Money works differently in communities traditionally excluded from formal banking, which makes designing products that really serve their needs a very different kind of challenge. People who live in the last mile often prefer cash because it’s physical. They can see it, touch it, and access it at any time.

While digital money offers many benefits, such as securely sending money over long distances and accessing new forms of credit, many don’t trust it because the places where they can access digital currency have often been too far away.

In 2017, over 500 million adults lived more than three miles from a financial access point in eight emerging markets studied by the Gates Foundation. This may not sound like much of a barrier, but for those living in the last mile, it means having to close their shops, lose a day of earnings, arrange family care, and pay for travel, which can be time-consuming and difficult, especially during rainy seasons. For low-income people, the inaccessibility of financial services has been a deal-breaker for adopting digital money. On the flip side, banks, telecoms, and other companies struggled to reach these customers because their products were not inclusively designed for them, and their distribution models failed to scale in rural areas.

Amid these myriad challenges, IDEO and the Gates Foundation saw an opportunity to introduce innovative ways to provide access to digital financial services even in the most remote areas of the world. And to make bold new bets: Could we design new digital experiences centered around the financial needs of people in the last mile? What would happen if we mobilized hundreds of actors to develop new ways to address financial access at the last mile? What if we took the most exciting financial innovations that worked in East Africa and piloted them in South Asia—and vice versa?

Working with more than 70 partners, including local startups, corporations, including Google, Unilever, Telenor, Standard Chartered, and BNI, as well as IDEO.org’s Women & Money program, LMM adopted a collaborative, ecosystem approach to drive and scale new digital financial products and systems.

A few of the life-changing innovations launched by LMM and its partners include:

• Finja’s intuitive small-business app that helps micro-merchants in Pakistan access flexible, interest-avoiding Islamic credit  to order products from fast-moving consumer goods companies like Unilever. Finja now serves 45,000 merchants and reaches 10.2 million customers.
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• Accessing government benefits can be a challenge, especially when it’s through a mobile phone, so IDEO helped Indian startup Haqdarshak develop a robust digital experience for its 52,000 community agents to facilitate access for low-income people. The agent network—70 percent of whom are women—now serves more than 7.6 million families and has unlocked $2.2 billion in social benefits for those who need it most.
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• Making micro-credit nearly instantaneous was a solution that startup Kuunda offered to financial agents in Tanzania. IDEO helped adapt the product to deliver working capital for merchants in Pakistan. Today, Kuunda continues to grow across markets in Africa, totaling 6.1 million active users and distributing $1.1 billion in loans globally.   

While the LMM program officially concluded in 2024, lessons, tools, and case studies from the program are accessible on IDEO’s Financial Futures website. Those looking to catalyze equity and inclusion in digital financial services for the last mile can consult LMM’s Financial Confidence Playbook, the open-source Digital Confidence Toolkit (created in collaboration with Google), or the Gender Evaluation Framework, among other helpful resources.

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Over 1.3 billion people worldwide in poor and rural areas are excluded from formal financial services, including savings accounts, credit lines, and insurance, making it harder for them to move out of poverty.

34M

underserved users reached by 100+ new financial products, pilots, and prototypes

70+ LMM partners

including Google, Unilever, Grab, Standard Chartered, Cargill, Airtel, Celo Foundation, and BNI

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Multinational CPGs excel at creating popular, mass-market products for large countries. When they enter smaller countries like Peru, they often parachute their brands onto store shelves and skip consumer product testing altogether, largely relying on brand recognition to drive sales. This oversight presented Alicorp and IDEO with an opportunity: flip the script and invite young Peruvian women to work together with them to create a new hair care brand from scratch. Over the course of a four-year transformational journey, IDEO worked closely with Alicorp, adopting a “learn by doing” approach to foster a culture of innovation, launch a new brand, and drive growth for the company through consumer-centric design.

The collaboration began with an inspirational trip 10,000 miles away to Seoul, South Korea, the epicenter of global beauty trends. To expand their thinking, the Alicorp/IDEO team received K-Pop glow-ups and explored other cutting-edge beauty experiences. They were inspired by the Korean market’s unwavering focus on meeting the particular hair care and skin needs of Korean women.

Back in Peru, the team conducted multiple rounds of in-depth interviews with young women, teenagers, beauty influencers, and experts across the country. They learned about their beauty goals, personal care routines, and “mixto” hair texture. They heard about women’s struggles with regional weather—the Andean region’s extreme dryness versus Lima’s humidity and the city’s hard water. The research revealed that Peruvian women wanted natural products that worked hard, wouldn’t harm their hair, and celebrated what made them unique. They wanted a brand that spoke to them honestly and authentically. That represented and empowered them. That didn’t overpromise, underdeliver, or hold up European and American beauty ideals that didn't resonate with Latin American women like the multinationals did.

