The 2008 Chicago Innovation Awards

Michael Krauss is a veteran strategic marketer, business adviser and organizational coach with more than 30 years of professional experience.

Mr. Krauss brings proven skills in strategic marketing planning, buyer insight analysis, segmentation, pricing strategy, marketing communications, crisis communications, brand building, product and service innovation, marketing organization design and sales effectiveness analysis. He is an advocate of fact-based marketing approaches that focus on delivering effective measurable returns. Clients served include: AT&T, Accenture, Diamond Cluster International, Hostway Corporation, Journal Communications Corporation, Golden Rule Insurance, Motorola, Public Service Co. of Colorado, Qwest, Reed Elsevier, Technomic, Inc., Tektronix, Xerox, Young & Rubicam and ZweigWhite. Industries served include professional services, computer hardware and software, telecommunications, media and publishing, public sector and consumer packaged goods.

Krauss speaks and writes frequently on business issues. He serves as the technology/marketing columnist for Marketing News, a publication of the American Marketing Association. Krauss is an active advocate of public sector economic development efforts and serves as co-chair of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Council of Technology Advisors.

Krauss holds a bachelor’s degree and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. He earned a CPA certificate in the State of Illinois.

Dan Miller is publisher and executive vice president of The Heartland Institute, a 25-year-old, non-profit think tank that discovers, develops and promotes free-market solutions to public policy issues.  He’s the former business editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and Crain’s Chicago Business, and served as the chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission.

Miller was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in 2005, and was named Illinois Journalist of the Year by the Northern Illinois University faculty in 1981.

He was began his career in Chicago with the Chicago Daily News, where he worked as a business reporter, editorial writer and assistant financial editor until the paper’s demise in 1978.

After joining Crain Communications, he helped launch Crain’s Chicago Business, and served as editor for 10 years, during which time the weekly newspaper earned local and national honors for general excellence in business reporting, commentary and design.

In 1998 Miller was named vice president of Crain Communications and publisher of Crain’s City & State, a national business newspaper for state and local government.

In 1994, Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar named him chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission, the state regulatory agency for public utilities. During his four-year tenure, Miller downsized the commission staff, and led efforts to deregulate the state’s telecommunications, electricity and motor-carrier industries.

Following public service, he spent a year at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian-oriented think tank based in Chicago, as senior vice president and publisher.

In July 1999 he was named business editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Miller is a 1967 graduate of the University of Minnesota with a B.A. degree in American Studies. He began his journalism career as a copyboy for the Minneapolis Tribune, and worked for newspapers in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

He is married with three daughters and three grandchildren, and lives in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood.

Gary Slack is chairman and chief experience officer of Slack Barshinger, the Business Marketing Association’s national “Agency of the Year” in 2002, 2004 and 2006 and BtoB magazine’s “Midsize Agency of the Year” in 2006. For three years in a row, BtoB magazine also has named him to its annual list of the “Top 100 Most Influential People in Business-to-Business Marketing.” Before founding Slack Barshinger in 1988, Gary spent 11 years with the Omnicom Group, where he held senior management positions in Chicago and Washington, D.C., with Omnicom agencies Doremus & Company and Porter Novelli. After earning a B.A. in economics from Dartmouth College, where he was editor in chief of The Dartmouth, he started his career in 1976 as a newspaper reporter and in 1977 joined Porter Novelli in Washington, D.C., as a writer. Besides being active in numerous marketing organizations, he is a vice chairman and member of the executive committee of the Economic Club of Chicago and a member of the board of directors of the Joffrey Ballet and the Chicago Council for Science and Technology. Gary joined BMA in 1989, served as chapter president in 2001 and 2002 and has been a BMA/Chicago board member since 2001.

Rick Strezo is a senior Partner with Kuczmarski & Associates, specializing in new- product development for manufacturing, technology, and consumer packaged goods companies. His professional achievements encompass a breadth of industries, including specialty and process chemicals, food, biopharmaceuticals, financial services, personal care, high-tech, and telecommunications. Beyond extensive work in the development of new products, Mr. Strezo’s experience includes new-product and market assessments/feasibility studies, overall marketing strategies, market segmentation, and stage gate and portfolio management processes.

Strezo led an engagement to assist a major consumer packaged foods company in the creation of a new-product development process—as well as in the actual development of new products. During this project, Strezo and his team generated a new-products strategic vision for the organization; conducted extensive customer and competitive primary and secondary research; created a predictive model of consumer behavior; led the generation of several hundred new-product ideas; identified and developed the highest potential product concepts; and authored new-product business cases for each concept. The strength of these product concepts developed by Mr. Strezo’s project team has led the company to move the most promising candidates into full product development and to recognize them as top corporate priorities.

Previously, Mr. Strezo headed an engagement with a private investor and NASA to identify commercial investment opportunities that could derive the greatest benefit from R&D access to microgravity (i.e., Earth-orbiting) environments. In this very unique project, Strezo and his team determined the benefits of microgravity research; identified broad-based scientific disciplines most closely aligned with these benefits; conducted extensive primary and secondary research to explore specific areas and applications within each discipline relative to needs and potential problem/solution fit; identified the most viable applications; and translated them into actionable business opportunities with recommendations for execution. As a direct result of this work, the client and NASA signed the latter’s first major contract with the private sector to develop commercial and medical biotechnology products. In turn, this licensing agreement allowed the investor to enter a joint venture with a biotech organization identified in the engagement’s recommended business models in order to pursue research of certain infectious diseases and the development of a liver-assist device for transplant patients.

