For more than 40 years, Sage has helped businesses of all sizes navigate complex business environments. While many of its larger customers have the means and the structure to support climate initiatives, many of its smaller customers do not.

Sage wanted to help its SMB customers get ahead of future climate regulations and meet consumer expectations. And building carbon-footprint evaluation and mitigation tools would also dovetail nicely with Sage’s own climate aspirations: cutting its own emissions in half by 2030. Together, Sage and IDEO investigated how the company could leverage the data in its platform to calculate its customers’ emissions, both direct and indirect, and how that information could spur action as they aim to hit net zero.

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To get started, the design team went deep with customers running all kinds of businesses—from a taxi company to a champagne bar to a falconry center. Business owners shared that their focus often has to be on the day-to-day, a series of small decisions that, when added together, lead to business success. For many, tackling a problem as complex as climate change felt overwhelming. IDEO and Sage synthesized those insights and began working across verticals and products, bringing together experts from marketing, technology, sustainability, and operations to build out new concepts. With the help of two carbon accountants, the team worked to figure out how existing data could inform customers about both their direct and indirect emissions, which can be harder to track. Given how tight SMBs’ margins are, they focused on how that knowledge could fuel emissions-cutting changes that also save money, giving businesses extra incentive to take action. Together, the team created a roadmap of customer outcomes and experience guidelines to help shape future products.

Sage has taken that work forward, launching Sage Earth, a platform that aims to help businesses measure, manage, and mitigate emissions—even across supply chains. With carbon accounting now built directly into all Sage Accounting and Sage for Accountants products in the UK, Sage has made climate action practical and accessible for millions of SMBs. By automating emissions measurement and reporting, Sage Earth removes barriers of cost and complexity, empowering business owners and their accountants to stay competitive in supply chains where up to 95 percent of emissions occur. 

From co-developing the UK Voluntary SME Carbon Reporting Standard to launching a Carbon Accounting API, which gives banks, fintechs, and other platforms access to Sage’s Carbon Engine, Sage is embedding sustainability into the systems people already trust—helping hundreds of thousands (and rapidly increasing) small businesses turn climate ambition into everyday action.

Small- and medium-sized businesses—companies with fewer than 500 employees—make up about 90% of the world’s businesses, according to U.N.-backed SME Climate Hub.

Two thirds of small businesses don’t know how they’re going to reach net zero, and lack the resources to do so, according to a recent survey by SME Climate Hub. Still, the majority reported they want to act on climate, recognizing it can help them become a more resilient business.

Large companies may be the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses, but an estimated 80% of those emissions come from supply chains—often made up of smaller enterprises.

Scaling rapidly

in the three years since the launch of Sage Earth, which is now being used by hundreds of thousands of businesses

World's 1st

open-source hybrid emissions factors dataset, Carbon Commons, led by Sage, helps SMBs calculate carbon footprints using existing data

Menopause is much more than a biological transition—it is a profound shift that often arrives just when people experiencing it start to feel invisible. Because it has long been shrouded in darkness as an unmentionable female affliction, those going through menopause often feel unprepared and alone.

Recognizing that its customer demographic makes QVC uniquely positioned to surface conversations and provide support to those dealing with menopause, the video commerce retailer partnered with IDEO to figure out how it could not only meet customer needs, but also flip the conversation on midlife. To learn more, a team of female design researchers held in-depth interviews with folks experiencing it firsthand. The people they spoke to had limited information about what was going on with their bodies, and in some cases, it took years before they understood that symptoms they were experiencing were related to menopause. Respondents also reported that midlife brought a change in social status and the feeling of being boxed in by stereotypes.

QVC and IDEO worked together to design an integrated suite of offerings that could give customers a safe space to discover and share more about menopause. That included an on-air programming series called “Menopause Your Way,” where QVC could support those going through menopause in the privacy of their own homes, a digital landing page with useful solutions, and social media campaigns to help women share and learn more about each others’ experiences. Because people experience menopause and choose to manage it in many different ways, the team wanted to create an integrated ecosystem of content that women could access according to their unique journeys. The new offering helped QVC  reach its core audience with solutions and relevant products, and created a space where menopause is out in the open and part of an ongoing conversation. And in the process, QVC evolved to become a more customer-centric company, putting its audience and their needs at the heart of its offerings.