Armed with these insights, the Alicorp/IDEO team developed tangible brand prototypes for women to respond to during successive rounds of user research, including in a beauty pop-up store in Lima. The team shared various bottle types, ingredient mixtures, and brand positioning options. Should the new brand’s personality be an outspoken feminist or a gal pal? Au naturel or sophisticated? The iterative feedback cycles informed everything from brand strategy and ingredient recommendations to product line-up, brand and product naming, launch strategy, and digital activations.

The final design, Amarás (“you will love”), is a personal care line that centers the needs and aspirations of Peruvian women. Hitting shelves in 2022, its shampoos and conditioners feature local, bio-diverse ingredients, including mangoes, macadamia nuts, and goldenberries, that help address the specific hair texture needs of women in LATAM and the climate realities of the Andean region. The brand’s launch campaign included TV and print ads featuring Peruvian models from every region as well as commissioned murals celebrating local beauty by artists across Peru. Most notably, the unapologetically authentic Peruvian hair care brand became a TikTok sensation, garnering over seven million organic views and more than 300 viral videos from enthusiastic new fans.

Three months after its launch, Amarás seized a 7.5 percent share of the personal care aisle—a remarkable goal it had set for year three.Since then, Alicorp has continued to expand its creative capabilities, designing personal care products tailored to the cultural and beauty needs of Latin American consumers.

Alicorp launched numerous successful brand extensions across its food and home care categories, but was unable to crack the $340M USD hair care product market in its home country of Peru.

7.5%

Amarás’ share of the Peruvian hair care market 3 months after launch—a goal Alicorp had set for year 3

7M+ organic views and 300+ organic fan videos

created on TikTok during Amarás’  launch campaign

Thirty years ago, China-based Jack Technology started as a home sewing machine manufacturer. A decade ago, the innovative global leader began investing in robotics and exploring AI, a decision that positioned it well to address today’s urgent need for smarter manufacturing solutions.

Believing that a new, strategically positioned sub-brand could draw in larger, more premium global manufacturing customers, Jack Technology and IDEO set out to understand their needs. IDEO began by visiting more than a dozen garment factories across China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, conducting in-depth interviews with factory managers, industrial engineers, pattern-making leaders, and frontline workers. It soon became clear: the apparel manufacturing industry is at a critical juncture. The way apparel manufacturers navigate the promises of intelligent technology—while addressing deep-rooted structural issues like labor shortages and working conditions—will shape the industry's development for years to come.

For premium clothing brands, garment factory compliance and worker well-being are priorities when selecting production partners, so many owners proudly showcased their improvement efforts. They discussed investing in quieter machines and air conditioning, enhancing lighting, adding greenery, and implementing no-overtime policies. Amid rows of identical sewing stations, the IDEO team noticed small human gestures, such as a small vase of flowers. As one operator said, “I just want to uplift myself during work.”

The research helped IDEO identify a core opportunity for differentiation. Create human-centered products and services that further enhance working conditions in large apparel factories, strengthen their ability to attract and retain talent, and drive the industry toward a more sustainable future. Through multiple rounds of co-creation with the Jack Technology team and key apparel-sector stakeholders, a clear brand direction for Aitu began to take shape: “Smart Machines, Uplifting People.”

Guided by this human-centered ethos, IDEO helped build a comprehensive brand system for Aitu. The idea of “uplifting people” and showcasing garment workers’ professionalism and skill is expressed throughout all brand communications, the industrial design of its smart sewing machines, and the interaction and industrial design of a humanoid sewing robot.

In the eyes of factory workers, this is the new work experience Aitu brings to life. Compared with traditional bulky industrial machinery, the clean lines and soft edges of Aitu’s new AI-powered sewing machines feel more like the professional office tools found in bright, organized workplaces. Concave surfaces and soft materials diffuse glare from overhead lighting, reducing eye strain, while clear interaction logic and icon-based visuals accommodate operators with varying levels of skill and education. AI technology, seamlessly embedded in the machine’s core functions, automatically adjusts parameters for different fabrics and tasks, allowing operators to achieve high-precision results with less effort. A soft halo-like light glows whenever the AI-assisted function is active, fostering users’ trust in both the technology and the AI-powered sewing machine as a whole. When hundreds or thousands of Aitu machines are arranged together in a factory, the overall effect is a modern, professional, and high-end work environment.

