Over more than a century of leadership in the food and beverage industry, The J.M Smucker Company has expanded its range of products to maintain its relevance and address market demand. Today, the company leads numerous categories, with beloved products like Jif, Milk-Bone, and Folgers, which are the top choices of millions of Americans. By growing and diversifying their brands over the decades, Smucker has successfully weathered major shifts in consumer habits and technology. Today, though, CPG companies are experiencing unprecedented disruption, and leaders at Smucker understand that the escalating pace of change will require more than just new products.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company recognized the need to identify new market opportunities and establish practices that put innovation and growth at the heart of their business. And he saw the potential to bring those goals to life through his relationship with IDEO.

WATCH: Balancing innovation and efficiency through design has helped Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company, brave the unfamiliar, transform organizations, and ultimately bring game-changing ideas to market faster.

Geoff has stewarded a close partnership with IDEO for over a decade and throughout roles at numerous organizations. Together, Geoff and IDEO have worked on 25 projects, beginning while Geoff was VP of Marketing at Big Heart Pet Brands, and continuing on throughout his career at The J.M. Smucker Company. By working with IDEO to adopt a design thinking approach, Geoff has enabled collaboration across teams and empowered his organizations to find new ways of working that result in measurable business impact. For The J.M. Smucker Company, the partnership has brought creativity and human-centered design to the forefront of its operations, strengthening its ability to bring new products and brands to market and create a pipeline of growth.

WATCH: The J.M. Smucker Company has shifted to embrace growth and innovation as a mindset throughout the organization to bring more consistency to the innovation process.

Looking to the past to creatively connect with the future

As an example of this, Geoff and The J.M. Smucker Company suggested to IDEO that they explore how Folgers, America’s leading at-home coffee brand, might resonate more deeply with a millennial audience. Design research revealed that the mindset of today’s millennial coffee drinkers aligned with Folgers entrepreneurial brand roots. The teams collaborated to create a new concept: a brand called 1850 and an end-to-end, go-to-market product experience, including packaging, retail, and merchandise. 1850 hit shelves in 2018 and has since been reported by IRI Advantage as the top launch in the Coffee Category for 2019.

Frankly, I don’t think innovation gets any easier. You just get a little more comfortable with the discomfort, and that’s when the work starts to get consistently better.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement, The J.M. Smucker Company

Creating an innovation pipeline that’s inspired by consumers’ needs

With 1850 underway, Geoff and The J.M. Smucker Company continued to invest in human-centered design to drive new offerings. The next collaboration with IDEO explored how Jif, the iconic peanut butter brand, could extend beyond the jar and become more readily accessible and appealing to busy parents who want to feel confident about the snacks they give their kids.

The design team was moved by the challenges that parents face: They want the best for their kids, but struggle to choose between what’s wholesome and what’s convenient on a daily basis. The ideal foods are filling, nutritious, and energizing, but often take more time to prepare and aren’t backpack or carpool-friendly. On the other hand, more convenient options tend to be full of empty carbs. Based on this insight, IDEO and Jif decided to tackle the snack-time parenting struggle. The IDEO and Jif teams worked side-by-side to prototype multiple product ideas and formats and tested them with on-the-go families to ultimately create Power Ups.

Available at over 200 retailers worldwide and online at Amazon, Jif Power Ups make wholesome, delicious grab-and-go snacking possible for kids and parents alike, across products ranging from Soft Baked Bars to Creamy Clusters, which are filled with peanut butter and rolled in whole grain oats. All are made with peanuts as the first ingredient and contain no high fructose corn syrup. Since going to market in 2018, Jif Power Ups has been named the top innovation launch in the Snack Bars category by IRI Market Advantage.

Design thinking underpins everything we do.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President & Corporate Officer, Growth & Consumer Engagement, The J.M. Smucker Company

WATCH: The J.M. Smucker Company is on a transformational journey, committed to three pillars of growth: Lead in the best categories, build brands consumers love, and be everywhere.

The J.M. Smucker Company has experienced accelerated growth and speed to market by testing bold new ideas and evolving the role of innovation at the company. Design thinking and consumer empathy have permeated the organization’s new product development process, making it easier to uncover sharp, human-centered insights that lead to thoughtful and uniquely differentiated brands in a competitive, ever-shifting, and overcrowded industry. The work has fueled Geoff’s vision to inspire a culture of innovation at the company so that it can move at the speed of consumers and remain a best-in-class family of brands for future generations.

