Matt Kressy
Program Lead, Planara Leaders · Founding Director, MIT Integrated Design & Management
Matt Kressy is a designer, educator, and innovator who has spent his career at the intersection of design, engineering, and business — helping leaders turn ideas into things that matter.
He founded MIT’s Integrated Design & Management program and served as its director for nearly thirty years. IDM was one of the first graduate programs to integrate design, engineering, and business into a single practice — reshaping how innovation is taught at the graduate level. Matt’s conviction behind it: the best products come from deeply understanding people and working across disciplines.
Alongside his academic work, Matt has always been a practitioner. As founder of Designturn, he has designed, invented, engineered, and brought to market more than 100 products for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. This hands-on record is what grounds his teaching — connecting bold ideas to the realities of execution, manufacturing, and business.
For more than two decades, Matt has taught at leading institutions — MIT, Harvard Business School, RISD, Babson, Olin College of Engineering, and the University of Utah — reaching thousands of students and executives. He is also a founding team member, trustee, and innovation advisor to the New England Innovation Academy, where he helped embed human-centered design into K–12 learning.
At the core of Matt’s work is a simple belief: innovation is about people. When empathy, creativity, and interdisciplinary thinking come together, what gets built is worth the effort it took.
Where Matt has taught and built