Working closely with Aitu’s robotics team, IDEO’s final design challenge was to bring a human-machine collaboration to life through a full-scale AI robot, AI10. The robot has an elegant, biomimetic silhouette. Its fabric-like outer finish features design elements commonly found in garment making, such as cutting and stitching lines, giving the robot the approachable look and the feel of a skilled tailor companion who can assist with simple, repetitive tasks. When AI10 is in operation, a circular light ring gently pulses at the sides of the robot’s ears as well as on the paired sewing machine’s display screen, clearly signaling the robot’s activity to its human co-workers.

In September 2025, Jack Technology debuted its new Aitu brand, along with its first AI sewing machine and a humanoid robot prototype, at a launch event at Shanghai Tower and at the China International Sewing Machine & Accessories Show. IFA Berlin, Europe’s largest trade show for consumer electronics, honored Aitu with a Gold Award for AI Product Innovation for seamlessly integrating AI technology and industrial design. Jack Technology’s humanoid robot is expected to go into full-scale production in 2026.

Before AI, the apparel manufacturing industry had experienced little fundamental change since the invention of the lockstitch sewing machine nearly two centuries ago.

2025 Gold Award for AI Product Innovation

from IFA, the world’s largest home and consumer tech event

Alicorp has direct operations in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile, manages export operations in more than 30 countries, and oversees over 150 brands. While its AlaCena sauces are ubiquitous in South America, the brand’s North American market primarily consisted of purchases made via Amazon by Peruvians living abroad. To help the CPG giant expand meaningfully and sustainably onto US grocery shelves—and achieve its ambitious $50 million retail sales goal in five years—Alicorp and IDEO collaborated on multiple projects over a two-year period. The partnership began in early 2020 with consumer research and product strategy, ultimately leading to the development of initial product branding, positioning for launch, and an in-market pilot in late 2021.

‍‍Through a combination of large-scale digital surveys and in-depth, in-person and remote research interviews, IDEO discovered that AlaCena’s Tari and Uchucuta’s hot sauce recipes resonated the most with US consumers. Made from native Aji Amarillo and Rocoto chili peppers ground using a traditional Andean “batán” technique, consumers appreciated their complex flavors and enjoyed how they enhanced, not overpowered, everyday foods like burgers and fries. The sauces’ authentic Peruvian culinary roots were also a key differentiator. In addition to consumers, IDEO consulted with industry experts—including executives from large-scale grocery chains and chief merchants of leading big-box stores—to explore retail and marketing trends and identify potential innovation partners for Alicorp in the US.

Based on the research, IDEO recommended a few changes to ensure a successful launch: Lead with the Tari brand, which was the most memorable and easiest to pronounce, and position it as an “everything sauce.” Change the packaging from a large plastic pouch to a smaller squeeze bottle to better align with consumers’ expectations and stand out on the inside of refrigerator doors. Adjust the product formulation to appeal to mainstream consumers looking for cleaner labels. And visually celebrate Tari’s Peruvian roots through bright colors, traditional textiles, and a llama, an animal closely associated with the Andes Mountains. In addition to these recommendations, IDEO provided a comprehensive go-to-market retail strategy that included potential US regions for launch, retail brokers, distributors, manufacturers, and R&D and pilot retail lab partners, as well as job descriptions for a new North American-based sales team.

While Alicorp worked on reformulation and packaging strategies, IDEO refined Tari’s initial branding strategy. Steeped in Peruvian aesthetics, the brand’s new look and feel featured a vibrant color palette, geometric patterns, and—of course—a friendly llama icon, which could also be found on all in-store point-of-sale items IDEO designed for Tari's pilot launch in late 2021.

The successful 12-week in-market pilot in Tom Thumb grocery stores gave Alicorp the confidence to have its in-house design team make the brand even bolder and more eye catching, and to launch two flavors, Amarillo Pepper and Rocoto Pepper, on Amazon and in over 50 retail stores in late 2024.

Since then, the popular sauces consistently rank among the top 50 percent of the fastest-selling products on US shelves, with 80 percent of sales revenue representing new business. In 2025, Tari expanded its offerings with three additional flavors: Zesty Verde, Tropical Kick, and Smoky Heat. Today, Tari is in transit to 3,000 major grocery stores, including Wegmans, Meijer, Central Market, and The Fresh Market, as well as available for purchase on Amazon.