It’s a Thursday afternoon in Oakland, California. A line of lunchtime diners snakes out the door of dosa by DOSA. Upon entering, eaters are greeted by the smell of tangy dosa—a large paper-thin crepe made from a fermented batter of rice and lentils—and sweet, spicy chai. Turquoise chairs pop against a floor-to-ceiling mural by Oakland artist Namita Kapoor that transports diners to Chandni Chowk, one of the busiest markets in Old Delhi, as if enjoying their food at a local vendor.

In 2003, Emily and Anjan Mitra spent their honeymoon in India, savoring the street food of Anjan’s childhood in Mumbai (often still called Bombay). After returning to San Francisco, they found themselves longing for those distinctive flavors and dishes. Realizing that most Bay Area diners had never seen nor tasted these foods, Emily and Anjan founded DOSA, an upscale, full-service restaurant that introduced the Bay Area to Southern Indian cuisine. Locals came to try the unique, plant-forward dishes, and left with satisfied bellies and a broader understanding of Indian culture.

The entrepreneurs envisioned a brand extension of DOSA: a counter-service restaurant that could scale nationally. The hospitality venture, called dosa by DOSA, would offer healthful Indian street food made from local and seasonal ingredients. Emily and Anjan also set out to expand their existing product line-up—including cold lassi beverages, simmering sauces, and grab-and-go-meals—to national grocers and retailers and needed launch-ready packaging that was convenient, eye-catching, and environmentally-friendly. The new expression would enable consumers to experience dosa by DOSA and Southern India in a variety of forms and places. Emily and Anjan partnered with IDEO to establish a cohesive and consistent brand experience, from the restaurant and to-go meals to retail stores and mobile delivery.

In close partnership with the founders, their staff, Feldman Architecture and MPADA, IDEO set out to bring dosa by DOSA to life and help it scale through brand, environment, and experience design. This included creating everything from the logo and packaging to the menu and operations strategy, with each element tying back to the founders’ vision of sharing Indian heritage and traditions through cuisine.

The group began by seeking cultural inspiration for dosa by DOSA’s brand identity system—the logo, colors, values, fonts, and messaging—to guide future designs. They were inspired by Indian truck drivers who decorate their trucks with garlands, signs, or flags that engage other drivers or bring luck. The dosa by DOSA logo design and its wood-cut typeface are inspired by the dimensionality of this homespun art form, while the vibrant, eclectic colors reflect the streets and textures of urban Mumbai.

The goal of opening people’s minds to Indian cooking and culture extends to the packaging, which meets customers’ needs and playfully educates them. The food containers—made from recycled and compostable material—feature brightly patterned labels reminiscent of the trucks. Some have built-in compartments suited to multiple dipping chutneys, making it convenient to sample a variety of Indian flavors. Paper tray covers resembling Mumbai newspapers offer eating tips like “Be civilized. Eat with your hands,” encouraging diners to experience an Indian custom.

The vibrant brand comes to life across an array of packaging, including cold cups printed with the phrase “thanda thanda pani”—meaning “cold cold water”—which comes from a popular Indian parody of the Vanilla Ice song "Ice Ice Baby."

To design the diner experience and restaurant environment in a way that invites curiosity about the culture and cuisine, the team started with diners: They identified key moments in their experience like entering, waiting in line, and paying. The floor plan, furniture, lighting, signage, and menu were designed around these touchpoints. For example, while customers wait in line, they can watch dosa being prepared, as if they’re eager and hungry travelers awaiting street food.

The dosa by DOSA menu includes distinctive items like coconut kale mung bean salad and hot masala chai made with caramelized milk—the way Anjan’s mother prepared it. To help the restaurant scale, the team created a preliminary furniture, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) budget, 3D renderings of the space, and an operations strategy for the founders and their employees.

The dosa by DOSA flagship launched in January 2018 in Oakland, California. The IDEO brand guidelines have enabled the dosa by DOSA team to independently and easily shepherd new product lines to market, including salads, wraps, curry bowls, samosas, and simmer sauces. The brand’s packaged food launched in over 200 natural food stores in 24 months—including over 100 Whole Foods locations—as well as online retailers and delivery services like Good Eggs and Caviar. These items and the restaurant have helped Emily and Anjan realize their vision of bringing the flavor and spirit of Southern Indian cuisine to new communities around the world.

In recent years, due to shifts in Japan’s demographics, the food industry has faced challenges such as a decrease in market size and a shrinking number of producers. As a result, social impact opportunities abound in this field.

When Japanese software company NJC (Nippon Jimuki Co. Ltd.) approached IDEO seeking to identify new business opportunities that would build on the company’s core strengths, the food and agriculture industry rose up as a promising area of focus.

NJC is a well-established software company that has spent over 50 years helping to build backend business systems for small to medium enterprises. NJC works across healthcare, retail, and food and beverage, computerizing core processes to support and improve operations.

In partnership with IDEO, NJC explored its strengths and potential as an organization, as well as the ideas and visions of the employees, and emerged with the goal of using their capabilities to address large-scale issues facing regional farmers.

During research across Japan, local growers described challenges with multi-layered supply chains and analog systems, which led to “overwork for minimal profit,” as well as a gap between supply and demand. Because agricultural wholesalers lacked clear information in advance on the status of crops or the volume to be harvested, they struggled to negotiate with buyers, which led to wasted food On the other hand, the farmers who grow the crops are engaged in manual labor, and do not always have the energy to focus on business aspects such as efficiency or the pursuit of increased profitability, which leads to a diminished interest in farming among young people.

One question that emerged through research was why agricultural producers weren’t utilizing IT. This evolved into “How can profitability be improved for all stakeholders?” and, “How might we create a system that will provide useful data without creating a burden for either farmers or agricultural wholesalers?”

The result was fudoloop.

fudoloop is an app that enables farmers and wholesalers to conduct business more profitably by bringing transparency to the fluctuating produce market. Through fudoloop, wholesalers receive information from farmers a day in advance, and can coordinate the various requests of buyers, such as order size, production location and other special requests. As a result, wholesalers can function as “community managers,” doing business with both producers and buyers at a more appropriate price point.

NJC aims for fudoloop to be the first step in a cycle that brings value to all stakeholders, from farmers to wholesalers, retailers and even customers, by redefining the “middleman” role of produce wholesalers.

The population of Tokyo’s metropolitan area is twice as big as New York, and the daily influx of workers from the suburbs increases that number sixfold. Congestion on trains traveling through the center of Tokyo during commuting hours is said to reach somewhere close to 200 percent of the trains’ capacity.

East Japan Railway Company (known as JR East) is the world’s largest railway company by revenue, operating 12,000 trains daily and serving 6.4 billion passengers per year.

In March 2014, JR East leveraged their extensive operations and passenger data to publish a consumer app that provided train location information, congestion status, air conditioning temperature, and wayfinding tools.

The app was downloaded more than 3.8 million times; however, its features and usability proved unsatisfactory to users. In an attempt to be comprehensive in addressing passenger needs, the app was weighed down with data and worked sluggishly. Competitors’ apps were named above JR East in customer satisfaction surveys, highlighting the company’s need to address the tool’s usability.

JR East’s Technical Division approached IDEO to help design an attractive and consistent user-centered experience through its digital ecosystem. With a team of interaction designers, they launched a project to create a new version of their app.

During the research phase, the IDEO team observed passengers’ behaviors and decision-making processes and noticed that people were using several apps at once to get more personalized and complete information.

The team created a set of paper-based prototypes to test how users would react to various functionalities. Surprisingly, users ranked versions with limited functionalities higher than those with a broad range of features.

This insight informed a new prototype that enabled a customized user experience based on traveler needs. Wayfinding proved to be the most frequently selected feature, so the new app was designed around helping passenger navigate during their trips.

Although JR East had traditionally outsourced their app development, IDEO encouraged them to organize their own internal team. In cooperation with Pivotal—a frequent IDEO partner familiar with human-centered approaches—the internal team was trained in agile development and built the new app themselves. A prototype was released in November 2017 as “Go! by Train.” It was so successful in the market that the earlier JR East app was replaced entirely with the content of the new design.

JR East's internal development team was recognized by the company for their exceptional output, and will be integral to the company's human-centered digital transformation going forward.

Originally designed for cyclists, the idea was that we could give them access to information from their phones while reducing distraction. As we worked to progressively learn how the electronics and denim could work together as one seamless product, we explored hundreds of variations of the smart tag, failing our way toward the best version. From 3D-printed shapes to sewn straps and overmolded silicone assemblies, each iteration brought us one step closer to an ultimately successful product launch.

At IDEO, we’re big believers in the idea that if you want to succeed sooner, you’re going to have to fail earlier. And fail a lot. But each time you build something, you learn something new about the challenge you are trying to solve. This iterative cycle of question, make, answer, and ask a new question is why prototyping is such an important part of the design process. The more you make, the more—and the faster—you learn. And ultimately, the better the end product. That’s why we always encourage our teams to make something—early, often, and repeatedly.

Here are seven principles that help guide our prototyping process, as we fail our way to the best version of whatever we’re making.

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Early prototypes should be rough, rapid, and right

When you are working at a lower fidelity, you spend less time and fewer resources on each iteration, so you can build more and learn more. The key is to know what questions you’re trying to ask—and answer—with each new variation. What can you make to address those questions first? What is the fastest way to make something you can test? Keep those goals in mind to guide your process.

On a project developing a new laryngoscope (a device that helps doctors examine the larynx), we needed to quickly explore many ways a retraction mechanism might work, and what the implications each option would have on the device’s internal architecture. We prototyped at just enough fidelity to convince ourselves and our client that the task was possible, and to align on the leading methods we had for achieving it.

Add refinement only when and where you need it

Every time a prototype helps you answer a question, you take a step toward a higher-fidelity design. In this progression, the prototypes usually start to get more complex—as do the methods for making them. Improvements and iterations start to take more time as complexity grows, so prioritize your efforts accordingly. Keep asking yourself, “What do I want to learn from this prototype, specifically?”

On a fairly recent project, one of our teams was designing a new handheld massage device that incorporated a digital touchscreen. Even though it was a big part of the final product, we consciously chose to keep that complex element out of our prototypes for months, because we hoped to evaluate ergonomics, size, and use patterns before digital interactions. We added functional digital elements once we felt we needed feedback to keep evolving and testing the concept.

Embrace pivots

When you are building early, low-fidelity prototypes, try to keep all the possible doors open and maximize exploration. We like to work with modular elements, and avoid permanently removing or attaching things. That way you can quickly change directions or incorporate new ideas without having to start from scratch. It’s a practical way to save time and money, and to keep yourself from locking in on one idea.

Embracing pivots was key to our success when we were designing a new set of multi-tool experiences for SOG, a specialty knife and tool manufacturer. A multi-tool can do so many things, but each form factor lends itself to being particularly good at just a few core tasks. By prototyping in a way that allowed us to mix and match functions across form factors, we were able to easily pivot and experiment with various tool elements across the product line without over committing to a specific direction too soon.

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Don’t reinvent the wheel

You could fabricate bespoke elements for each prototype you’re building—or you could take advantage of what's already out there, using existing products as a foundation. No point in wasting time building something you could easily grab from elsewhere. The spirit of prototyping is all about speed of execution, so it’s always better to focus on what you want to learn without getting bogged down solving additional problems. Plus, taking things apart is in itself a way to learn—and it’s fun!

When we developed a scent-ring-blowing robot with the furniture company Moooi, we turned to all sorts of other products as we figured out the best way to create visible scent rings. We landed on a viable solution sooner because we started from existing product architectures—like solenoid valves (electrically -controlled valves used to allow or prevent the flow of media) and speakers.

Always be documenting

If every prototype is a question, and every interaction with a prototype provides an answer, you need to capture those answers as best you can. Plus, when you’re working at low fidelity, things can break, fall apart, or even disappear. It can be easy to forget to set up a phone and hit record, but don’t make that mistake. Short videos and still images are amazing tools for telling the story behind a prototype—why you made it, what you hoped to learn, what users' reactions were, and ultimately how the prototype pushed your design forward.

No one wants to get the message, “Hey I think I just broke the prototype.” But it happens to all of us, and having documentation can be a lifesaver. When our team was creating a folding infant travel bassinet for an IDEO PlayLab client, a delicate, 3D-printed collapsing mechanism was broken just hours before we needed to ship our functional model to the client. Luckily, sending them a video of the mechanism in action created the extra time we needed to print new parts and fix the model—just in the nick of time.

Don’t forget your prototype is … just a prototype

All prototypes are meant to be learning tools that elicit feedback, and the point of prototyping is to discover new challenges, problems, and flaws as you progress to the right solution. Sometimes that means you’ll hear critical things about a prototype you may have spent hours working on—and eventually you’ll probably have to provide feedback for others, too. Prototyping isn’t about defending your perfect creation; it’s about amplifying the speed at which you can learn to enable you to get to the right solution.

Often, IDEO will send research participants several prototypes for evaluation. One of the first things we tell people is, “It's okay if you break the prototype,” because we know it frequently happens. It's more important to allow for genuine interactions and feedback than it is to be overly precious with our models.

This might seem like a lot of information, but these principles are simply guidelines—there’s no right or wrong way to prototype. We think of it as a dance between questions and answers, constantly taking steps toward a more resolved and robust design. That’s why the last principle is, don’t forget to have fun! Rolling up your sleeves and making something is one of the most rewarding parts of the design process, and one of the critically important ingredients in IDEO’s approach to solving hard problems with our clients.

Getting stuck in your own prototyping process? Get in touch so that we can work together to figure it out.

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A few years ago, we partnered with Google and Levi’s to build the mechanics inside the Jacquard jacket, which allows wearers to control their smartphones with a brush of their sleeves.

We’re already living in the future. We’ve had small computers in our pockets for almost two decades that have more computing power than the first space missions. We have cars that drive themselves. There’s a man out there who has a Neuralink chip implanted in his brain, allowing him to control Mario Kart. This is the stuff of futuristic science fiction—except it’s our reality.

And already, we’ve begun to chart the next era of humanity and technology, as we live out the initial stages and repercussions of the technological, social, and political future that we and others drafted as designers of technology. But this future that we now live in has us asking some panicked questions about what the next one will mean for our jobs, the environment, and our kids. Because we’re realizing: This future we’ve created is not good enough. 

Early cartographers once depicted the vast oceans on ancient maps with intricate illustrations, often accompanied by the warning, "Here Be dragons." These words marked the thresholds of the unknown world, the entry point to unknown realms. In his essay “Here Be Dragons,” James Baldwin pushes us to consider what it looks like to meet those shores with curiosity, empathy, and compassion, to use moments of facing the unknown to overcome fear and uncertainty. Right now is a moment to be brave: Not to react with fear and step back from the edge, but to dive in and see what we find and if we can make the future better, together.

To accompany us in our journey to design a better future, we’ve created a set of talismans that represent what we already know about what’s coming.

1. Eve’s apple: We can’t go back to reality

We’re building a world of deepfakes, synthetic humans, and invented K-pop bands. The real, the invented, and the generated are blending more every day.

Think about U.K.-based Synthesia, which makes tools that can turn a one-off performance by an actor into an endless stream of deepfake avatars, reciting whatever script you give them at the push of a button. According to the company, its tech is now used by 56 percent of Fortune 100 companies.

Hyperreality is here, and we can’t go back—so let’s see where it takes us. What if the debate between “real” and “fake” becomes irrelevant? Maybe our creative expressions will no longer be bound by the limits of human imagination.

2. The heartbeat: Everything is alive

To be alive is to breathe, to pulse, to love, or to dream. But what if life also emerges from calculations, from quanta, and from superpositions? The sharp line between animate and inanimate is blurring, fading, and vanishing fast; life is no longer limited to the organic. What if this is the end of human exceptionalism? What if every object around us becomes alive? 

These questions inspire projects like Hume AI’s Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) and ChatGPT-4o, which interpret emotional expressions and generate empathic responses. With systems like these, technology feels more “alive,” because it can understand and react to human emotions with nuance. We can have full conversations with a machine that almost feels like a living being.

3. The Tweezer: Develop taste and precision

In a future of abundant AI-generated content, anyone can create anything, at any time. This means an explosion of creative output, no longer constrained by cultivation of craft.

In this world, we’ll have to select and curate experiences. Otherwise, we’ll drown in options. So, what if taste becomes a valuable currency? Imagine if finding compelling worlds was more valuable than making them.