9/10 of British menopausal women say society and brands overlook them.

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1 in 2 women in the UK admitted they didn’t know what was happening to them during perimenopause.

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Nearly 40% of menopausal women are being prescribed antidepressants to help manage their symptoms, despite 4 out of 5 describing the treatment as “inappropriate.”

Season 2

a series focused on menopause is now in its second season

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Healthcare is a complex web of institutions, interaction, relationships, and services. In England, the National Health Service consists of thousands of separate organizations spread across the country. This fragmented structure means that rolling out digital tools and using them to their full potential can be difficult.

NHSX approached IDEO and Public Digital, IDEO’s sister company, for help designing user-centered resources that would empower Children and Young People’s Mental Health (CYPMH) practitioners to use digital tools more effectively, shifting service design from a reactive to a proactive process, and allowing each regional organization to create the best digital services for their children and young people.

The team took a human-centered approach, tapping into the perspectives, challenges and needs of NHS practitioners and leaders across the system over months of research. They then designed a set of accessible, straightforward online resources, courses, and templates that would enable a practitioner to start their own local service transformations. These included everything from practical advice on improving users’ experiences of CYPMH, to teaching methods for service design, to content focused on achieving digital transformation at scale.

The resources were easy to implement and replicate, allowing mental health practitioners across the country to seamlessly integrate physical and digital, create firebreaks in the system, and better bridge the gap between seeking care and receiving it. They were designed to evolve over time, and the work is replicable across the NHS, with the potential to touch millions of lives.

By empowering practitioners to utilize these digital tools to ease the burden of care, NHSX plans to create a positive ripple effect across the entire NHS, its partner organizations, and the country at large.

In a study undertaken in July 2020, the first summer of the COVID pandemic, the NHS found that clinically significant mental health conditions amongst children had risen by 50% compared to three years earlier.

More options, more access

digital resources are helping children and young people access more options for their mental health care

It’s not easy to shift the paradigm for an entire industry. But when a company comes along that promises to reinvent air travel, it opens up a blue sky of opportunities. That’s the flight path for Boom Supersonic, which is thinking big about how passengers arrive at their destination not only faster, but also with a greater sense of wellbeing.

To really comprehend the experience of flying in the unique contoured profile of this ultrafast jet, and to help Boom make key decisions about the design of the plane, the IDEO team believed that you had to go beyond algorithms and schematics—you needed to actually board it.

Using a “build-first” approach, the team quickly constructed a full-scale mockup of the fuselage from plywood and foam core. That became a prototyping platform to test multiple seating configurations, galley and lavatory size and placement, luggage storage solutions, and other concepts that would differentiate and add value to the passenger experience. For the first time, the Boom team was able to set foot in its own aircraft and truly understand the experience from the perspective of its clientele. The exercise allowed the Boom team to confidently make decisions by comparing multiple cabin configurations and options in full-scale.

Throughout the project, Boom and IDEO invited future travelers aboard to interact with the prototype and offer feedback. That input culminated in a more refined model, with augmented windows, moonroof, in-flight entertainment screens, and sound design—all further augmented by a Virtual Reality component to allow our future travelers to fully immerse in this new experience.

Together, Boom and IDEO brought a sneak peak to the Farnborough International Airshow, a biannual exhibition for the aerospace, aviation, and defense industries. The event was an opportunity to give the industry and potential customers a preview of Boom’s innovative new jet. In collaboration with the client, an exhibition architect, and a digital production agency, the team created an immersive environment designed to make the Overture experience feel tangible, eliciting the wonder of this revolutionary plane.

Boom’s presence at Farnborough not only underscored the Overture’s progress but provided an inspiring glimpse into the future of air travel. During the air show the company announced the production Overture design, a market-expanding alliance with Northrop Grumman, and agreements with tier one suppliers Collins Aerospace, Safran, and Eaton. Not long after, Boom received its largest order to date, this one from American Airlines. 

