Elaine Chen is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Elaine is a seasoned product development executive and consultant with a unique background spanning product development and product management. She brings practical techniques for entrepreneurial product development and marketing to engineering, MBA and EMBA students. Specific areas of focus include: lean startup, customer development, user and buyer persona development, and the application of ethnographic techniques for planning and conducting primary customer research.

Elaine is deeply passionate about all aspects of bringing a product to market, from market sizing and analysis through customer research, ideation, user experience, design, development and release to product life cycle management and planned obsolescence. She has brought over 20 hardware and software products to market, in industries spanning robotics, haptics, CAD, consumer electronics, web, mobile platforms and more. She has built and grown several technical organizations from the ground up. She is a co-inventor on 17 issued patents to date, and has managed IP portfolio strategies for several startups.

Elaine has served at the VP level in engineering and product management at several startups, including Rethink Robotics, Zeo, Zeemote and SensAble Technologies. She is also the founder and president at ConceptSpring, where she provides strategic management consulting and product development services to teams developing disruptive new products. Elaine is an active member of the MIT community and is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

Elaine holds a BS and an MS in mechanical engineering from MIT.