Since its founding over a century ago, Tokyo College of Music (TCM) has trained countless world-class musicians. Despite its well-established reputation, however, the school was feeling a pressing need to reconsider its role in order to remain relevant in a changing world.

The college had plans to build a second campus in Daikanyama, a prominent area of Tokyo known for being a hotbed for new global trends. Taking advantage of this opportunity, TCM leaders asked IDEO to help them develop a new concept for the school, and to redesign the learning experience while preserving a focus on classical music.

To kick off the research phases of the project, IDEO designers interviewed TCM students, and traveled to London, New York, and Boston visiting educational institutions, music schools, and arts facilities.

The team observed that students at music colleges outside of Japan were giving serious consideration to their career plans at an early stage in their studies, acquiring a variety of skills and mindsets through a well-rounded education. By contrast, TCM students were focused on learning and performing classical music, but tended not to have a clear image of future career opportunities.

IDEO proposed four specific directions for TCM’s new campus, based on an overarching theme of “culture, fields, and people collaborating across boundaries.” The first aim was to foster a business mindset and entrepreneurial spirit among the students that surpassed their classical music training. Next was to increase opportunities for actual performances, collaborations with professionals outside the school, and joint projects. The third aim was to position the college as a platform that would encourage the spontaneous creation of communities within and outside the school. The final aim was to develop students who were digitally savvy and fluent in new technologies, enabling them to continue evolving in response to developments in the real world. These goals are reflected in the various spaces of the school, as well as in the design of the experiences that occur in those spaces.

The most symbolic of these spaces is the Creative Lab. Originally intended as a library, the space now functions as a platform where people from within and outside the school community can collaborate and generate innovative ideas. The open layout, which encloses a cafeteria for students and faculty, can be altered depending on programming needs. The Creative Lab provides a venue not only for live performances in which the students can polish their improvisational skills, but for holding workshops and other events on topics such as cultural exchange, business, and new technologies.

New furniture and objects were carefully selected to inspire spontaneous encounters and conversation between students from different departments and staff, creating a flow of activity.

Even the landings on the staircases, which tend to be dead space, were designed with this concept in mind. One student commented that the space facilitates meeting new people and creates “opportunities for deeper interaction with students from other departments.” This intentional, open design has transformed the space into a hub within the school and the local community.

Through the new environment and educational opportunities at TCM's Daikanyama campus, students now have stronger opportunities to apply their creative talents in numerous fields worldwide, creating impact informed by the various perspectives, skills, and relationships they have developed at TCM.

Georgia is among the most populous states in the American South. It’s a place with a storied past and promising future—on the rise economically, and continuing its powerful cultural impact on music, TV, cuisine, and tourism. Over 10.4 million people call Georgia home, and nearly all of these people will at some point navigate the state’s websites for securing everyday services. Ideally, this online platform would provide unifying and accessible government resources for everyone, whether they’re renewing their vehicle registration, seeking a fishing license, or looking up tax law updates.

Georgia’s Office of Digital Services (DSGA), part of the Georgia Technology Authority, was challenged with designing a platform to modernize the collective and individual online presence of 80+ state agencies, many of which used visually disconnected formats and color palettes that could leave the public feeling confused. DSGA recognized that they could provide more efficient and higher quality service to the public if they simplified the language, designed the site from the user's point of view, and created a more cohesive look and feel across agencies.

IDEO worked with the DSGA to identify the priorities of Georgia residents who use the various agency websites. On a road trip from Savannah to Atlanta, with stops in Macon and Dublin, the IDEO team immersed themselves in the rich culture of Georgia, connecting with social workers, low-income residents, state agency leadership and civic organizations to learn how Georgia’s digital properties could better address their disparate needs.

The design research underscored that there isn’t just one Georgia—it’s a tapestry of people, geographies and political orientations. Yet several common themes emerged, including:

Georgians want their government to “give it to them straight.” On the redesigned Georgia.gov platform, the people of Georgia can easily search popular topics to get the information they need. This includes learning how to apply for food stamps, renewing a business license, or simply finding out the location of a local office in their area. If a user has remaining questions, they can connect directly with a real human for further assistance, balancing direct information with warmth and a personal touch. User feedback on the site provides the opportunity for continuous design improvement.

Georgians want to take pride in the legacy and the future of their state. IDEO developed an entirely new design system with new navigational elements, fonts, and a color palette inspired by Georgia’s landscapes, all of which can be modified for individual agencies while remaining consistent with the state brand.

A distillation of the original Georgia seal adds authority, and new icons anchor the site’s menus and bring more clarity to the search function. The platform was designed to be Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 AA compliant, providing clear and accessible page content that adheres to federal laws and international web standards. To instill trust in Georgia’s online presence, each page also has a header that indicates it’s an official Georgia State website and outlines the uniform features constituents can use to identify this.

With improved navigation and easy-to-access prioritized content, Georgia.gov is a much more efficient platform for addressing requests from citizens. The site projects a happy-to-help, citizen-centered approach that aims to empower all Georgians so that they feel confident, informed, and prepared.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 30 million Americans have diabetes, almost 10% of the population. The vast majority of these diagnoses are type 2, which is commonly treated through a combination of medicine, diet, and exercise. Today, one of the major barriers to better outcomes is access to trusted information. As little as 15 percent of people with diabetes receive adequate education from their healthcare providers on managing their disease and making recommended lifestyle changes.

Ascensia Diabetes Care, a global healthcare company, has been a leader in diabetes treatment for over 70 years, known primarily for producing blood glucose meters. IDEO has worked with Ascensia for more than a decade, helping develop and design their CONTOUR NEXT ONE meter in 2016. In 2017, Ascensia engaged IDEO with a new goal of moving the company beyond physical devices. Ascensia envisioned a first-of-its-kind approach to educating and monitoring diabetes patients. In partnership with IDEO, they wanted to build a comprehensive solution—one that would not simply take glucose readings and document food intake, but would consider all factors that impact a person's health.