Prior to joining Kuczmarski & Associates, Mr. Strezo served as CFO for Arlington International Racecourse, Inc., a premier thoroughbred horse racing facility. Before to that, he was a manager in the Strategic Services practice of Andersen Consulting, where he focused on strategic planning, marketing strategy, supply chain analysis, and business process re-engineering. Additionally, Strezo worked as an organic research chemist at DeSoto, Inc., and The Stepan Company, specializing in new-product development, applied research, and hazardous waste management.

Strezo earned his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, where he was elected to the Beta Gamma Sigma honor society. His areas of concentration were marketing, finance, and policy studies. He obtained his B.S. degree in chemistry from Loyola University of Chicago and there received the American Institute of Chemists’ Award as “the outstanding undergraduate student majoring in chemistry.”

Howard Wolinsky wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times for 26 years, first as a medical reporter and then as a technology reporter. He was one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS epidemic and also one of the first to cover the emergence of the Internet. Wolinsky has co-authored two books, The Serpent on the Staff: The Unhealthy Politics of the American Medical Association with Tom Brune, and the best-seller Healthcare Online for Dummies with his wife, Judi Wolinsky. He holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana and was a journalist-in-residence at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Robert (Bob) D. Blackwell, Sr. is chairman of Blackwell Consulting Services. A well-known leader in management and information technology, his computer industry expertise spans more than 35 years. He is known in the industry for being a visionary and dynamic leader.

Blackwell founded Blackwell Consulting in 1992, after working for more than 25 years at IBM. Today the company is a national full-service, full-life-cycle management and information technology consulting firm, serving the Global 1,000 and middle-market enterprises. With nearly 300 consultants, and an estimated revenue of $36 million in 2004, Blackwell has grown to become one of the largest minority-owned management and IT firms in the United States.

Blackwell holds a bachelor’s degree from Wichita State University. He is a member of the Mayor’s Council of Technology Advisors, the Executives’ Club of Chicago, the Economic Club of Chicago and the Metropolitan Club of Chicago. He also sits on the board of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the board of trustees of both the Museum of Science and Industry and Lakeside Bank.

His passion for and dedication to the arts has fueled his support of the Arts and Business Council (ABC), the Joel Hall Dance Company (past president), the Neighborhood Writing Alliance (chairman of the board) and the ETA Creative Arts Foundation (chairman of the board).

Maura O’Hara has been executive director of the Illinois Venture Capital Association (IVCA) since January 2004. The IVCA is a 160-member-firm trade association that represents the interests of the venture capital and private equity community, with more than 500 individual members. IVCA members collectively invest $100 billion in assets under management. The association works to promote the venture capital/private equity industry in Illinois by:

• Encouraging institutional investments in Midwest-based venture capital and private equity firms
• Supporting deal flow for Midwest-based venture capital and private equity firms
• Creating opportunities for early-stage equity investors to interact with growing companies
• Advocating a pro-investment climate in Illinois

O’Hara has 20 years’ marketing, strategy and consulting experience and has worked in such diverse industries as retail, home services, consumer packaged goods and professional services. Immediately prior to joining the IVCA, she had an eight-year career with Sears, Roebuck & Co., holding positions in corporate strategy, marketing and customer relationship management. When she left Sears in 2002, she was vice president of customer strategies and consumer research.

Before Sears, O’Hara gained operational planning experience working at Helene Curtis’ manufacturing facility in Chicago for four years. She also has five years’ experience in mergers and acquisitions at Stevenson & Company representing both buyers and sellers in the sale of closely held companies.

O’Hara holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Illinois-Urbana and an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She serves on the board of the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center and on Mayor Daley’s Council of Technology Advisors. She and her husband live in Oak Park, Ill., and have two children.

Micheal Arndt was named editor of BusinessWeek’s brand new monthly, BW Chicago, in August, 2007, after 7 ½ years in the magazine’s Chicago bureau as a senior correspondent. While at BusinessWeek, he covered virtually every business beat, from pharmaceuticals and health care to manufacturing, from airlines to retail and fast food. Arndt also edited various sections of the magazine.

Before joining BusinessWeek at the start of 2000, Arndt was a business editor at the Chicago Tribune from 5 years, overseeing a staff of up to two dozen reporters and directly responsible for the paper’s Sunday Business section. He was chief economics correspondent for the Tribune in its Washington, DC, bureau from 1990 to 1995. Arndt became a business reporter in 1987, after seven years as a metro reporter in the city and suburbs. During his career at the Tribune, he reported from Russia, Mexico, Canada and Japan. His first job in Chicago was at the now-defunct City News Bureau.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Arndt now lives in Lincoln Park.

As agency co-owner and leader Fay Ferguson is responsible for overall account management, financial operations, human resources, information technology, office services and administration.

Ferguson has received numerous awards, including being named the 2006 Chicago Advertising Woman of the Year by the Women’s Advertising Club of Chicago and the Chicago Advertising Federation; the "Advertising Working Mother of the Year, Trailblazer Mom" award from Working Mother magazine and the Advertising Women of New York; the “Most Influential Woman Award” from the Women’s Leadership Federation; and an “Outstanding Women in Marketing Communications” award presented by Ebony magazine.

Ferguson serves on the Executive Board of Perspectives Charter School, an inner-city Chicago school.  She is also a board member of the Chicago Advertising Federation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Chicago Council and the Turner/Patterson Company.

She is especially proud of being able to successfully manage her career, being a mom and helping others.