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

Spring in London vibrates with the tweeting of birds and the drilling of construction excavators. It’s a surreal symphony of nature and gentrification.

I was late for work and speeding up my usual way when I got detoured by a few meters of plastic barrier. As I walked around the construction equipment, I heard one worker shout to another.

"I'll pick up my gloves and be right back," he said. He walked by me and leaned towards a hole in the temporary barrier where his gloves were neatly stored.

"Excuse me," I started with my typical nosey flair. "Why do you keep your gloves in there?" He must have a locker, I thought to myself, or even a pocket where to store them on site.

"I work on different areas of the site,” he said, “and I need different gloves based on the job. These barriers crack very easily, so they provide the perfect storage space when I need it and where I need it."

As I looked at his hiding spot, I thought about designing for the end of life of products, like construction barriers, mailboxes, and or a simple shoebox. It was the first time I considered the new use cases that can come from deterioration and change.

As he walked away, he smiled tightly; I had acknowledged his hidden creative side.

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Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

1. What a Computer Learns From Watching Hours of Cartoons

Find out what happened when an IDEO CoLab designer tried training a neural network to generate its own cartoons—and what he learned about the danger of bias in training data. Read the story!

2. Inviting Algorithms to the Design Team

Your future design partner may be an algorithm. Here’s what emerged from an experimental collaboration between a graphic designer, a data scientist, and an algorithm. Read the story!

3. To Design a Better Future, Embrace the Uncomfortable

How can we explore the future of technology? By prototyping it. Check out the 5 near-future concepts that came out of a new IDEO exploration called The Discomfort Zone. Read the story!

4. No Beards Allowed: Exploring Bias in Facial Recognition AI

One IDEO designer created a facial recognition AI game that helps users understand how machine learning models are trained—and subtly hints at the areas where bias could creep in. Read the story!

5. We Built a Bot to Assign Parking Spots. It Fought Back.

When IDEO Cambridge moved into a new studio with a too-small parking lot, they built a bot to manage traffic... but the bot fought back. Here’s what this rogue AI taught the team about “raising” a bot—and how they tamed it. Read the story!

Bonus: Check out the follow-up post where a design researcher explores how his colleagues' interactions with the bot signaled shifts in studio culture.

6. Training a Computer to Find Shapes in the Clouds

The average 25-to-34-year-old only spends 13 minutes a day relaxing. Here’s what happened when one IDEO intern tried "outsourcing" some of her leisure time to a computer. Read the story!

7. What the AI Products of Tomorrow Might Look Like

How can designers leverage the power of AI to build a better future? To explore this question, we created an award-winning speculative design exhibition called HyperHuman. Read the story!

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As designers, we help build the future we want to see. So when a new technology emerges, we're always eager to take it for a test run, push its edges, and see how it fits into visions of the future. When it comes to AI, the opportunities are endless, but the stakes are high—our work can have serious implications that affect the lives of real people at unprecedented scale. Designers at IDEO are constantly working on cutting-edge experiments that explore the possibilities—and potential pitfalls—of a future where humans and machines are ever more entangled. Read on to explore a few of those experiments and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

But the painful reality is that most corporations don’t enjoy the conditions necessary to enable true startup behaviors. The DNA of a large, established business looks far different than that of a fledgling company. And just like with actual startups, creating new ventures is hard, risky, and doesn’t always pan out.

So how, exactly, can you design the conditions for success?

If you have a big company’s DNA, you need to catalyze strategic changes—small mutations that make it possible for a startup model and mindset to thrive inside a much different species. Sometimes, it happens naturally. If a legacy company hits an acute adapt-or-die moment, there’s no choice but to change (à la Netflix or Microsoft). But for companies where transformation is inevitable but not immediate, it’s entirely possible to engineer the conditions that generate pressure for a controlled shift. Here are three ways senior management can provoke the conditions for success.

1. Question your business model

Many legacy companies have been successful because they’ve focused on their core business, while many startups have flourished by routinely abandoning theirs. The key is to do both: Keep the core business running while a new venture pursues something entirely different.

Recently, American Family Insurance was looking to innovate outside of its traditional business model while staying true to its mission to help working families. One of its customers' biggest pain points was an inability to save enough money for an emergency. A $400 surplus—a cushion to get through a medical crisis, for example—was beyond many people’s reach.

Initially, American Family thought budgeting tools might provide a solution, but from the very first research interview, it was clear that budgeting wasn’t the barrier—cash-strapped people budget masterfully. The problem was having enough income to put away a little extra.

So, the insurance company embraced a radically new opportunity, creating a service to help families living on the edge bridge the gap between their paychecks and their security threshold. The company built a new business venture called Moonrise—a platform that would allow businesses to tap into an on-demand workforce, and allow people to access short-term work when they found themselves on shaky financial ground.

