Jay Wilson_Bio Growing up in the MidWest, Jay studied Engineering and Design at the University of Kansas where he was voted the Outstanding Senior in Industrial Design. After graduating, he moved to Chicago to join Ampex Consumer Electronics Division and then was Design Manager of the newly-formed Motorola New Ventures, a 20-person think-tank created to retain creative but iconoclastic entrepreneurs within the corporate environment. Funded by 1% of Motorola's gross sales, New Venture's Mission was to create and nurture innovative ideas and business models into products and potential Motorola subsidiaries.
But it was the call of the West that brought Jay to the San Francisco Bay Area where he served in several design management positions, including Vice President of GVO INC, a 40-person nationally-recognized product development firm in Palo Alto and later as Senior Director for Plantronics in Santa Cruz, the world leader in communication headsets. Most recently, he has reformed Jay Wilson Design, a Virtual Design enterprise having done consulting for Compaq, 3M Visual Systems Division, Polycom, Alza Pharmaceutical, Aviron (FluMist), Hewlett Packard, Schilling Robotics, and Liquid Audio.
Jay is a full member of IDSA and has, over the years, developed and maintained an outstanding track record of successful product designs for a variety of industries. Jay is a hands-on designer and has received dozens of design patents, utility patents, and design awards and has been honored with an exhibit in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Jay enjoys mentoring students and has been an invited speaker at various schools including San Jose State and the Stanford School of Business. His work and articles have been widely published in ID Magazine, Business Week, Arbitare Magazine, IDSA Innovations, Silicon Valley Business Ink, and others.