The IDEO team quickly discovered that the challenge of designing a Digital@FEMSA super app for tens of millions of customers was matched only by the operational complexity of bringing together different teams that had already created various apps with separate value propositions. Not to mention the 22,000 stores specifically tailored to local communities.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team built on FEMSA’s already deep understanding of its customers by meeting them in their homes and communities. The team discovered that users didn't care about long-term rewards; instead, they wanted everyday help to thrive long-term. Connecting omnichannel rewards to regular spending would allow them to save time and money—something they said was particularly important. Along with market research, insights like these directly informed the app's design, ensuring that it was compatible with users' everyday habits and preferences.

Meanwhile, the project team also worked to ensure the app fit the priorities of the various teams inside Digital@FEMSA, designing a comprehensive process for testing joint value propositions. Together, the team created a new design system, iconography, and set of unifying principles. IDEO also worked closely with the Digital@FEMSA teams to ensure that the app's design was in line with their strategic goals and technical capabilities, and built the app's initial information architecture. They incorporated secure transactions, effortless coupon redemption, personalized offers, and a cohesive loyalty program.

From there, the IDEO and Digital@FEMSA teams quickly transitioned into the design and development phase, producing prototypes of the new app, dubbed Spin Premia. With the help of user testing, they were able to continuously iterate to improve the app's features and functionalities, creating a user experience that was both seamless and intuitive. In just 10 months, they went from a small digital team with an ambitious idea, to a 150+ people product organization and an MVP launched in one region. And thanks to a tight partnership, the teams were able to seamlessly integrate Spin Premia into Digital@FEMSA's existing systems, resulting in a scalable implementation nationwide just a few months later.

The introduction of Spin Premia was a milestone in FEMSA's digital transformation path. Following a true ship and iterate model, just a few months into the project, the company released a smaller, focused version of the app in just one city in Mexico to quickly learn from customer experience before expanding to new regions. Since then, the Spin Premia app has quickly gained popularity, offering a safe and user-friendly platform that millions of Mexican consumers have embraced. It has also allowed FEMSA to broaden its digital portfolio and extend its customer base throughout Mexico, elevating customer satisfaction and fueling business expansion.

13 million Mexicans visit FEMSA’s OXXO convenience stores every day. But the company had ambitions to leverage digital experiences to increase customer engagement.

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To get there, Digital@FEMSA needed to deliver exceptional digital products with the agility to serve an entire population.

4.7 stars

Spin Premia’s app store rating

22.8 million

active Spin Premia program users

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Midscale hotel brands are the fastest-growing hotel segment in the US, attractive to both travelers and hotel owners. But often, their messaging feels repetitive, and travelers have a tough time differentiating between them. With a warm, thoughtfully designed midscale brand, IHG had an enormous opportunity to distinguish itself in a crowded market. 

IHG’s goal was to deliver a guest experience that felt genuinely unique and resonant—and quickly. With costs on the rise, many owners were motivated to turn toward conversion brands, which allow them to refurbish hotels under a new brand rather than invest in construction, a way to grow their portfolio in a tight financing market. Meanwhile, IHG’s competitors were set to introduce new conversion brands of their own. The company was looking for a partner that could work swiftly and iteratively to deliver a distinct brand.

For the IDEO team, the answer lay in communicating the brand’s value, starting with a custom logo rendered by hand. Inspired by vintage sign painting and modernist typography, the team sketched different versions of the letterforms, reviewing them with IHG until they had a set that brought to life the generosity and sense of invitation associated with the hotel’s spaces. They also worked to ensure the wordmark was visually balanced and would translate well across a variety range of scales. From there, they built an expansive brand world, including bespoke navigation icons, a full interior and exterior signage system, and a video to support the Garner launch.

The result is a hotel brand that stands apart in its category for both travelers and owners: thoughtful and well-designed yet affordable. As competition in the midscale segment continues to increase, Garner has been central to IHG’s growth strategy. Launched in the fall of 2023, Garner opened 100 hotels worldwide in just 16 months, making it the fastest-ever IHG brand to scale globally. The brand’s increasing popularity among owners and developers is driven by the growing demand for conversion properties, which accounted for 52% of IHG’s room openings in 2025. Garner plans to continue its rapid expansion with nearly 80 additional hotels in 12 key markets, including the US, Mexico, Italy, and Japan.