The solution was outside the scope of the legacy company’s core offering, but by moving outside of its business model, American Family Insurance was able to create an entirely new venture that helped its core customers solve a chronic, unaddressed problem.

2. Be an early adapter

It’s nearly impossible for an entire corporate organism to pivot rapidly in response to what’s happening around it, but startups have the innate superpower to move fast and get in early. When an emerging need or trend appears on the horizon, they can leap to create new products—or even new markets—far more quickly than large corporations. To achieve speed and adaptability, the new venture must be carved off and treated as its own autonomous, responsive entity.

Take the case of the 150-year old financial company that decided to widen the scope of its business to meet the growing desire for socially-responsible investment options. The company recognized early signals that the consumer desire for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing and impact investing was increasing rapidly, especially among younger generations, with whom they didn’t have many relationships. Chasing a high-growth opportunity for a new market segment, they set out to create a digital-first product that focused on socially-responsible investing.

To get started, the company didn’t simply announce a new division, or task an existing team with creating something new. Instead, they hired a founder and an outside startup team of 10. They built a company and a culture that was totally separate from their parent company’s offering, allowing the venture to take risks, prototype early and often, and above all, move fast. Throughout the venture’s development, the team continuously evolved the experience and business model by pushing prototypes to potential customers, adapting and pivoting until they reached product-market fit. By creating a team with the impetus and the culture to hit the ground running, the venture launched in just 18 months—and put its product in the hands of its consumers before its competitors.

3. Select for resilience and relentlessness

No matter the industry, startup leaders tend to have a few shared qualities that are more common among the entrepreneurial set than among seasoned CEOs. For a new venture to really work, the people behind it need to be driven by curiosity and insight, and have the skills necessary to prototype and iterate their way toward a tangible outcome. They can’t carry the static burden of “the way we do things around here.”

Intercorp, a massive Peruvian economic group of more than 30 companies, including banks, malls, cinemas, and schools, sought to build and design an innovation studio. Instead of solely relying on the business units to drive their own innovation processes, the company opted to create a central entity that could solve problems across its offerings, focusing on the needs of Peru’s rising middle class.

Intercorp purposely built La Victoria Lab in a middle-class Peruvian neighborhood—outside the walls of the corporate HQ—to immerse the team in the human-centered problems it’s trying to solve. The company also put together an interdisciplinary team of resilient and relentless talent, and set it up to embrace design thinking, identify new opportunities, and constantly prototype new value propositions. This talent stays close to the customer in order to shape new ventures in development, works through rapid digital-first prototyping, and operates within constrained timelines to get results. To drive disruptive new growth opportunities, small, cross-functional teams work quickly to design and launch digital businesses that compete with Intercorp’s core companies. Through La Victoria Lab, Intercorp’s leadership is intentionally creating urgency and applying positive pressure to disrupt its own businesses and remain competitive.

As a leader of an established company, you can’t ignore its history or DNA—nor would you want to; it’s what made the company successful in the first place. But you can constructively provoke necessary changes that allow new ventures to flourish. By openly embracing new business models, pursuing (and possibly creating) new markets, attracting and empowering entrepreneurially-minded talent, and even imposing a few artificial constraints like tight timeframes or lean budgets, companies can begin to fundamentally evolve not only what they do, but also how they do it. It’s the only way to ensure long-term market leadership—and sometimes even survival.

The tricky part of all of this, is that true venture-building, much like innovation itself, cannot be a corporate hobby. It cannot be wedged into spare time and pursued only when employees have white space on their calendars. It has to be modeled from the top, by senior leadership. One of the things that makes startup entrepreneurs effective, and ultimately successful, is their grit, determination and dedication to creating lasting change in the face of all obstacles. It's why others join them on their mission. Make it one of the reasons that others join you.

Visuals by Elin Svensson.

As tech valuations rise, and more and more unicorns are born, legacy businesses everywhere hear the message that they need to act more like startups. If you want to innovate, stay relevant, and grow, the advice goes, then you have to take risks, be nimble, and throw money at potential solutions.

A few years ago, we started a project to figure out how we might address these challenges. To start, we spoke to dozens of executives, design leads, product developers, and engineers around the globe—people who work at small startups and large conglomerates in a number of different industries and countries. We were particularly interested in learning more about the ways organizations come up with ideas, how those ideas are evaluated, and how they collaborate within teams and across departments to bring those ideas to market.

Today we’re sharing the results of our research. Here are the highlights of what we discovered, plus some practical tips for creating an environment and culture that can foster innovation over and over again.

1. Leaders are attracted to a new scientific and objective approach to evaluating ideas, but very few organizations actually practice it

Most of the organizations we talked to struggled to decide which ideas they should invest in. It’s not because they didn’t have top talent or novel ideas, but because they didn’t have a consistent rubric to help them evaluate and prioritize. That’s a problem that not only slows things down, but can also lead to good ideas never getting the support they need.