The prospect of getting to London in time for dinner just got a little closer.

Boom plans for Overture to get from New York to Frankfurt in just over four hours instead of the eight hours spent on a commercial jet today.

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The Overture supersonic jet has a cruising speed of Mach 1.7, about twice as fast as today’s commercial planes. Overture is built to fly on 100% sustainable aviation fuels (SAF).

20 Overture deposits

made by American Airlines, joining current customers United Airlines and Japan Airlines

I took this picture in the San Francisco airport. Airport lounges are shared places where you're invited to make yourself at home temporarily. I love watching how individuals and groups position themselves to take personal ownership of space and make it work for them by creating boundaries and surfaces with whatever is on hand. This heads-up newspaper display system was a clever repurposing of roll-aboard luggage that I hadn't seen before. In one elegant move, this traveler has provided himself with an information screen (the bottom half of a page anyway), hands-free support to read in comfort while eating his cereal, and a clear delineation of personal space and visual privacy.

Thoughtless acts reveal just how natural it is for everyone to design, modify, and rearrange the world to make it work better for them. We draw on that capacity everyday in our quest to create useful products and services for others.

1. Sketch Your Neighbor

Most people default to verbal/analytical mode, so getting people to use their hands and get involved with pen and paper can prove to be a very refreshing gear shift. As the name suggests, Sketch Your Neighbor requires everyone to draw the person next to them. Set a timer for a minute or two and let loose. For the majority of people who claim that they can't draw, this exercise involves a certain amount of vulnerability—and that's the point. If everyone is used to failing in front of each other, the group dynamic is going to be more open, generous, and positive.

2. The Name Game

When you're dealing with strangers, learning everyone's name can be a significant challenge. The improv legends at Second City use a game to get past this. Everyone stands in a circle and takes turns saying their name while making a gesture. Everyone else repeats the name, while copying the gesture. They go around the circle doing the same thing one more time, and then everyone has to do the whole thing from memory. The association of movement with the name is a shortcut to embedding it in long-term memory. That, plus that fact that everyone has made themselves look ridiculous, leads to an open and fun meeting.

3. The Stretch

Sitting hunched in a chair while someone drones on and on feels like going through a slow death. Getting people out of their chairs is a quick way to perk up energy levels and set the stage for collaboration. The Stretch is a very simple exercise: A facilitator asks everyone to stretch their arms up to the ceiling, tilt them to the left and the right, and then shake them out. It takes less than a minute, and allows the meeting leader to take control of the room and wakes people up.

4. Last Word, First Word

One problem with meetings is that we aren't great at listening to each other. This is even more of a problem if people are glued to their phones and laptops. We cribbed this game from Second City, too. Everyone pairs up and has a conversation. The rule is that the first word of your sentence must be the same as the last word of the sentence your partner just said. This requires listening to their entire sentence before beginning to frame your reply. Sadly, for most of us, this is an unusual behavior.

5. The Story Opener

One of the keys to a good creative meeting is to have everyone show up as their whole, human self, rather than their"work self." A quick way to get there to have everyone tell a quick personal story. For example, ask your colleagues to talk about a youthful hobby. If possible, connect the story topic to the purpose of the meeting. Talking about ways to motivate a team? Ask them to tell a story about the moment in their life when they felt most excited. The main benefit comes from having each person tell a story from the heart, which will bond everyone for the rest of the meeting.

6. Dance Lesson

If you're ready for an added level of risk, get people to do rhythmic movement in unison. This requires a charismatic (i.e. shameless) facilitator or a very willing group of participants—or, ideally, both. The facilitator takes the group through a set of dance moves, and then everyone performs them together to music. If you start a meeting like this, nothing that happens afterwards will faze anybody.

Illustrations by Steve Har.

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In the age of Slack, Asana, and other tools for collaboration, in-person meetings are losing ground. It’s true that having a great meeting isn't easy, and too often we fall into dull routines. But it’s also true that real magic can happen when people are face-to-face in a room together. To get people to be fully present and spark creative ideas, try these meeting warmups.