Consider Pharrell Williams’s role as Louis Vuitton's Men's Creative Director. Broadly known as a musician, he’s an example of a broader trend in the luxury fashion industry, where the role of a creative director evolves beyond traditional design skills. Now, it can include curating and connecting broad artistic expressions​ to form and build new kinds of media that stand out among the noise.

4. The Hotdog: Orchestrate digital ingredients

More and more, technology is moving from standalone apps to integrated and embedded functions. At WWDC, Apple Intelligence presented visions of technology that can seamlessly anticipate our needs and meet them. Instead of flipping through apps to find recipes for a dinner party, a system like this could come up with a menu based on guests’ dietary preferences, choose a date that fits calendars, and order groceries. Similarly, the vision from the movie Her, which ChatGPT is largely modeled after, is an all-in-one voice assistant that knows all of our needs and preferences, and supports our emotional and social wellbeing—and even provides a romantic connection.

Let’s lean into that trend. Picture technology acting as an innate extension of oneself, rather than as isolated tools. The essential skill is no longer using different apps to complete a task, but mastering the orchestration of digital agents.

5. The Parrot: How to bridge realms

Words matter. But there are so many more ways to communicate, many that humans have never been able to access—until now.

We’re leaving behind the confines of human-to-human communication, and unlocking the secret languages of animals, natural systems, and time. Think about the Earth Species Project, which has been working for the better part of a decade to use AI to decode animal language to support conservation.

So, what if we could decipher the dialogues of the animal kingdom? What if translations could capture the essence of cultures and the subtleties of metaphors? Imagine if we could bridge the ultimate divide—time itself. 

In their TeleAbsence series, researchers like the MIT Media Lab’s Hiroshi Ishii and D. Pillis are experimenting with technologies to facilitate dialogues with digital renditions of those we've lost, redefining our concepts of connection and presence. Their project, MirrorFugue, is a piano that captures how a loved one plays, and then plays itself back, allowing you to touch the keys and feel the piano move as it would if they were actually playing it. 

Thanks to these talismans, we have a sense of what’s beyond the edge of the map, the future that lies beyond. But, if we want to be the ones to draw the map, we have to live in the real world. And that means folding in not just pie-in-the-sky ideals, but building the best version of business and commerce. So how do you make sure we build the future we want, while creating a future that makes commercial sense?

We believe that great design commercializes emerging technology by marrying what’s possible with what people want and need. That’s the future we’re working to build. As we listen to the panicked questions, let’s unpack the human needs behind them, mapping them to the incredible potential of technology, designing a future that we want to live in.

What is the future you want to live in? Let us know: ai@ideo.com 

What can a heartbeat, a pair of tweezers, a hotdog, a parrot, and an apple tell us about what’s coming?

Healthcare is responsible for 10 percent of global material extractions and 4.4 percent of emissions, contributing significantly to the very environmental issues that are increasingly impacting human health. Paradoxically, 80 percent of health outcomes globally are driven by non-clinical factors—the environmental conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age. These compounding factors present a unique opportunity for leaders within and beyond the health industry to rethink their approach, moving beyond traditional care models to embrace more holistic, preventative, and sustainable strategies.

At IDEO, we believe that the climate crisis can be more than a threat—it can also be a catalyst for innovation. By shifting our healthcare focus upstream—from last-mile care to first-mile health, ie, creating the conditions that make everyday life healthy by design—we can create solutions that not only improve individual and community wellbeing, but also contribute to a healthier planet. This approach doesn't just mitigate risks and improve health outcomes; it opens new avenues for growth and value creation.

So, what might this future of climate-conscious healthcare look like? During Climate Action Week in London, we asked a group of leaders and creatives to combine future inspiration, nature strategies, and building blocks of first-mile health to come up with ideas that could lead to better results for people and planet. Here are some of our favorites:

Converge urban planning and healthcare 

Imagine a world where public green spaces are not just amenities, but prescribed interventions for both physical and mental health. Already, these spaces serve as natural air purifiers, reducing urban heat islands while providing accessible areas for exercise and community connection. Health insurers might offer incentives for time spent in these green spaces, recognizing their role in preventing chronic diseases and improving overall community wellbeing.

Bridge empathy and health with wearable technology

Picture a wearable device that allows users to experience the physical sensations of others—perhaps those with disabilities or health conditions different from their own. This technology could revolutionize patient care, medical education, and public health campaigns by fostering deeper empathy and understanding. It might also encourage more sustainable behaviors by allowing people to viscerally experience the health impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations.

Make community rituals a cornerstone of preventative healthcare

Consider creating re-localization rituals, which would bring communities together to build shared culture, empathy, and social cohesion. These events could incorporate nutrition education, physical activities, and community health moments, all while fostering the kind of strong social bonds that are crucial for mental health, quality of life, and community resilience in the face of climate challenges.

Bring the fashion and health industries together around sustainability

Envision a partnership where health tech companies and fashion brands co-create wearables that monitor health while promoting sustainable consumption. These products could adapt to users' changing health needs over time, reducing waste in both the fashion and medical device industries. They might even incorporate materials that actively purify the air or neutralize pollutants, turning personal style into a form of environmental stewardship.

Give children a voice in health and environmental policy

Picture a Ministry of Children (or, in the U.S., a Department of Children) with real executive decision-making power on issues of health and climate, working for and with children to understand and serve the needs of some of our most vulnerable citizens. This radical approach to inclusivity could lead to policies that prioritize long-term health outcomes and environmental sustainability, breaking free from short-term thinking that often dominates current governance models.

These scenarios may seem far-fetched, but they illustrate the kind of bold, systemic thinking required to address the intertwined challenges of health and climate. They also highlight the immense opportunities for growth and innovation in this space, and the importance of bringing diverse groups together in service of solving these problems.

For health industry leaders, embracing this climate-conscious approach to healthcare isn't just about corporate social responsibility—it's a strategic imperative. Companies that lead in this space will be better positioned to:

• Tap into new markets: As consumers become increasingly aware of the health impacts of climate change, there's growing demand for products and services that address both personal and planetary health.
• Attract and retain talent: Purpose-driven initiatives that tackle major global challenges can be a powerful draw for top talent, particularly among younger generations.
• Mitigate future risks: By investing in preventative, sustainable healthcare models now, companies can better prepare for the health challenges that climate change will inevitably bring.
• Drive innovation: The constraints imposed by climate considerations can spark creativity, leading to breakthrough technologies and business models.
• Enhance brand value: Companies that demonstrate leadership in addressing climate and health issues can build strong, positive brand associations that resonate with consumers and partners alike.
• Cut costs: Not only will sustainable strategies lead to better health outcomes that save money, they may also lower regulatory costs.

As we navigate the Climate Era, the health industry has a unique opportunity—and responsibility—to lead the way in creating a more sustainable, resilient future. By focusing on upstream, preventative solutions that address both human and planetary health, we can unlock new sources of value while making a profound positive impact on the world.

The future of health is not just about treating illness—it's about nurturing wellbeing in its broadest sense. We look forward to joining health industry leaders in stepping up and embracing this challenge. The health of our businesses, our communities, and our planet depends on it.

Looking to catalyze change in business or healthcare? We’d love to connect.

In the rapidly-evolving landscape of global health, we find ourselves at a critical juncture where the health of individuals, communities, and our planet are inextricably linked.

Digital technologies will be a huge piece of that puzzle, helping us find solutions to everything from reusable packaging to textiles that stay out of landfills, the electrification of everything, and retailers that embrace circularity.

The opportunity is enormous: Leaders who adopt new technologies to meet sustainability goals will not only lighten their impact on climate—they will gain new value for their brands and their customers because of all the benefits that new tech brings. Those who evolve now will be positioned to lead the market. 

So, how do you adapt a fashion or luxury brand to be more sustainable, more inclusive, and more connected to the consumer, while increasing value to brands, manufacturers, and consumers alike? 

The challenge is complex, but it’s nowhere near impossible. Take H&M’s work to streamline its supply chain, cutting unnecessary inventory, and producing less waste. Together, IDEO and H&M mapped out the complex network of people that make up its supply chain across the globe, then created an algorithm for more precise ordering, and a tool that provides a shared view of information. Now, a new automated flow called “Cruise Control” creates a demand forecast that makes it possible for employees to place much more accurate bets on what consumers will want, when. It’s a project that not only led to less waste—but better sales, too. After all, it's a lot easier to buy the thing you want when it's in stock. Already, Cruise Control has led to an eight percent average reduction in inventory, saving the company €500 million (more than $630 million) per year.

