Fred Leichter

Fred Leichter is the director of The Claremont Colleges’ Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (the Hive), which has a mission to accelerate the creative development of students through exploration, collaboration, and experiential learning. He is also a clinical professor of engineering at Harvey Mudd College, specializing in design thinking and innovation.

Leichter previously worked as senior vice president for design thinking and innovation at Fidelity Investments, where he led teams to focus on user needs and experiment for faster innovation. He created a lean, start-up style incubator function within the larger financial company to help bring new ideas forward more quickly, and he initiated intercompany collaboration among design thinking teams from JetBlue, Nordstrom, Kaiser Permanente, and others.

Leichter also served as a lecturer at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school), teaching such classes as Designing with Data, Visual Thinking Strategies, and Project Joy: Designing Delight into the Workplace.