Through deep collaboration, Ascensia and IDEO built a powerful app-based service. The project began with a strategic vision for the experience and ended with the delivery of an all-encompassing health offering, including training of providers, packaging, app design, content creation, and visual design.

The patient experience married data and tracking, real-life mentorship, and personalized content. When a patient signed up, they were paired with a Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE) who created a tailored program based on their needs and linked them to relevant articles on topics like cooking, mental wellbeing, and sexual health. The IDEO team led the charge in hiring and training guides, crafting the educational content, and even designing the content management hub.

The data engine behind the app is another one of the program's stand-out qualities. The app pulled data from multiple data sources—exercise bands and glucose meters—to provide constant feedback, track progress, and continually refine the experience. To generate empathy, as well as build the app's initial data set, IDEO's data scientists tested the product on themselves. One designer wore a wrist full of exercise monitors around the office and tracked her blood sugar after every meal.

The app-based service was tested with 60 people and demonstrated remarkable early results. Only two participants failed to complete the study—a stunning success rate when adherence to therapy for chronic illnesses in developed countries averages around 50%. Additionally, participants reported drastic improvements in both physical and mental health. One recently widowed 70-year-old woman emerged from depression, returned to swimming, and started having regular blood sugar readings.

The project required Ascensia to embrace new ways of working internally, adopt a broader view of their offering, and ultimately expand the way they serve people with diabetes.

When Mr. Gordon told his fifth grade students they were taking a field trip on a bus, many of them envisioned the city bus that they ride each day to school. But when they saw the Verizon Explorer Lab pull into the school parking lot, they realized a unique experience awaited them. Painted in bright colors, this bus promised something very different from their daily commute.

“Climb aboard, explorers!” says the Lead Explorer. The students walk through the bus’ sliding doors and inside, where instead of rows of seats, they find a sleek research lab. Suddenly, the lights dim. The bus makes a rumbling noise as though it’s about to lift off. And on a large screen, a vision of Earth from space appears. The students listen and point as the video narrator briefs them on NASA’s ongoing search for life in space.

Science education isn’t always this fun. Some kids have a chance to learn through interactive games, immersive experiences, or engaging field trips; but many lack access to rich educational experiences in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). As a result, they can be less likely to pursue careers in STEM, though many future jobs will demand mastery of these subjects. This not only impacts a student’s potential and future, but reduces the diversity and number of qualified STEM job applicants.

In under-resourced schools, students are often limited to the scarce tools available for STEM learning in their classrooms. Many kids rarely have a chance to leave their neighborhoods. For these kids, mobile learning experiences that come to their school offer unparalleled exposure to cutting-edge, technologically advanced, and—most importantly—inspiring gateways into these critical academic subjects.

As part of its focus on digital inclusion, Verizon partnered with IDEO to share the excitement of STEM learning with middle schoolers. To facilitate access and discovery of STEM, the team designed a learning experience that takes place on a coach bus and can be scaled to reach kids across the nation.

The team set out to transform the bus into the Verizon Explorer Lab: a futuristic research lab that transports kids to new environments, from outer space to under the sea. As part of the larger Verizon Innovative Learning program, the Verizon Explorer Lab offers delightful and rigorous content that meets national science standards.

A multidisciplinary team comprised of designers across interaction, communication, environments, games, and software partnered with Verizon to bring the Verizon Explorer Lab to life.

To keep the student at the center of the experience, the team designed alongside kids. Their gravitation toward play, interaction, and technology inspired the digital game that students play onboard the bus. When developing the game’s narrative, the designers turned to popular kids’ books and movies. What began as a card game prototype eventually became a 360-degree video and virtual reality expedition to Mars—complete with a custom musical score—that introduces middle schoolers to engineering basics.

After stepping through the bus doors and taking a tour of the solar system, Mr. Gordon’s students receive an emergency call from NASA: They must rescue the missing Curiosity rover, which is dedicated to collecting evidence of life on Mars. Eager to save Curiosity, the students become immersed in the adventure at hand. And through the adventure, they become immersed in science.

Students use tablets to design their own Mars rover. Each rover appears on a large screen and traverses the planet’s extreme terrain. The goal is to collect data that suggests life on Mars, including ice deposits, photos, and more. Students iterate on their rover’s design—wheels, power sources, and sensors—to test if it can stand up against dust storms and craters. The team consulted a NASA planetary scientist to ensure accuracy, as well as educators to establish cohesion with classroom curricula.

During the game, students are encouraged to compare designs and learn from each other: One rover may be able to travel long distances and take various photos, while another can carry large quantities of ice and sediment samples but can’t go far because of its size. At the end of the mission, the group finds Curiosity and sends all of the evidence they’ve collectively gathered back to NASA to aid the search for life beyond Earth. Before departing the bus, students watch an animated video that explains various jobs in STEM and encourages kids to pursue one of these careers.

The Verizon Explorer Lab teaches students the engineering design loop, the value of collaboration and teamwork, and what a career in STEM might look like. The mission to Mars game is just one of many potential STEM learning opportunities for students and integrated, customizable learning modules for teachers.

Since launch, the Verizon Explorer Lab has traveled to various parts of the United States and reached thousands of kids. It continues to be managed by Learning Undefeated, Verizon’s nonprofit partner. By designing for and with students, it’s possible to create educational experiences that facilitate meaningful learning and genuine fun. The Verizon Explorer Lab represents progress towards a more inclusive future for employers and the STEM field.

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.