He is currently working on the NSF-sponsored project, Digital Libraries for Distributed Innovative Design Education and Teamwork (DIDET), and on the Real-time Venture Design Laboratory for Creating Sustainable Ventures in Economically Challenged Communities. His research interests include learning, engineering, and entrepreneuring processes in design teams; interaction of representations, questions, and emotions during new product development; and design process performance metrics.

He is also a program leader in the School of Humanities and Sciences’ Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory, dedicated to accelerating shared global prosperity. Ade empirically studies how engineering design happens in innovation ecosystems and has published in the areas of design theory and methodology, knowledge management, design protocol analysis, design education, simulation studies of design teams, and emotion in engineering. He is currently leading an initiative to create global fluency in the science and engineering of capital formation systems.

Ade earned MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and originally hails from Nigeria where he earned his undergraduate degree.