Conversions account for 12% of the global hotel pipeline, enabling hotels to switch brands and refurbish, boosting revenue without expensive construction.
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The US midscale hotel segment, valued at $14B, is expected to reach $18B by 2030.

100 new Garner Hotels

in less than 3 years—the fastest-scaling brand in IHG's history

500 Garner Hotels

planned in the next 10 years; 1,000 over the next 20

Alzheimer’s and dementia are notoriously difficult to treat—and scientists estimate that some 50 percent of people who have dementia are undiagnosed. Recognition of symptoms and early intervention are key. Together and IDEO set out to conduct user research to inspire new products that would help patients with cognitive decline take charge of their brain health.

The first priority was to expand the reach of the Moving Together program, which combines group movement exercises with mindfulness techniques, led by a trained group instructor. The IDEO team conducted remote and in-person interviews in Florida, where one in five residents is age 65 and older, and rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia are among the highest in the country. One of the key insights the team discovered was that many older adults didn’t understand how behaviors like smoking, exercise, and diet can be risk factors for cognitive decline. Their input inspired a new design principle for the program: “No naked feedback.” Any time participants received health coaching advice about modifying their lifestyle, they would also be given resources on why and how to do it, so they would have a pathway to boosting their brain health. 

The IDEO team folded insights like this one into the design for four new product offerings, including personalized brain health education, new online community engagement tools, partnership programs, and health coaching services, as well as a new user interface to illustrate them. Along with Together they also developed an implementation roadmap of next steps to bring the new digital product offerings to market, such as hiring a brain health coach and creating a new course curriculum. Now, Together has enrolled 165 people in the Boost Your Brain Health Clinical Trial, which is looking at outcomes such as reduced risk of Alzheimer's and maintenance of cognitive function for the Brain Health Together program. With trial completion in Q3 2024 and product launch in early 2025, growing numbers of people with MCI will have access to this exciting program. Together incorporated almost all of the elements from the IDEO roadmap into the final curriculum, and the team often refers back to insights the team gathered as guiding design principles.

Fighting barriers to diagnosis

With its online program growing, Together wanted to take on an even bigger problem: dementia underdiagnosis. Co-founder Dr. Deborah Barnes had recently developed an algorithm that uses patients’ health records to calculate their risk of undiagnosed dementia, called the electronic health record Risk of Alzheimer's and Dementia Assessment Rule (eRADAR). Together was looking to find creative ways to equip and empower providers to use risk scores like eRADAR in primary care settings.

One piece of the puzzle? Many primary care doctors are unaware that better management of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia can have a positive impact on other chronic health issues—like diabetes, hypertension, and depression. So by encouraging providers to prioritize dementia care, they can help support the overall health of older adults with cognitive decline. The IDEO team recommended a curriculum for continuing education courses for doctors that make that link clear—another step toward increasing dementia diagnosis and improving overall health.

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Better help, sooner

To understand the patient experience, Together and IDEO decided to work directly with patients and caregivers to uncover what was stopping them from asking for dementia screening. The IDEO team quickly learned many patients were afraid of facing a diagnosis that signified a loss of agency and control, especially when they didn’t believe there were good treatment options. Often, they were unaware that there were things they could do to improve their brain health. They needed to know what steps to take after a diagnosis, and who could provide actionable advice. In response, the IDEO team designed a digital activity toolkit and physical booklet to guide patient families through the early stages of a dementia diagnosis, including recognizing the signs and symptoms, having better conversations with their doctor, and getting connected to support groups and programs like Moving Together.

Solving the problem of dementia underdiagnosis involves complex systems-level thinking and designing for the entire health ecosystem of patients, providers, and insurance payers, and solutions for Alzheimer’s and dementia care are still in their infancy. But already, this work is empowering patients and doctors to prioritize brain health and get screened sooner, and Together, which has since been acquired by Linus Health, is still working to move dementia care forward.

Approximately 12-18% of people aged 60 or older live with mild cognitive impairment, while memory loss, Alzheimer's and dementia affect more than 50 million people around the world.

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An estimated 50% of people living with dementia are undiagnosed.

165 enrolled

in the Boost Your Brain Health Clinical Trial

Many companies view culture-building initiatives as nice-to-haves. At Moderna, Mindsets are a business imperative, crucial to its plans to develop breakthrough products quickly.

For companies working on solutions as vital as a COVID-19 vaccine, delays and mistakes don’t just mean missing a product launch date—they’re life-or-death, and on a large scale. Moderna had to ensure that its employees knew how to make the right decisions, evaluate risk, and move quickly—even if they came from organizations with more bureaucracy and less risk tolerance. In 2021, IDEO sat down with longtime Moderna veterans to hear stories about moments that exemplify the company's culture, like the day a critical piece of equipment arrived but was too big to fit through the door. Taking it apart would have added days to their timeline. So employees took sledgehammers to a wall instead. Stories like this one fed into the crafting of the list of Mindsets, such as “Act with urgency: Action today compounds the lives saved tomorrow” and “We behave like owners: The solutions we’re building go beyond any job description.”

To gather feedback, the team shared the draft Mindsets with a diverse set of employees—new hires, veterans, folks already closely aligned with the culture, folks for whom it wasn’t the most natural fit, and a plethora of employee resource groups. CEO Stéphane Bancel and the leadership team took crafting and iterating on the Mindsets very seriously, wordsmithing and tweaking them with the team until they were ready to share them officially. Now, new hires learn about the company’s Mindsets in Moderna ONE, an onboarding process that IDEO helped revamp, while existing employees attend a workshop to ensure everyone at the company knows not only what to do but also how to do it effectively. In a matter of weeks, IDEO helped Moderna codify its culture for employees and set the company up for continued success. Moderna continues to embed these Mindsets across the entire employee lifecycle to systematically scale its culture.

For employees new and old, the clarity of the Mindsets has made it easier to understand expectations and to understand the company itself. Long-term veterans responded with comments like, "These really help explain why we're working this way,” while one newbie said, "It feels like a homecoming to hear the culture that we’re trying to bring through.” But more than just solving a cultural issue, the new Mindsets have fulfilled a business imperative: Holding on to the secret sauce that made Moderna successful to begin with, setting the stage for its next five years of breakthroughs.

When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 health crisis a pandemic in March of 2020, Moderna had fewer than 1,000 employees. Four years later, it’s more than five times the size.

Ranked #1

BioSpace Best Place to Work, large company in 2024

Ranked #6

Boston Consulting Group’s 50 Most Innovative Report in 2023

Ranked #4

Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 List in 2023

He outlined his thesis, built over many years of creative problem solving: Almost any creative endeavor can produce an output–a digital experience, a new brand, a physical product, a reimagined service–but the quality of that output is wholly dependent on how we frame and examine the problem it’s meant to solve. For years, his thinking has stuck with me: Obsess over the question. Questions are a tool to guide our thinking, and, to address the biggest, gnarliest challenges facing society today, we need to think in radically new ways.

Questions can serve two purposes: They can open our apertures, allowing us to uncover new approaches to familiar problems, or they can focus our efforts by providing clarifying constraints on formidable challenges. In both cases, a well-crafted question allows you to examine a problem in new ways, stress-testing potential solutions to ensure innovation is successful and doesn’t fall into a trap.

Across our interactions at IDEO–in our health portfolio and beyond–we encounter organizations looking for answers to the most critical challenges that they are facing, and, in response, many groups purporting to have the answers. AI products that will “unleash the power of your workforce,” digital solutions that will “fix your patient experience,” or elixirs that will magically cure every conceivable ailment hindering your organization today. But, when you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when organizations start with solutions, the impact of their innovation efforts will be at best limited, and at worst, will completely miss the mark, squandering opportunities and investments.

