About the Design Consortium

The Design Consortium was formed in 1985 by Ronald J. Sears to help firms create new products and services that provide significantly greater value to customers and everyone else with a stake in a new design. Mr. Sears invented the Product Value Matrix^sm theory and process. 

The Design Consortium trains firms that adopt the PVM^sm process, and it provides consulting services to support individual PVM development projects.

Mr. Sears received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from DePaul University and additional post-doctoral training at Northwestern University. Over the last 20 years he has worked on 60+ product planning and development projects in a wide range of industries, published related articles and papers, and led numerous seminars and innovation sessions.

His work has been recognized in two IDEA National Design Awards and featured in Business Week. In recent years, he has focused on training design teams in the application of the PVM process to product and service development.