Eric Rebentisch, Ph.D. is a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. There he leads and advises research projects, including “Creating High Performing Engineering Programs: Making Lean Thinking Part of the Program Management DNA”, “Production in the Innovation Economy: How to Create Excellence Through Competition and Benchmarking in the U.S. Shipbuilding and Defense Industry”, and “Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology Enterprise Stakeholder Analysis”.
He formerly headed LAI’s Enterprise Product Development group and led its research, tools, and community development activities. He has advised dozens of graduate student theses at MIT on a range of topics. His research has focused primarily in aerospace, but also encompasses autos, medical devices, chemicals, and high- technology. It has addressed the development and management of enterprise technical competencies, including knowledge management and knowledge transfer, intellectual capital management, long- term institutional change, the “fuzzy front end” of product development, system architecting (including standardization, reusability, and commonality), and strategies for managing technical system development in an unstable environment.

He has also played a principal role in developing research findings into policy recommendations and deploying them to the US Government, and in facilitating high-level value-stream mapping and transformation events in complex enterprises such as the US Air Force, US Army, and the US Department of Defense (DoD). He led the facilitation of enterprise transformation initiatives with the US Army Materiel Enterprise and the US Army System of Systems Engineering office, and the office of the US DoD Deputy Chief Management Officer. He led the enterprise and stakeholder value research effort on the NASA Constellation Systems Study on the Draper Laboratory/MIT team studying future space exploration architectures and strategies.

He is co-author of the book Lean Enterprise Value and numerous other publications. At MIT he has taught courses in research methods and Lean/Six-sigma processes. He has been a principal in developing and deploying short courses at LAI and MIT, including the Lean Enterprise Value (LEV) and Lean Enterprise Product Development (LEPD). Both LEV and LEPD were developed with Dr. Hugh McManus and have been used widely in the aerospace industry to train managers and engineers lean enterprise principles and practices and to facilitate improvement initiatives.

He received a doctorate in the Management of Technological Innovation from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master’s degree in Organizational Behavior from Brigham Young University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Prior to academia, he worked in the aircraft industry as a propulsion engineer.