Mickey McManus is a senior advisor to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and a visiting research fellow at Autodesk's Office of the CTO. He is a pioneer in pervasive computing, collaborative human/machine innovation, human-centered design and education. McManus holds 13 patents in the area of connected products, environments, vehicles and services.
At Autodesk McManus co-created the generative learning research initiative where dynamic —in the moment — formative assessment combined with networks of cross-industry credentials themselves evolve to improve “speed to mastery” based on use. McManus' initial focus area for this research was in the domain of complex creative, technical, and engineering skillsets, toolsets, and mindsets.
His current research is at the intersection of automation, cognitive capacity, biases and meta-cognition.
McManus was the president, CEO, and chairman of MAYA Design, a design consultancy and innovation lab that spun out of Carnegie Mellon University in 1989 with a mission of taming complexity. During McManus' 13-year tenure as CEO at MAYA, the company won numerous Consumer Electronic Association (CEA) awards for product innovation, was selected multiple times as a top 20 “best small company to work for” in America by Fortune, Inc, and Entrepreneur magazines, and spun-out, launched, or incubated five new MAYA organizations based on research done for the original “Department of Strategic Surprise”, DARPA.
McManus is the co-author of the award-winning book "Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology."