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.

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.