Catalyst. Engineer. Designer. Gregory Polletta has made a career of producing work that startles, gets the job done, and continually pushes boundaries in a broad range of fields that encompass the artistic as well as the practical and scientific. He is the founder of iGNITIATE, an innovation strategy and industrial design firm that specializes in disruptive design — the art and science of creating new and innovative products and services that can transform a product category, shake up a market, and ensure international firms’ continued success. Polletta is also the co-founder of the international award-winning design brand gregorysung.

Polletta is a true 21st-century Renaissance man whose research, start-ups and designs span many fields, including furniture, lighting, nano technology, architecture (where he and his team have designed eye-catching facades for buildings under renovation such as the worlds first ever moving-pin facade design TOPIADE for Louis Vuitton), medical technology, computer memory devices, mobile phone software, furniture design, artificial lighting, bio-materials, object design, and consumer product packaging. He has brought his talents for high-tech research and development commercialization and design to bear for such clients as Guzzini, Roche Bobois, Fujitsu, Louis-Vuitton, and Pfizer and many more.

Prior to iGNITIATE, Gregory Polletta worked at the legendary Xerox PARC Labs, the American Management Center for Advanced Technology, and DARPA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Gregory is a full professor at France’s Grande Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées ENPC PhD Engineering and MBA program + The ENPC Paris Tech d.school in Paris, and the Parsons School of Design in Paris, France as well as lecturing at the Royal College of Art in London, UK; The University of Bologna Advanced Design Unit; Harvard University, and many other universities on the topics of design innovation, strategic management, research and development commercialization, entrepreneurship, industrial design, and new product development.

After almost 10 years with the ENPC Ph.D Engineering & MBA Program and after more than 500 industry professionals have passed through his Ignite program classes, Professor Polletta was named the most inspirational professor in 2014 at Grande Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées ENPC Paris, France. Gregory is the designer of REUTPALA – the permanent award for the World Retail Congress given on the date of its launch to Alberto Alessi as a lifetime achievement award for design and retail. Gregory was the 2nd highest ranked speaker at the inaugural True Start/True Capital R:evolution conference and a past designer in residence there, is the Chairman of the 2015 Global Leadership Conference on Design and also a judge of the $1M President Clinton HULT Prize, the A’ Design Awards, the Cannes Lions Festival Awards for Product Design, the Clio Awards and a 2017 Candidate for the US Presidential Innovation Fellows Program at the White House.