Joern Buehring is currently Assistant Professor and faculty member at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, School of Design, where he is advancing a research culture that is cooperative, innovative, and highly impact focused. This collaborative approach (cf. Design Economies, Ignite Innovation) brings academia, designers, and business stakeholders together to develop high-impact design knowledge, concepts, and forward-looking solutions. To this end, he leads the Ignite Innovation program specifically aimed at fostering University-Industry collaborations through tailored program initiatives, which have been funded by Government Grants and Industry totalling HK$3 million to date.

In respect of knowledge transfer, he is MDes Subject Leader in breakthrough product and service innovations, strategic innovation methods, and for International Design and Business Management MDes students, where he leads the Reflective Capstone thesis program. He is also a Chief Supervisor of PhD-level Design students.

Prior to joining academia, he held senior corporate leadership positions across diverse industries, leading major project initiatives including innovative start-ups, entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial business formations, and enterprise expansions into new markets. Working within a wide range of global brand icons (e.g. Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Toyota, BMW, and Bang & Olufsen A/S), and across organizational cultures and geographic locations, he has accumulated extensive experiences as a senior executive in a variety of industries, and his knowledge of the demands of the future is based on first hand experiences. His employment locations span the globe and include business experience within the major cultures of the world; formal qualifications earned him a BA-equivalent degree in the field of Tourism Management, an M.B.A. (VU) majoring in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and a PhD in futures Consumer Engagement Innovation at Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne, Australia).

Dr. Bühring's research explores Design Foresight, Vision and Fiction techniques as emerging processes within Strategic Design, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Management. A full member of the "World Futures Studies Federation" (www.wfsf.org), he has conducted since 2010 several major futures sector, he has been leading a series of industry funded futures studies in Wealth Management and Private Banking to the year 2030. With emphasis placed on life-centred value innovation driving new sustainable markets, his research interests expand toward experiential human engagement propositions in form of service-centric user experience design concepts. An area of specific interest is experiential consumption, memorable experience constructs, and designing experience co-creation concepts involving stakeholders within the transformation economy. Active across international markets, he collaborates with leading Universities in research and design-led innovation; Dr. Bühring also holds an honorary Adjunct Associate Professor position within the College of Business at RMIT University in Australia.

Contact eMail: joern.buehring@polyu.edu.hk (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong)

University Profile: https://www.sd.polyu.edu.hk/en/meet-our-staff/jorn-buhring

LinkedIn Profile: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/jornbuhring