When it comes to food, we often have to choose between health, convenience, and taste. Parents struggle to get their kids to eat veggies. The same daily salad can become boring or bland over time. Produce often withers in the crisper drawer.

Betterer Foods set out to make one of the world's favorite foods healthier. Rice is a beloved food across many cultures, but many people now avoid simple carbohydrates due to diet restrictions or health concerns. Innovations and alternative options have mostly been limited to products in the freezer section, like riced cauliflower.

Betterer Foods created RightRice: a dry, shelf-stable grain made from rice and vegetables, including lentils, chickpeas, and green peas. RightRice has more than double the protein, five times the fiber, and 40 percent fewer net carbs than traditional rice. But the product still tastes and looks like rice, and is faster and easier to cook.

RightRice founder Keith Belling, the founder and former CEO of popchips, asked IDEO to design a brand that would communicate the product’s benefits. The start-up needed everything from a defined target consumer and brand story to a stand-out package design, website, and go-to-market materials.

The team listened to people's challenges with rice and eating healthfully: home cooks find it difficult to store fresh foods without them going bad, busy professionals are strapped for time when preparing balanced meals, and parents sneak vegetables into dishes like casseroles or mac and cheese. Some consumers say they avoid rice because it’s a carbohydrate, which is forbidden in so many of today’s diets. People describe themselves as “carb phobic” or say they consider rice a “guilty pleasure.” Others don’t eat rice because it makes them feel sluggish or bloated, or is too difficult or time-consuming to prepare. Overall, people wished rice could be healthier, simpler to cook, and still taste delicious.

IDEO translated these insights into a brand foundation that helped RightRice come to life on shelves, online, and in the world. The package messaging emphasizes the vegetable ingredients, and the cut-out window lets consumers see that the product looks like rice. The shape of the window simultaneously forms a bowl of rice and a smile.

Rice is a household staple around the world. The RightRice brand makes it easier for consumers to have health, convenience, and good taste in one accessible product. RightRice launched nationwide in Whole Foods and Amazon in February 2019.

Since this launch, the company has expanded both its reach and product line. RightRice is now available in nearly 5,000 retailers nationwide in addition to Whole Foods and Amazon, including Sprouts, Wegmans, and approximately 1,800 Kroger stores. Over one million bags have been sold.

The company has received numerous awards and acclaim, including being named “Best Plant-Based” by People’s 2019 Food Awards. Building on the success of RightRice, Belling and his team launched RightRice Medley, a blend of RightRice, ancient grains, and vegetables, in 2020. This new product, which features the same branding the company created with IDEO, has doubled the company’s shelf presence at Whole Foods.

After 40 years of rapid development, China's economic growth has reached a critical turning point.

However, looking at the world, today is also the most complex and uncertain era in human history. The traditional engine of economic development is slowing down, while innovation and other emerging ideas are helping the economy burst into dynamism. To ride this trend, China has already put in place comprehensive policies to ensure that the country can achieve this magnificent transformation—not only to maintain economic growth, but also to achieve high-quality development. To this end, what China needs most is a group of new business leaders with a sense of cooperation and innovation to lead and realize this change as a pioneering force.

People of insight can often see the situation clearly with a forward-looking eye. China's society and economy are undergoing transformation and upgrading, and market demands are constantly changing driven by technology. While seeking business development, many mature entrepreneurs with successful experience have realized that they need to explore some of the most essential issues inwardly, including: The original intention and mission of the enterprise and the role that enterprise leaders should play. However, without a systematic approach, transformation and upgrading, strategic decision-making, management mode and cultural construction cannot truly serve the enterprise

As a top institution of higher learning in China, Tsinghua University has always placed an important strategic position on cultivating innovative talents for China. IDEO is the world's leading design and innovation consulting firm. As a pioneer of design thinking, IDEO has always been committed to applying design and innovation capabilities to solve the world's most complex problems. After discovering the need for China's economic and social transformation and the need for innovative leadership by Chinese entrepreneurs, Tsinghua University and IDEO jointly launched the "Leading China" program in 2018. This program is aimed at senior management of Chinese enterprises, and aims to train entrepreneur trainees to use new perspectives and ideas through a one-year innovative leadership course to seek solutions for the systemic changes that need to be achieved in the process of social transformation in China.

The students of the first "Leading China" program came from more than 30 entrepreneurs from 20 different industries. The teachers who participated in the lecture included 73 Chinese and foreign experts including Shan Jixiang, the former dean of the Forbidden City, Masahiro Kuroyama, the father of Japanese industrial design, and Jake Knapp, the inventor of "Design Sprint". As China's first innovative leadership course with design thinking as the core, the project is equipped with "design to open enterprise creativity", "reshape enterprise competitive advantage", "forge innovative business system", "innovate with the help of finance", "embracing Industrial Revolution 4.0" and "Win-win China Created 2030" six modules. The trainees traveled to nine cities in one year, and completed the courses in the interactive teaching of inspiration and the exchange and sharing of practical experience. Many students said that the course not only helped them find the direction and path of enterprise reform, but also improved their way of thinking, strategic planning and leadership models.

Liu Feng, the founder of Top Intelligence, gave an example of the inspiration brought by the six pillars of "vision-led" enterprise reform. Through "vision leadership", he not only sorted out the original intention and values ​​of the company, but also launched a series of measures based on this starting point, which improved the company's various aspects from the telephone customer service process to the organization of the annual meeting, and mobilized the enthusiasm of employees. This greatly improves the company's efficiency and flexibility. Ting Zhihong, chairman of Hongtu Logistics Co., for example, said that the biggest change brought by the course is her awareness of the importance of empowering the team. The company has now built many platforms to give employees more room to play, to create markets, to put decision-making on the front line, and to let employees play the role of company operators. Her company doubled its profits in 2018. Hu Chao, founder and CEO of Leyou Pregnancy and Baby, introduced that what most executive courses learn is knowledge, and what this course learns is people-oriented values ​​and ways of thinking.

The students of the first class of "Leading China" graduated in December 2018. Regarding the course of this year, Wang Jingwei, former assistant dean of the PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University, commented: "Since the project was launched, we have not only witnessed the true value of design in a business context, but also experienced first-hand the use of people-oriented The difference between the designed executive courses is that the entrepreneurs who participated in the courses quickly entered a state of immersive learning, and many students quickly began to practice the methods they learned in the enterprise.”

On April 8, 2019, the list of winners of the 3rd "Changing the World Innovation Award" was announced, and the "Leading China" project was shortlisted for case nomination, becoming the only Chinese innovation case in the education category. The "Change the World Innovation Award" was announced by Fast Company, one of the world's three major financial and business media organizations.

As one of the world’s leading smartphone manufacturers, the Chinese brand vivo is widely known for its exceptional technological innovation and top-of-the-line photography and gaming hardware. But in an increasingly saturated phone market, vivo understood that it wasn’t enough to lead the pack based solely on technological excellence. To win the hearts of young Chinese consumers, they needed to become a beloved brand.

China consumes roughly 30 percent of the world’s smartphones, presenting a tremendous market opportunity to brands who wish to capture young consumers’ loyalty. In order to achieve that, vivo wanted to design a complete brand experience beyond the devices themselves—one that would express the joyful vivo brand spirit through services and retail experiences. One of their first key initiatives was to build its first concept store in an iconic building in Shenzhen, China.

Before building the concept store, vivo approached IDEO to explore what kind of in-store experience would resonate with young Chinese people. The concept store needed to convey joy in a meaningful, tangible way, while also setting the stage for vivo’s future brand systems. With this in mind, IDEO set out to explore how vivo’s young consumers experience fun.

After conducting research in four different cities, IDEO shared the stories of young Chinese consumers back with the vivo team. Their interviews revealed that young people value experiences that enrich their lives and create a feeling of positive personal transformation. They seek opportunities to expose themselves to new experiences, express themselves in different ways, expand and deepen their social connections, and build knowledge and skills.

Through this understanding of how young Chinese define “enjoyment,” IDEO helped vivo identify the value proposition of the concept store as expressing oneself in new and different ways. The store would allow every visitor to see something unique and find a fresh perspective. The vivo team took that value proposition into a design brief and later built out the space and interactive experiences.

The concept store launched at Shenzhen on March 22, 2019, featuring an upper level dedicated entirely to interactive experiences with photo booths, sound recording, and lighting technology. The engaging, lively and positive atmosphere of the store represents a major milestone in vivo’s transformation from a smartphone maker to a consumer brand.

WATCH: Official launch video provided by vivo.

As China's agriculture moves towards scale and sustainability, helping farmers grow healthier food with resilience is a matter of national economic security and individual livelihoods.

Bayer Crop Science—with its mission to accelerate China's agricultural modernization and benefit Chinese farmers and consumers—has provided high-quality products for millions of growers in China over 18 years. Yet its service relies heavily on multi-layered distributors and retailers across the country. The last mile of Bayer’s product delivery spreads across tens of thousands of highly fragmented retail stores, making the quality of service difficult to monitor and control.

Together with IDEO, Bayer Crop Science aimed to uncover new ways to engage with local farmers and retailers, and develop design concepts for its diverse set of retailers—establishing local relevance as well as the potential to scale nationwide.

With this ambition in mind, a team formed by Bayer Crop Science and IDEO launched into a design sprint in the rice fields of China’s Anhui province. Field research uncovered multiple challenges facing Bayer Crop Science’s retailers. First, each store needed to serve more than one hundred farmers, many of whom rely solely on the store owner to understand how to use the products. Retailers struggled to meet a high daily demand for direct support in a way that provided a positive customer experience.

In turn, farmers felt they had insufficient access to expert advice. While many farmers shared similar needs, there was no system for aggregating requests or arranging group instruction. Given that many rice farmers are illiterate, pre-printed educational pamphlets had limited impact, and retailers lacked tools for providing targeted support. And because the retail stores were also used for storage, little space remained for educational or community programming.

With these constraints in mind, the team needed to come up with ideas and design concepts that could be easily integrated into the daily lives of the retail store owners. The team brainstormed hundreds of concepts and quickly prototyped a select few. One retail store in Dangtu was transformed entirely into a live prototype set. Over three days, more than 50 farmers and retailers came through and provided feedback. From there, the team was able to make daily iterations of the concept, evolving the experience in real-time.

The Bayer team was energized by the potential of these prototypes to enable more customer-centered retail experiences. An exhibition of the concepts was set up during the National Annual Sales Conference of Bayer Crop Science in China, during which a much wider audience from Bayer experienced not only the concepts, but also the immediate feedback from farmers.

One year after the project’s completion, more than half of the design concepts have been included in Bayer's support kit for dealers. In 2019, these concepts will be rolled out in more than 1,000 flagship stores across China.

The work has also accelerated Bayer Crop Science’s efforts to build an ongoing engagement mechanism with its retailers and growers. Its online platform, Bayer Joy Grower, now has more than 10,000 retailers and will be expanded to growers soon.

We've studied the effects of emotions in the workplace, and the research shows that managers can make or break an office. In one poll, 50% of people said they’ve quit a job to remove themselves from a bad manager. (In another survey, 65% of folks said they’d take a new boss over a pay raise. Ouch.)

Managers often set the tone of the workplace. But that doesn’t mean managing has to be stoic, emotionless work. In fact, we think it should be the opposite.

There’s no set formula for becoming a perfect boss, but we have a few tips for building a positive emotional culture in the office and supporting the needs of the people that work for you.

Manage individually

After surveying almost 80,000 people, researcher Marcus Buckingham came up with the insight that “average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess.” In checkers, every piece is the same: they’re interchangeable. But winning a game of chess requires you to understand each piece’s strengths and weaknesses, and you can’t effectively play unless you understand why each piece is unique.

One of Mollie’s favorite examples of this individualized approach is IDEO’s new employee survey, which includes hardball questions like, “What’s your favorite office snack?” and “What kind of flowers do you like?” The answers give teams an understanding of their new colleagues right off the bat, and help managers address a newbie’s individual interests—even if it’s just a preference for vanilla vs. chocolate.

Address your feelings without becoming “emotionally leaky”

In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott recalls a morning when a report told her, “I know what kind of day I’m going to have by the kind of mood you’re in when you walk in the door.” Managing your feelings is as important as managing your team; what you consider a throwaway comment or a momentary bad mood can ruin someone’s day. Reactive, hot-tempered managers are hurtful and demoralizing.

But don’t pretend that you’re not allowed to have feelings (you’re human. Accept it!). “The idea that you’re never going to have a bad day as a boss is bullshit,” Kim says. “The best thing to do is to cop to it. Say to your team, ‘I’m having a bad day, and I’m trying my best not to take it out on you. But if it seems like I’m having a bad day, it’s because I am.’”

You don’t necessarily have to go into great detail (oversharing is another complicated topic), but acknowledging that there’s something going on can help those around you avoid unnecessary anxiety.

Figure yourself out first

Like we said: You’re human. That means you have your own emotional responses to unpack before you’re fully equipped to help others do the same. The best leaders are able to hit the pause button when they become emotional, sit with their feelings, and understand where they’re coming from. Instead of taking action immediately, they ask themselves, “What’s behind this emotion?”

A great manager will realize, for example, that anxiety about meeting a deadline can be mitigated by building structure to help a team get work done on time, or that a tough design review means that next time, more prototypes might be necessary. Tapping into your emotional toolkit will help you arm others for the emotional demands of the office.

Listen

It sounds basic, but it bears repeating. One of the questions Wharton Professor Adam Grant fields most often is, how do you have your suggestions heard when you’re not in charge? "These are not questions asked by leaders," Grant notes. Hearing people out is an extremely important part of letting them know you appreciate their work.

Listening is also the only way leaders can understand the source of problems or strong emotions. As a manager, ask questions instead of immediately trying to problem solve. You’ll never understand another person’s perspective unless you listen and show compassion.

Find time to prioritize yourself

Managing means cooking something on every burner without burning anything. You also have to time every step perfectly to make sure the meal comes together. If the simple thought of that balancing act exhausts you, try taking a "Shultz hour." When he was in office, former Secretary of State George Shultz protected one hour each week for solitary reflection with paper and pen. No one was allowed to interrupt him (except the president or his wife, which we understand).

If solo time feels a little too isolating, seek support. Try connecting with peers and folks who have a similar role with whom you feel safe talking openly about personal and professional issues. As Liz Koenig, who managed Teach for America teachers, told us, “You can’t pour out of an empty cup.”

Acknowledging emotions in the workplace is one thing; harnessing their power to become a better manager is another. It’s not impossible, but it does take work. We’d recommend not putting on a brave face, but instead getting a little vulnerable with the people that work for you. Here’s one last reminder: You’re human.

Like playing the flute or choosing the right sized Tupperware for your leftovers, being a good manager is a skill. You’re not born knowing how to play scales or eyeball specific volumes of pasta—it’s something learned and practiced. And when it comes to building your managerial muscles and shepherding others through a career journey, there are a lot of emotional skills that can really boost your toolkit.

Not necessarily, says Chris Nyffeler, IDEO Executive Design Director and a faculty member in the undergraduate and graduate programs in Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts. Those vocational skills are important, but they can come later. A foundation in design—whether built through education or early career experience—comes from understanding the process and building up the soft skills that all designers, but especially interaction designers, need to master.

Chris would often see his students hung up on mastering tools first. But according to him, great interaction designers have three things at their core—empathy for users, storytelling chops, and the instinct to prototype.

1. Empathy for users

The role of a designer is to be the voice of and advocate for the end user. This is especially true when you're working in-house alongside engineering and product teams that might feel disconnected from the customer.

Empathy starts with an awareness of others and an ability to detect their emotions and understand their perspective. What does it actually feel like to live with a problem, and how would a potential solution actually fix it? “The more that you can build that muscle of empathy,” Chris says, “the better you're going to be as a designer.”