So, when faced with a daunting challenge, jumping to solutions with “guaranteed” results can look attractive, but doing so may very well limit you to what is possible right now. The questions we ask are a starting point to allow us to envision beyond today, unlocking new solutions to the toughest problems.

Recent history in digital health serves as an excellent example of solutions looking for problems. While “digital health” is now an established term, we are yet to realize the value of a decade’s worth of the progress it promised. To date, even the most future-facing digital health initiatives have been focused on gathering data to drive efficiency or improving costs by outsourcing to digitized solutions. But the true value of digitized health will come when we find the meaning in the data that we gather. It will fuel more integrated health services that fit it into the ways we experience our own health and improve both quality of life and outcomes. Technology for technology's sake will not advance this cause, but digging into genuine problems and asking how our emerging technologies can enable us to innovate in genuine, human-centric ways will. 

By reframing the problem in the first place, we may land on better solutions. How might we enable people to live healthier lives before they find themselves requiring clinical care? How might we enable better collaboration across sectors to transform into the health systems we need for the next generation? How do we leverage human expertise alongside AI? Individual technologies will not be the answer; they will be enablers within a system redesigned with these considerations in mind. 

The opportunity in healthcare is keenly illustrated by developments in the financial sector. Startups and challenger brands have used human-centered innovation to disrupt incumbents in a highly-regulated space by transforming the customer experience. The resulting reset of market share has forced the established financial institutions to elevate their own customer experience to keep pace with these new entrants, accelerating innovation and investment. With the global healthcare industry attracting spending comparable to the annual GDP of a small country, it is only a matter of time before disruptors come along and rip up the existing healthcare rule book. Because if large incumbent brands don’t innovate, someone else will. 

In healthcare and beyond, many organizations acknowledge that AI will be a significant part of their future success, but—to change the question again: What do humans in the experience deem desirable? How should the experience be elevated? What value might new, emerging technologies unlock? 

The answers may lie outside of traditional healthcare itself. The industry doesn't exist in isolation. It’s heavily influenced by politics, policy, geography, and climate, and it is deeply integrated with other parts of our daily lives.  Today, the health of people, communities, and our planet are inextricably linked. To understand just how interconnected they are, consider the following facts: 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. And at the same time, 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.

With both the healthcare system and the planet under such extreme pressure, small changes are not the basis of a winning strategy. If we are able to frame the right questions, we might be able to shift the preconceived constraints that exist today and create better systems, experiences, and solutions that address real human needs for the future. 

If you take a hard look around healthcare, you’ll see many solutions, but few that address those big, gnarly challenges. And yet, the need has never been greater. Organizations of every size should carefully examine the questions guiding their efforts: Is this solution solving a genuine problem? Are we placing people at the heart of our solutions? Is the innovation effort set up for success? 

If the answer is no, then the first step is to go back to the problem and ask: Do you have a great question that your innovation efforts are trying to answer? Does it represent the humans in the experience? Is it oriented around an outcome? Does it acknowledge the wider context? And is it broad enough to represent a number of possible futures, while being constrained enough to make meaningful progress?

With ever-increasing societal and commercial pressures, now is the moment to radically rethink our broken health systems. It’s a huge job, but there’s an easy place to start: Ask the right questions. 

Exploring how to innovate in new ways? We would love to chat.

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One of the most impactful lectures I had in my early years of design training was from a professor who sought to reframe the purpose of design.

It will shift from something physical in our pockets to a seamless layer embedded in every service. Financial tools will be hyper-personalized and smarter thanks to AI. This will benefit everyone, but it will have the most positive impact on those in the last mile: low-income people in emerging markets, women, and rural communities. Businesses will benefit, too. Tapping into billions of underserved customers will unlock growth. All these factors make a more inclusive future of money not just long overdue, but also inevitable.

For the past five years, IDEO has been exploring what’s possible for the future of finance with Last Mile Money, an innovation program that accelerates new financial products for those who traditionally have been excluded from financial systems. We’ve worked with partners to launch more than 100 pilots, prototypes, and products to connect them e with better financial options. Now, we’re sharing the lessons we’ve learned in advancing inclusion, gender equity, and the digital economy. And we’re inviting the global finance community to learn, replicate, and scale our innovations—or to come up with even better ones. 

A big part of this work has been looking closely at the signals that tell us what the future of finance will look like. And over the next 10 years, we predict three seismic changes in the world of money:  

#1. Women will be at the center of finance.

Digital products will be built for women, not adapted to include them. 

Women are underserved by the world of money. One-third of women in emerging markets do not have a formal bank account, excluding them from high-quality options to save, grow a business, or plan for their family’s future. Meanwhile, businesses are missing out on billions of customers, and many are realizing they must change: They need to center women’s financial needs, not only to be more inclusive, but for their own growth.

In Pakistan, the global consumer-goods company Unilever launched Guddi Bajis, a program for rural women to earn a living by delivering household goods to other women’s homes. IDEO worked with Unilever and the startup Finja to design a digital experience for these women that was culturally-sensitive and optimized for first-time internet users. These digital Guddi Bajis were able to grow their businesses by leveraging smartphones, digital payments, and credit—often for the first time. And to great sucess: They reported up to a five-fold increase in income after accessing digital credit. Not only were these female agents able to earn and increase their own livelihood, the program  also benefitted their customers—women in their communities.

Future #2. The last mile will be no mile at all.

The last mile will not be defined by location, but by network access. 

Historically, geography has been a big determinant of who can participate in financial systems. People living in very rural areas in less developed countries were simply left out. But as internet connectivity spreads into more corners of the globe and the digital economy enables work from anywhere, the line between urban and rural will no longer decide prosperity. Instead, it will be determined by how active and connected we are in digital networks. And what may seem like unexpected partnerships today will set the norm for how businesses reach the new last mile of people tomorrow. 

Our team saw this in action in Indonesia where global food company Cargill had a problem sending payments to cocoa farmers in rural areas. So, we brought in Grab, a major tech company behind an e-commerce app where farmers could sign up as agents to facilitate payments on its platform. Now, payments that used to take seven months get to farmers in only 10 days, boosting satisfaction with Cargill. And rural agents actually performed 111 percent better than agents in small cities, exceeding a target for gross merchandise value, according to Grab data. Better yet, the “star agents” turned out to be women who had strong ties in their rural communities and were active in social-commerce networks. This effort was so promising that Grab is scaling the model among women merchants and drivers elsewhere in Indonesia, bringing digital livelihoods to more underserved people regardless of geography. 

Future #3. Financial services will be invisible.

Our everyday lives will be enabled by a seamless layer of AI-driven, embedded finance.

As our lives become ever more digital, finance is becoming just another layer of daily life, seamless and embedded. We’ve seen this with apps offering personalized financial guidance, automated investing, and credit when we’re online shopping. Now it’s happening for the rest of the world. 

In Tanzania, when merchants run short of funds, they can get instant credit so their sales aren’t interrupted. This is thanks to Kuunda Digital’s automatic service that pre-qualifies merchants and makes accepting credit as easy as responding to a text message. Even small amounts of capital delivered just-in-time have helped merchants earn more revenue and lifted transaction volumes for banks and telcos. With support from IDEO, Kuunda brought this embedded-finance solution to new markets. Globally, Kuunda has scaled to 6.1 million active users and has distributed $1 billion in loans.

Already, we’re seeing signs that these shifts are beginning to take place. But more importantly, folks at the last mile are really beginning to feel them in their own lives and communities. A decade from now, these seismic changes won’t even feel new. And we invite everyone in this space, from startups to behemoths of finance, to help build the tools and pathways to make that happen. 

Learn more at Financial Futures, where we explore what’s possible for the future of the last mile.

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In the year 2034, money will work dramatically differently than it does today.

As I swam, in a meditative cycle of inhale and exhale, I was deep in my brain, totally engaged, thinking about the project I’m working on as part of my fellowship with the Aspen Institute. That’s when I realized just how well-designed this fellowship is. And I should know. I design fellowships for a living.

The First Movers Fellowship is part of the Business and Society Program at the Aspen Institute, a non-profit organization committed to realizing a free, just, and equitable society. Since its founding, the Institute has worked to drive change through dialogue, leadership, and action in communities at home and around the world. 

Back in 2009, Nancy McGaw, author of Making Work Matter, designed the fellowship with her team and some help from IDEO. The idea behind the program is to advance “social intrapreneurship” within organizations; aka to drive social impact goals alongside business goals. Because, as McGaw put it in her book, “There is increased urgency in companies to adapt and innovate … with attention to the footprint they are leaving on communities and the planet.”

Now, a decade after I first heard about it, and four years since I first designed a fellowship, I’m a First Movers Fellow. My project is about centering and amplifying the practice of inclusive/responsible design at IDEO. I am so lucky to get the chance to be a part of this amazing cohort, and also part of IDEO’s history with the program. (In 2009, Jocelyn Wyatt, former CEO of IDEO.org, was a fellow working on a project that soon became IDEO.org itself. A few years ago, Michelle Lee partnered with toymakers and external organizations to help drive digital experiences that can help people thrive. Pretty big shoes to fill.)

Already, I am learning so much from the other fellows and the curriculum. But as a fellowship designer, I am also relishing the details and intentional design that creates truly transformative experiences. Here are some core principles that can make a fellowship genuinely great. 

‍Seeing eye to eye (literally)

It’s important to design fellowships to ease folks into new spaces—and meeting new people—with care.  Groups bond more quickly when facilitators break up mass conversation into smaller groups and randomize them, to get everyone to talk to everyone. When I met with the Aspen Fellows for the first time, we sat around a circular table, where everyone could look at each other. (There is even a circular building on the Aspen Institute campus specifically for this purpose.) It made a surprisingly big impact. And there were no fancy titles on our nametags—just our first and last names. (And pronouns. Which may have been on my behalf, and I really appreciated it.) 

At a retreat I helped design for the Earthshot Prize, Prince William’s environmental award, my team focused a lot of our time together on helping our fellows bond. We created peer groups, paired fellows up to go on walks with discussion prompts—we even had them make chocolate together. At dinner in Aspen, they scrambled our name tags every night, and gave us new conversation prompts to facilitate table-wide sharing. One night, they asked, “What’s one thing that your younger self would be proud of?” Which, at my table, had us talking about everything from chicken nuggets to the origins of our names—and yes, some of us cried. 

No tech at the table. Ever.

In the business world, we’re so used to using technology to be in multiple places at once. But how well do we show up in either place when we do that? On the first day in Aspen, they told us, “When you’re here, you’re here, and if you have to take a call or text someone, leave the room. The table is a sacred place for presence and connection.”

Draconian, maybe, but I can’t tell you how productive I felt while we had our phones turned off, how-in-the-moment and engaged I remained. It works. And everyone should enforce it more: at fellowships, at conferences, even on daily standup meetings. Presence is powerful. 

Nature AND nurture

Many fellowships are held at naturally beautiful places, and there is really something to it. Being in nature helps people breathe more deeply, and allows nervous systems to calm down, especially for city dwellers so used to the sounds of buses and 4 a.m. trash hauling. It’s actually something people have asked for in every fellowship I’ve ever worked on, and for climate activists, scientists, and organizers, it’s also a deeper connection to their work to save the planet.   

At The Rockefeller Big Bets Climate Fellowship, fellows meet at Bellagio, the foundation’s property tucked on the lush mountainous hillsides of Italy. It should be a part of every fellowship—because boy do fellows need it. (Don’t we all?) 

Roses are red. Tears are blue. Reflection makes people vulnerable, too.

The First Movers Fellowship is designed around four pillars: community, innovation, leadership, and reflection. As I read that last point, I was skeptical. When I was running fellowships and we were short on time, reflection was the first thing to go.

But the Aspen Institute holds it sacred. Every morning, we’d read a poem together as a group, and then reflect on it together. No matter how packed the schedule, or how busy the day ahead, we’d read a poem, journal, go slow, and stay quiet. It was an on-ramp to the day. And a beautifully deliberate design choice.

