Dennis Boyle is a Partner and a founding member of IDEO. Based in the firm’s Palo Alto offices, Dennis helps lead the Health and Wellness side of IDEO’s business, which works with clients in the medical and consumer healthcare industries to develop innovative products, services and strategies for treating disease and promoting healthy living and behavior change.

Over the course of his IDEO career, Dennis has worked as a design engineer, a project leader, a business relationship leader, a studio leader, and a practice leader. He has helped us build and nurture many key, long-term client relationships, including Silicon Valley tech firms, Fortune 100 consumer businesses, and health-care companies. He has been named on more than 55 patents.

Dennis helped to shape IDEO’s approach to teaching design thinking through workshops. He also created the TechBox at IDEO, a collection of tools used for creative problem-solving, research, and in communication both inside and outside the company. Dennis is a consulting assistant professor for the Design Division of Stanford University’s Mechanica Engineering department, where he’s contributed to courses on product, engineering, and human factors design, as well as design for sustainability and creativity and innovation. He established and co-teaches “Design Thinking for Better Health” at the d.school, a course that draws students from each of the university’s graduate schools. In this class students are placed on teams that work directly with individual patients to promote healthy behaviors in order to avoid or slow the onset of long-term chronic illnesses.

For elementary and high school students, Dennis has helped start after school programs, such as the Tech Challenge at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. The goals of these programs have been to enable kids to experience and solve engineering problems through hands-on design thinking and building projects.

Dennis holds a BS in mechanical engineering, with an emphasis on industrial design, from the University of Notre Dame and an MS in product design from Stanford. He is married to Peggy Burke, founder of 1185 Design, and has two sons.