On the flip side, we found a very small proportion of cutting-edge internal labs provided a consistent set of metrics for making meritocratic, data-informed choices about which ideas to invest in. Having a clear and fair set of metrics means that employees are better engaged, ideas get a fair shot, and employees can’t blame the organization when ideas are cut.

So how can you set that tone at your organization?

• Choose your most important metrics and be consistent. This ensures stakeholders on your team can make evidence-based decisions, giving every idea a chance based on merit.
• Empower decision-makers to say no. Once they have the data in front of them, they need frameworks to make decisions based on customer feedback—not internal bias.
• Make sure you have a diverse crowd evaluating your ideas. Bring together people from inside and outside your organization’s walls to help you see your blind spots.

2. Design and innovation teams need to know when to apply the right methods—but can’t be forced into a linear process

Tools, guidance, and structure are an integral part of any good design practice, but overly prescribed processes restrict creativity. Being too rigid about the timing or order of certain phases can quickly quash team engagement—if phases have to be ultra-quick, people may contribute too superficially; too long and teams lose momentum.

As Jens Uehlecke, Managing Director at Greenhouse Innovation Labs, told us, “My team thrives with just enough structure to help them know that things are going according to plan, where they can still customize the process and get feedback along the way.”

So how do you walk that line between ultra-rigid and maniacally unstructured?

• Don’t focus on a single, linear process. Empower your team to use the right approach and tool at the right time, and document them clearly.
• Encourage teams to re-evaluate their method to stay at the cutting edge of design, research, and technology.

3. Organizations struggle to access customer feedback because it requires a lot of time, resources, and expertise

Accessing customer feedback early and often is a crucial part of making evidence-based decisions, but it can also be a major bottleneck. It rarely happens regularly or effectively enough: Survey tools often are difficult to use and have too many features, and sourcing the right audience can be expensive.

Chris Lindland, CEO of the crowd-sourced clothing company Betabrand, told us that after his company created an effective way to gather customer feedback, “It was exciting for designers to get results back and it took the guesswork out of understanding what our customers wanted.”

Here are a handful of ways for you to make feedback-gathering process easier:

• Communicate a process to conduct qualitative and quantitative research. Provide guidance for creating customer discussion guides and rubrics for selecting which customers to talk to.
• Let people across the company know how they can talk to a customer directly. Most tech companies even have the technology to make it happen in just hours—all while following privacy guidelines.

4. Ideas sourced from across the company often lose steam because there’s no pathway for them to make an impact on the business

Many leaders we spoke with rely on company-wide idea gathering—often in the form of open innovation challenges—to uncover ideas from across the organization. But the transition from idea to implementation is a fragile one. As one innovation challenge manager at a financial institution told us, “There’s often a lack of a clear process and accountability after the challenge is completed and an idea is selected.”

Innovation management tools usually start with a challenge and end once that one idea is chosen. Often, ideas with potential get cut because teams aren’t able to take ownership, or aren’t able to arrive at a version of the idea that would benefit the business.

So how can your organization turn ideas into action?

• Cluster ideas based on the problems they solve. This helps highlight business value, and from there, you can prioritize based on each idea’s potential.
• Don’t set a finite deadline on your long-term strategic goals. Leave the door open for new ideas that relate to your strategic priorities. Periodically sponsor the ideas that float to the top; avoid one-and-done competitions.
• Help ideas live beyond the scope of a challenge. Don’t expect everyone to perfect their idea during a short timeframe. Encourage teams with promising ideas to keep getting feedback. Create clear and transparent opportunities for those ideas to be re-evaluated.

5. Passionate minorities need opportunities to do work that challenges the status quo

Relying purely on the judgement of internal stakeholders, employee forums, or upvoting of ideas reinforces groupthink. As a result, a cadre of similar ideas often continue to get approval while new ideas struggle to gain momentum. As Joe Gerber, Managing Director of IDEO CoLab says, “You need to give ideas surface area so that the minority of people in an organization with a similar hunch can explore their passion.”

To protect divergent ideas, make sure to:

• Help passionate people identify each other and build off of each other’s work. Use internal channels to help people broadcast their ideas, hypotheses, and expertise across the organization.
• Bypass organizational bias with customer feedback. Don’t require ideas to be internally vetted or approved before any customer gets to see them. Include customer feedback as an early and integrated part of managing your innovation pipeline.

We hope these tips will help make the process of solving big challenges and taking on your company—or the world’s problems—just a bit smoother.

Illustrations by Cassandra Fountaine

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The toughest part about being a truly innovative company is figuring out how to let new ideas grow—then figuring out which ones are worth further investment. It’s not easy. Many high-potential ideas hit roadblocks or spur questions from leadership before there are answers. There isn’t always a straightforward formula for success.

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.