques. Before that he completed formal postgraduate education on intelligent systems and production engineering. He is a Chartered Engineer and the Vice President and Fellow of the Association of Cost Engineers (AcostE), a member of IEEE, IED and the Institution of Engineers (India). He has also been an Associate Member of CIRP over 3 years. Professor Roy is the Editor in Chief of the Applied Soft Computing journal from Elsevier.

Douglas has over 20 years of experience focused on the development, marketing and deployment of tailored supply chain solutions for companies across a wide variety of industry sectors and brings energised leadership to this dynamic field of study. Before founding eKNOWtion, Douglas was a Principal Consultant of management consultants Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath (PRTM) and formerly served as the Vice President for the Integrated Material Services division of Avnet Inc. Prior to his role VP role at Avnet, Douglas held various positions in Sales, Operations Management, Product Management and Procurement.

Pierfrancesco Manenti leads the IDC Manufacturing Insights research practice in EMEA and is the global lead for the Operations Technology Strategies advisory service. In his role, Mr Manenti provides insights, consulting and advisory support to leading manufacturers and specialty IT vendors into the key challenges and trends affecting manufacturing industries, including Automotive, Machinery, Wearing Apparel/Fashion, CPG, and High-Tech – with a particular attention to the EMEA region. Among the process domain areas, Mr. Manenti specializes in Manufacturing Operations, Supply Chains, and Product Life-Cycle strategies. Mr Manenti regularly contributes to the Operations Technology blog on the IDC Manufacturing Insights Community (http://idc-insights-community.com/manufacturing) and tweets (@PierManenti) about business and IT issues relevant to Manufacturing Operations, Supply Chain, Product Lifecycle, IT strategies. A senior executive with about 20 years of industry experience in manufacturing operations and supply chain strategy consulting and IT solutions, as well as product management, marketing, and business development, Mr. Manenti is a thought leader with a strong focus on the business value of technology in manufacturing. Prior to joining IDC, Mr Manenti spent many years with TXT e-solutions, a Europe-based SCM software vendor, where he held increasing roles and responsibilities, including: industry business unit manager for automotive, business development manager for manufacturing industries, and U.K. operations director. Mr Manenti has a degree in computer science from Pisa University (Italy).