The boozy makeover started with the lid. We wanted opening the bar to be one-handed and easy, and have some dramatic flair, so we added a gas-spring hinge to connect the lid and kettle. Figuring out where and how to attach the hinge, then drilling out a slot, ended up being the hardest and most time-consuming part of the build. Go figure.

Once the gas spring was in, we designed a cooking grate—laser cut out of acrylic and spray painted silver—to accommodate six hand-lettered liquor bottles.

Next, we added a Bluetooth speaker to the inside of the lid for what we called the “Complete Party Effect,” and a push-push latch to make opening and shutting the grill seamless. A few holes in the leg of the grill and—boom!—we had cord management.

We thought we were finished when Chris Gold, mechanical engineer extraordinaire, walked into the Shop. “How can you have a grill wet-bar thingy without glowing embers?” Good point. Ten minutes, a strip of LEDs, and some quick coding later, Chris had made a modern fire. We crinkled some paper to diffuse the lights and give it some texture and we put it under the bottom grate. Embers: check.

But a grill isn’t real grill until it is loved. So this year, we’ll be throwing one hell of a St. Paddy’s Day Happy Hour by queuing up a good Irish jig and giving Webby a proper welcome to the IDEO Chicago family.

Video by Sophie Feng

Special thanks to Annette Ferrara, Party Designer in Chief, for the idea!

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Even though our Midwestern hearts haven’t quite thawed yet, springtime is right around the corner. For too many long, cold months, IDEO Chicago’s Weber Original Kettle grill—that icon of carefree springtime afternoons and a beloved local brand—has been collecting cobwebs in the corner. We thought: What better way to welcome spring than to bust out our beloved grill and transform it into a tricked-out studio wet bar? And just in time. With the start of spring comes everyone's favorite excuse to drink with coworkers: St. Patrick’s Day. (Chicagoans are particularly notorious for celebrating the holiday in style, from our rowdy St. Paddy's Parade to literally dyeing the Chicago River green.)

Name: Tony Browne
Location: London
Role at IDEO: I’m an organizational design director. I help people build modern, purposeful organizations through design, and a more human use of technology.
Joined IDEO: January 2017
Twitter: @misterbrowne
Titillating Fact: I was crowned UK Computer Gaming champion in 1994 and haven’t really given up the joystick in the 20 years since. Approximately 60 percent of our household arguments are over who is allowed on our Playstation—me, or my 5 year old son, Spencer.

1. Corporate Rebels

I mean, just look at them. With their long hair, nonchalant stance, and leather/denim apparel, Joost and Pim have corporate rebellion chic down. But they didn’t start out like that. In fact, they came from a fairly standard finance and consultancy background—until they quit their jobs, and committed to traveling the world in search of “rebellious” organizations.

Their blog has some great case studies about companies that are experimenting with radically different ways of working. Check out their insights into Zappos, Gutmann, and my personal favorite, West Coast tomato processing company Morning Star.

2. The Meaning Conference

Established in 2012, the Meaning conference is an annual UK event for those of us who believe there is more—so much more—to business than making money. It started off as a fairly small, low-key affair, but by 2016 it had grown enormously, attracting leading UK economists, global business leaders, and politicians. I always come away from the event buoyed by conversations with passionate and like-minded people, and excited that meaning and purpose are really starting to be taken seriously in the business world.

Look out for news of the 2017 event (where I’ll be a volunteer).

3. A16Z Podcast

I’m a tiny bit obsessed by all things digital. I love technology, and I love thinking about how it is blowing up business models, transforming organizations, and creating entirely new sectors. The A16Z podcast from venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (16 refers to the number of letters between the A and the Z in their names) is the best I’ve found to help keep my thinking current and fresh. There are other podcasts that may be closer to the cutting edge of technology trends, but none that are able to translate it all into usable business insight as well as A16Z does.

In this series, we ask IDEO designers to share the stuff they're digging right now—tools, books, music, sites, people, places—so you, too, can drink from the fount of inspiration bubbling up here. This week's guest star: Tony Browne.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.