Alicorp had a vision to expand its beloved and delicious hot sauces to the US market, but needed help fine-tuning the brand and product for an American audience.

3,000

major US grocers, including Wegmans and Meijer, have signed on to sell Tari hot sauces

80%

of Tari’s sales revenue represents new business, a significant expansion of the overall category

Ranked in the top 50%

of the fastest-selling products on US grocery shelves

At IDEO, we like to breathe new life into the mundane with design. In an effort to shape a new paradigm of meeting-dom, here are some of our best resources on making your next conference-room gathering stand out—in a good way.

1. When you want to kick things off with a bang

Stretch! Sketch! Dance! Build in a few minutes for a new opening exercise and you’ll have a team that’s fully present and ready to get down to business.

READ: 6 Ways to Kick Off Creative Meetings

2. When you have a mixed bag of introverts and extroverts

An IDEOer once called the San Francisco space an “extroverted office full of introverts.” If you have a team of folks all across that spectrum, these exercises will strike a balance between team-together-time and solitude.

READ: 5 Brainstorming Exercises for Introverts

3. When you want people to really get to know each other

Whether bringing together a brand new team or sitting down with old colleagues, a jam-packed room can make for an overwhelming and impersonal experience. Ditch the canned icebreakers and try one of these instead—any of these exercises will help reveal your group’s commonalities.

READ: 5 Exercises for Breaking Down Barriers

4. When morale needs a boost

Do any of your meetings have a jingle? Didn’t think so. Reset your whole meeting philosophy with some out-of-the-box tips.

READ: How to Design a Meeting That Doesn’t Suck

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Meetings. Maybe you’re in one right now. (Are you paying attention?) Maybe you have one in ten minutes. (Are you prepared?) We know them well—and we know they’re not usually the highlight of your day. In fact, they can be quite the opposite.

A GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) is a type of AI that pits two neural networks against each other, each one training the other to improve its ability. Unlike other types of AI, GANs don’t just recognize objects—they can create them. GANs borrow a feature from biology and pit two competing neural networks against each other. One network, the “generator,” produces synthetic images, while another network, the “discriminator,” tries to guess whether the images are synthetic or real. The discriminator learns from both synthetic and real images, getting better over time. As it improves, it challenges the generator to produce ever more realistic synthetic images.

During a bite-sized sabbatical from my day job at IDEO CoLab, I dove head first into building and exploring the visual potential of GANs. I learned a lot about the differences between how humans and computers see the world, and how an AI’s output is shaped by the data we provide it. As designers, it’s important for us to understand the limitations of emerging technologies likes GANs—or else we risk creating products that harm, rather than help, humans. Here’s what I created, and what I learned. (Want to learn how to set up your own GAN? Read more here.)

1. Choosing a dataset

GANs can generate convincing fake pictures of almost anything—faces, cats, and even anime characters. How do they do it? It all depends on the dataset. GANs need to be fed a large set of images (think tens of thousands or more) so they can learn patterns. For example, GANs that produce faces learn that they tend to be roughly round, have two eyes, one nose, one mouth, and possibly hair on top. They learn pixel-level patterns, too—the textures that make up skin, eyes, and hair.

The trick with GANs is finding sets of images large enough and diverse enough for a network to pick out patterns. There are plenty out there—like CelebA (hundreds of thousands of celebrity faces) or LSUN (images of scenes like rooms and buildings)—but these are all meant for this kind of research, and training with them tends to illustrate how successful GANs can be.I wanted to do the opposite. What if we try to stretch GANs to their limit, so that we can get a better understanding of how they work? In this case, we’re using images from The Simpsons.

2. Training the GAN

Once I had my dataset of images from the show, it was time to train the GAN. For those familiar with machine learning, read my step-by-step process here. For everyone else, here’s the gist of it: I installed an open-sourced machine learning software called TensorFlow on my computer, which I souped up with a hefty graphics card originally bought for virtual reality and gaming. I then used a series of tools to reformat and resize images from my Simpsons dataset.

I trained the network overnight (sometimes over multiple days) and saved examples of images created by the generator network. The video below documents the learning process of the generator. With time, the images began look more and more like the actual Simpsons.

Scrub through the video to see the network’s progress. At 1:10 (about 13 hours of training), the first outlines of Simpsons eyes appear. At 2:00 (about 23 hours), the color scheme becomes noticeably brighter and figures start to emerge. At 3:00 (about 34 hours), there is less variation as shapes start to solidify and the networks reach some stabilization on what is classified as “real.” At 5:00 (about 57 hours) and beyond, the shapes start to vaguely resemble Simpsons characters, though the result is still too psychedelic and abstract for us to truly classify the images as real Simpsons frames.