And for more seasoned in-house designers, the more you can help your counterparts across the organization develop their empathy muscles, the more successful it will make you and your UX team in delivering great products to market.

2. The desire to tell a story

Chris describes storytelling as effectively envisioning ideas and putting them into a more strategic framework. That frame could be user insights (how the work is right for the user), a business context (how the work builds on business goals), or organizational context (how the team is well equipped to deliver on the work).

“Storytelling is an under-appreciated soft skill,” Chris says. Storytelling doesn’t just come in handy for presenting your ideas—it helps build consensus with cross-functional teams. Being able to share your ideas and bring others on board helps designers be strong advocates for their own work.

3. The instinct to prototype

At IDEO, we talk about prototyping as a central step in the design process, but it's also a mindset that should be fundamental to the way an interaction designer thinks.

“As they have an idea, great designers put pen to paper, or pixels on screen, or just start building something as a way of working out their process,” Chris says.

Designers should be skilled at prototyping at various levels of fidelity, but most importantly, their gut instinct should push them to test ideas early and often.

“I love seeing that, especially from designers who are just discovering prototyping as a tool in their tool belt,” Chris says. “Seeing them realize that there’s more than one way of doing things, and that their first assumption of how they should present an experience could be right or wrong.”

Putting unfinished, scrappy ideas out into the world can make a designer feel uncomfortable, but Chris says the best prototypes leave room for users to co-design parts of the experience. “If they show you something that’s not working,” Chris says, “quickly change it. Move a button, rewrite copy, replace an image. Users can also take you down unexpected, delightful paths that can lead you to a powerful new idea."

Connecting more deeply with that end user—the person you’re designing for—is key to developing all three of these skills.

Want to learn more about interaction design? Dive deeper with IDEO U’s on-demand class, Prototyping for Digital Experiences.

How do you identify the makings of a great interaction designer? Is it coding expertise? Mastery of digital tools? A beautiful portfolio of visual design work?

Turns out it's really hard to get people to think about why they'd use technology they don’t understand for a problem they don’t know exists. And that's exactly the challenge we've taken on at the CoLab, IDEO’s collaborative innovation lab—to determine what humans will need in the connected future.

How does that affect our quarterly design sprints? The goal isn't faster execution—as it would be with a typical work sprint—but rather surfacing and validating new opportunities.

Here's how it works: At the start of the sprint, each multidisciplinary team (a motley crew of designers, technologists, and businesspeople who range from students to entrepreneurs to corporate representatives) is given a design brief that specifies a technology to use, like blockchain or machine learning. Teams are charged with quickly getting their heads around the emerging technology, creating their first prototype, gathering feedback, iterating, synthesizing, and sharing their design.

Over the past four years, we’ve created well over 200 prototypes and learned a ton.

Here are our best tips for how to run a highly productive design sprint:

1. Big questions need small starting points

When you’re asking a huge, provocative question, you could spend months coming up with answers. So, before the sprint, we make sure we take time to craft specific briefs to work on—design challenges that are bite-sized enough that we can (in)validate them during the course of a week, but broad enough that we can sink our teeth into them.

We might start with a question like: “How might decentralized technologies change the ways communities reduce risk?” and include a suggested prototype like: “Build a peer to peer insurance product for travel using blockchain technology.” This level of specificity can feel stifling at first—but it helps teams get moving fast toward a prototype.

2. Timebox everything

An exploratory sprint can feel directionless at first—you’re trying to make something new with a brand new tool, which means you could do almost anything. The best way to not devolve into endless spiraling is by scheduling every phase of design down to the minute. When you know your team needs to make a decision between A and B in the next seven minutes, well, you put on your big kid pants and decide. By giving yourself a series of minideadlines, you can accomplish more iterations and ultimately, a better prototype at the end of your sprint.

3. Show up with a prototype

When you’re working with a revolutionary technology and trying to explain your idea to a potential user, their eyes glaze over. Showing up to user testing sessions with a prototype—even if it’s far from final—makes the future tangible and accessible. You’re not talking about faster horses anymore, you’ve got people imagining cars.