Human-centered technological strategies like this one also create opportunities to change—and deepen—the relationship between brand and consumer. A climate-conscious future isn’t just responsible and increasingly required (see Corporate Social Responsibility Directive, Waste Framework Directive, and the Ecodesign Criteria for Consumer Textiles in the EU), it’s full of opportunity for growth.

Here are four ways fashion brands can leverage digital technologies to increase value in the climate era.

Measure a garment's value across multiple life-cycles

Provocation: By shifting how you measure the profitability of garments from linear sales to circular value creation, you can redesign the business from the core. Today, shoppers buy garments from celebrity closets on the second hand luxury platform The RealReal, and collectors are happy to buy a pre-owned Eames chair, like one Redditor who said "I ain't got time to age a 670—I'll buy someone else's history.” Brands can expand on these trends to show off the value embedded in goods that are already out there in the market, while deepening their long-term relationships with customers and communities. Digital twins—virtual data tied to a physical object, like data tied to your passport—can streamline tracking and enable new business models that compliment physical experiences with digital.

Impact: New KPIs connected to digital twins in a circular product lifecycle allow the reconfiguration and measuring of new value chains.

Use the shift to on-demand manufacturing to co-create with customers

Provocation: On-demand production and direct-to-fabric printing mean your customers can create their own bespoke prints, directly collaborating with your brand, while making sure you don’t produce too much inventory. Some brands are already taking advantage of this strategy. Reebok, for example, has a service where you can supply images to a chatbot to create custom sneakers, and then can buy digital versions of the sneakers for eight dollars. Projects like this one are becoming increasingly common, as brands come into proximity with user-generated worlds and designs. There's a great opportunity here to expand on the creative drive of potential customers through co-design tools.

‍Impact: Co-design drives brand engagement and loyalty, taking your customer relationships to new heights.

Create new experiences that add more bonding between the customer, your brand and their new purchase


Provocation: Manufacturing on demand can lead to a longer window between a customer’s order and the delivery of their goods—but that doesn’t have to add friction. Instead, brands can reframe delays with a bespoke, insider experience, where the customer connects with the designers, people, and processes that make their garment possible—and unique to them. It’s also a way to make visible the labor and resources it takes to produce their garments, which can drive real behavior change. This concept even has a name, Shinkansen Theater, after the shift in perspectives that riders on Japan’s bullet trains had on turnaround time after watching cleaning staff work.

Impact: Luxury purchases are often the pinnacle of many months or years of decision-making and brand engagement. Involving the consumer in the production process enhances and elongates the thrill of the purchase moment. Customers who are willing to spend a lot to get a coveted item will go to great lengths to acquire as much information about it as possible (see this discussion of a bespoke order tracker for Ford). 

Design for the impact of the design idea, rather than the identity or size of the buyer

Provocation: Experimenting with different styles, fabrics, and customizations in a virtual environment can create a sense of ownership and excitement akin to bespoke tailoring. Picture a hybrid experience, where high-quality simulations allow shoppers to start the design process online, then see the final touches at delivery. It’s a strategy that makes brands more accessible to more sizes, body types, and genders. Already, brands like Unspun are using body scanning to create custom jeans, and Universal Standard has committed to carrying sizes 00 through 40, with the same attention to cut and quality, regardless of size. Returns in fashion are not purely about technical fit, but about a complex set of emotions, context, and expectations. How are you feeling about your body? What’s the lighting in your space? How does the garment make you feel? High-quality and accurate simulations of a garment’s shape, texture, and movement could also help close the gap between digital and physical shopping experiences, reducing the emotional mismatch between online vision and product reality.

Impact: Sizing and gender categories become irrelevant, allowing your brand ethos and styles to reach—and be reinterpreted by—the largest possible portion of the market.  

These provocations are just four ways fashion and luxury brand leaders can leverage emerging tech and trends to cut impact on climate, while increasing value to their customers—there are many, many more. And the leaders that implement them first will not only be doing better by the planet—they’ll also reap the rewards. 

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Looking to implement emerging tech to add value to your brand? We’d love to connect.

The climate era is ushering in changes so big, everything will need to be redesigned—including fashion and luxury brands.

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.