3. Making sense of the output

The GAN manages to generate very Simpsons-esque images, but they’re definitely not going to fool the human eye. What’s going on? GANs (and any neural network or machine learning method, for that matter) only learn patterns that are in the training data. As humans, we have a deep and complex understanding of what people and objects should look like, including Simpsons characters and scenes in the show. The GAN, however, doesn’t bring any preexisting knowledge. It has to learn everything from the raw pixel values of the images it sees, and more complex patterns take more examples to learn.

In this case, the GAN easily learns the color palette of The Simpsons and its simple, flat illustration style, and starts to learn the features of each character. With enough training data, it may learn more complex patterns, like complete images of characters, or which characters show up in which settings (like the Simpson family at home, or Mr. Burns at the power plant).

What’s it all mean?

The varied and strange outputs of these networks are a succinct example of both the promise and risks of building products, services, or systems with machine learning inside. They’re seemingly magical, learning from patterns in data without being told what to look for, but they’re also limited by that data. Imagine you came into this world yesterday and had to make sense of it all just from still frames of The Simpsons—how would that inform your thinking?

Biases in training data, intended or not, will be reflected in the output of the network, which, if embedded into a product or service, can codify the bias at an unprecedented scale. As designers, we are uniquely positioned to help with this problem. As Kate Crawford, cofounder of the AI Now Institute has said, the problem is neither a specifically social nor technical problem: It’s a socio-technical problem. Designers have a responsibility to understand the unique role data plays in machine learning, so that we can create networks that equitably serve human needs.

Learn more about training GANs on IDEO Labs. Special thanks to CoLab’s Adam Lukasik for his help wrangling GANs for this post.

Pop quiz: What the heck is a GAN? You might not have heard the term, but you’ve likely seen one in action. From generating images of fake celebrities, to creating training data for self-driving cars, and even recreating suggestive (and weird) nude portraits, GANs are everywhere these days. But what exactly is this bleeding-edge technology, and what can we do with it?

In one sentence, who are you?

I am Vince Kadlubek, CEO and cofounder of Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I am a momentum artist. I have dedicated my life to the study and sculpting of momentum, which primarily entails finding authentic, collaborative understandings and influences with the brilliant people around me.

What does a typical work session look like?

I'm usually dealing with these questions: What is the brightest vision? How do we articulate that vision? What steps are necessary for the most effective articulations? Work sessions are meetings or checking email. Those are the two kinds of work sessions I have these days. Sometimes I get to have creative work sessions, which are really just big meetings with beer and Indian food.

When it came to building something like the House of Eternal Return, we imagined, then found scrap armature materials, started producing structure and skin, utilized a bunch of air drying sculpting medium, and started turning large amounts of the exhibit into plaster forms. Lots of stuff was sculpted around the armature produced by the architects and general contractors, using more standard finish practices like painting.

3 favorite possessions?

Oh gosh. Together, “favorite” and “possession” are kinda an oxymoron for me. All I can think about are non-physical things like my memory, my spirit, and my compassion.

How do you get over creative block?

Collaborate with someone who is not stuck in a creative block.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

The last item on my to-do list was to donate money to Beto O'Rourke. But as for work, my last to-do item was to send our SVP of art direction a copy of a PowerPoint that she can use in an upcoming presentation.

How do you see the world in 2078?

Um... well, warm. And I also see a massive network of interconnected spatial computing, photo-realistic artificial intelligences, the liveable internet, monumental creator tools that result in instant manifestation—essentially, we will have transitioned into the 5th dimension.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

Chilling poolside in the Oia Village in Santorini, Greece with a bottle of Krug Clos d’Ambonnay 1998 and three of my closest friends.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Young Thug, constantly. It is actually a problem. I have a hard time getting excited for any other musician. And I have recently fallen for food and cocktails, so Grant Achatz from Alinea in Chicago is on my mind a lot. LeBron James is creating a reality that is mind-blowing and way beyond basketball; the world is wrapped in his storytelling. And finally, I am a huge coaster guy and what RMC is doing in the coaster world is unbelievable—Steel Vengeance at Cedar Point has completely flipped the script.