4. Strong ideas weakly held

Making something takes confidence, and nothing builds confidence like concrete evidence that you’re headed in the right direction. But evidence is hard to come by in the world of emerging tech. Try prototyping as if you’re right—and then listening as if you’re wrong. This means putting your prototype in front of people and learning from all the ways it didn’t work for them—giving you both evidence and direction on what to build.

5. Find the right questions, not perfect solutions

Exploration is about charting unfamiliar territory. Sometimes that means you get it all wrong and end up at a dead-end. But that doesn’t mean the sprint was a failure! As we said, the goal of an exploratory sprint is not to execute a million dollar idea in record time, but to surface new opportunities.

At the end of the sprint, when it’s time to present your prototype, focus the conversation on what you learned: What would you build next time to make an even better, more human-centered solution? What advice would you give to others designing with these technologies?

6. Science fair, not pitch deck

Rather than jazz hands, Powerpoints, and promises of what your prototype could do, we always end our sprints in a science fair format: multiple hands-on demos happening alongside one another, with lots of room for discussion.

This lets people experience prototypes individually and then come back together to reflect on how the ideas worked for them (or didn’t). It’s another round of user feedback that furthers our learning and participants walk away with real insights that might apply to their work beyond the sprint.

It’s not always easy to run a sprint. It means breaking out of your regular work routine and collaborating with a team to do something intense and exhausting that you aren’t always sure is going to work. It means building with tools you don’t know how to use (yet).

But when we follow these rules, our sprints offer up reams of new ideas, insights, opportunities, and next steps that send us galloping toward a more human-centered future.

‍

Know that timeworn Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”? Turns out Ford probably never said that. But as designers who are trying to imagine and build the future, we’ve found it to be a very useful notion.

1. THE DIXON MULTIPLEX

Multiplex is a pop-up "department store of tomorrow" trading for a month as part of the London Design Festival. It features contributions from a wide range of brands curated by legendary product designer Tom Dixon and Wallpaper magazine.

Billed as immersive and multi-sensory, I was super curious to see the designer's vision of an multi-brand store that is fighting for the attention of tomorrow's customers by offering experiences, not just products. That included British botanicals brand Haeckels’ mist spa (like walking into an aromatic greenhouse), to booking in for a fashion shoot or even a vitamin injection.

2. MINDBLOWER

Mindblower is a new 'idea to product' platform showcased at Multiplex, which invites you to pitch ideas for physical products you would like to create, to help bridge the gap between the amazing ideas we dream up and our ability to tangibly own them.

A blend of TV show Dragon’s Den and Kickstarter, its inclusion within a prototype store of tomorrow was interesting, blurred the boundaries between consumer, inventor, and entrepreneur. It's still super early days, but interesting to see someone responding to the citizen maker-economy without assuming that everyone is well-versed in design, 3D printing or engineering.

3. THE GOOD JUDGMENT PROJECT, AND SUPERFORECASTING

The Good Judgement Project is an experiment to explore how well the 'wisdom of the crowd' is able to predict future world events (e.g. will a nation's government collapse in the next six months). It's headline-grabbing finding is that within the thousands of people taking part, there is a small group of ordinary citizens dubbed 'superforecasters' whose predictions are 30% better than intelligence professionals armed with confidential data and subject expertise.

Philip Tetlock's new book - Superforecasting - looks at what sets these superforecasters apart. It's not just about raw intelligence (Superforecasters are clever but not off the charts) they demonstrate a 'growth mindset'; an openness to consider information from many different origins, to change their predictions, and to look back at their predictions and learn from their mistakes. Forecasting is something we could all potentially become better at, and Tetlock has now described how.

‍

Every Monday morning, the London studio shares a coffee and some inspiration. This week, design researcher Kate Wakely talks through an immersive, pop-up retail experience from famed product designer Tom Dixon, a Dragon’s Den meets Quirky-style product development platform, and a book on the emerging art of super forecasting.

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.