Vince Kadlubek is a visionary. He leans into tension, ruffles feathers, and has spent more than a decade constructing new worlds with the art collective Meow Wolf. In 2016, they transformed an abandoned 20,000-square-foot bowling alley into the House of Eternal Return—an immersive experience full of creativity and curiosities—drawing more than a million people to Santa Fe, New Mexico for a dose of childlike wonder. Now their sights are set on two new activations in Las Vegas and Denver, as they aim to create the modern-day Disneyland. As an immersive experience designer, I’ve been personally inspired by Meow Wolf and the big-thinking and resourcefulness of Vince, the collective's CEO. I was stoked to chat with him about his inspiration and aspirations for the future.

The answer is yes, of course. And when companies don’t fix themselves, we feel it in our products and services. The company has designed something—often a digital thing—that fails to give us what we need, and we walk away cursing the air, wondering if the leaders of the company have ever used the service themselves.

But making things that work for humans isn’t easy. We change every five minutes. How can organizations be confident that what works today will work tomorrow? It’s a lot easier to just slap on a Band-Aid and hope it won’t rip off with the first sudden move.

There are vastly different perspectives out there about how to make change happen and stick, and we’re curious about them all, so this fall, we invited five friends who’ve led major transformation projects at their companies to IDEO’s London studio and for an open conversation.

Here are the top 5 takeaways from our Make Change event:

1. Be a curious leader

“The problem I see in a lot of organizations is they have a lot of great tools but the top leaders don’t use them. If you’re not prepared to do what you’re asking everyone else to do, then why should you expect them to? If you want to understand what’s broken in your company, try entering your own expenses.”

—Mike Bracken (Public Digital), the guy who led digital transformation for the UK government (GDS), a model that’s been replicated in Canada, Argentina, Peru, Australia and the U.S. (and he has a letter from Obama to prove it).

If Mike had one piece of advice for making change happen, it would be this: “Go and sit next to a user when they’re using your service or product. I make sure to do six hours of that every month.”

2. Question accepted behaviors

“If you’re in a self-contained moment as an organization, I’d highly recommend that you build an innovation team that sits on the side and role models something really weird and strange, questioning the accepted behaviors. Having a constant dialogue and exchange with other perspectives is what makes companies competitive. But not a team that sits in the ivory tower. Our innovation team has reinvented itself three times in three years according to what the business needs."

—Anne Pascual, VP of Design at Zalando, Europe’s leading online fashion platform, which delivers to 24 million customers and grew its revenue to around €4.5 billion last year.

Anne's advice? “Think big. We tend to be obsessed with the details, but there’s much bigger opportunities out there.”

3. Don't build an innovation lab

“Innovation is far too important to be outsourced. I’m not a believer in gluing an innovation lab onto the side of your organization. If your culture is not innovative, that’s not going to sustain. You’ve got to fix your culture first if you want to be in this for the long term. It’s got to be everyone’s job when they wake up in the morning. And you then have to create the air cover as a leader for that to happen, which is all about creating a no-blame culture. You can’t innovate as fast as we do without sometimes screwing up. We do it regularly, and when we do, we try to learn from it, but we know it just goes with the territory of being a disruptor.”

—Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer at Ocado. After a deal with Kruger in May, Ocado’s market cap blew past Marks & Spencer's—a sign of the tectonic shift happening in retail.

Paul's advice would be this: “Tell the truth about what's broken.”

4. Be a DJ

“A good leader is like a DJ—they play the music that makes people move, but they should accept that people will move in different ways and what’s important is that you move to the same rhythm and move forward.”

—Beatriz Lara Bartolomé, former Chief Innovation Officer of BBVA, and EMEA Advisor Director of Globant, a digitally-native technology services company.

To make change happen, Beatriz would advise you to “ask your teams what they think should be improved.”

5. Launch beacon projects

“Launching a product to market in a short period of time is the best organizational change program—you’re going to learn the most about how the company behaves. We call these projects that have a change agenda 'beacons.' Select them for their ability to help you build a new muscle. If you’re not building a new muscle with every project, you’re wasting an opportunity to learn.”

—Luis Cilimingras, IDEO partner and managing director of our London studio. He leads digital transformation and change projects, including starting an innovation studio called La Victoria Lab that creates new products, services, and experiences for Peru’s emerging middle class.

Luis's best advice: “Keep seeking out inspiration. It’s your job to be inspired.”

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Take a behind-the-scenes look at the event.

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People are always looking for ways to improve themselves. But what about companies? Companies are just collections of people, so it makes sense that they’d build up all kinds of bad habits over time. Shouldn’t our organizations be on a self-improvement regimen, continuously trying to fix what’s broken?

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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.