On the third day, they shared this poem, (which someone in my cohort aptly called a sermon). After three days of becoming more vulnerable and authentic together, half the room was sobbing, openly, loudly. This openness led to more sharing, more intimate conversations, and funnily enough— better advice for my project. Yes, we instantly felt closer, which had an impact on how we worked together.  

Read the room

As much as I valued poetry and reflection at Aspen, it is really important that fellowship designers keep their agendas dynamic, and adjust to the needs of the people in the room. At the Earthshot Prize retreat, we tried to make space for reflection—but we learned, it wasn’t what fellows needed most. While our sound bath activity was highly-attended, we swapped out our daily morning meditation moment to give fellows more transition time in the after-breakfast time slot. I loved writing and leading these nature-based visualizations, but loved giving the fellows that space to do what they wanted, even more. 

Free time frees the mind

When I looked at our schedule for the Aspen seminar, I was astonished to see big breaks every day. There were organized activities that folks could go do together, like hikes, gondola rides, and ice cream in downtown Aspen, but fellows could own their schedules. I swam each day, and really took reflection to heart. And every afternoon, I found myself coming back ravenous for the content and conversation, more engaged and more present. It seems counterintuitive, really, but those breaks made me work more. 

After the first year of the Earthshot Fellows retreat, we asked for feedback about the experience. One of the resounding themes was a call for “more time to just relax,” and “space to get to know each other outside of the content.” And we listened, adding it in the next year. 

It’s hard to solve big problems alone 

When I was being interviewed by a former Aspen fellow as part of the application process, they stressed over and over how important community and connection is for the success of the program. After only five days with the Aspen fellows, I felt so close to all of them—a crucial source of support in the fight to tackle big problems, like inclusive AI and research, menopause tech, indigenous farming support, equitable financial systems, to name a few. 

And creating intentional space for people to be vulnerable and honest about what they're going after —It's the only way to set them up to make true progress. And it’s the future vision that I’ll never stop designing for. 

A few weeks ago, in the middle of a Monday, I was slowly swimming laps in a beautiful saline pool just below the peaks of Aspen, away from my laptop and dings of Slack.

For years, our system has been grappling with ever-constricting constraints—low supply, high demand; increasing life expectancy; and escalating treatment costs. There’s no question that the healthcare landscape is at a critical juncture. As Ian Abbs, Managing Director of Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals in the UK, so eloquently articulated in Amsterdam last month, “Health care as we know it will end; change has to come."

But as we know well, big constraints and difficult conditions can be an incredible impetus for innovation. We now have remarkable new tools, therapies, and emerging technologies at our disposal. The potential to accelerate drug development has never been greater, and we amass more and more data every day. The organizations that take advantage of these opportunities and develop innovative solutions will be at the forefront of enormous value creation.

From the transformative potential of AI to the urgent need to rethink emergency medicine, here are the six key opportunity areas we took away from HLTH EU 2024 in Amsterdam. These areas have the potential to produce significant improvements in health outcomes and substantial advantages for organizations that bring them to life with a human-centered lens.

1. The promise of digital health is still waiting to be fulfilled

Ten years ago, digital health was poised to revolutionize healthcare. It was the promised future, the answer to the worst of our problems, and the route to better, healthier lives. Yet, despite such a clear need, its full potential remains untapped, focused instead on data collection, controlling costs, and optimizing for outdated systems

Digital health needs to shift its focus to the meaning behind the data, and how to better support patient and provider health. Remote care channels could extend the reach of doctors. Sensing technologies could enable whole-body care. Digital therapeutics could complement more traditional care. But realizing the potential of this space requires a deep understanding of the core needs and a mastery of digital channels.

Designers and digitally-fluent innovators will play a critical role in creating patient- and provider-centered, secure digital health solutions that improve patient outcomes and deliver on this decade-long promise.

2. AI will be transformative–if we are able to learn from the past

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands to revolutionize global healthcare systems; its potential spans from expediting drug development to increasing the efficacy of patient care. But only if we learn from the errors of digital health. 

Products that harness AI to interact with patients, collect more accurate data, and summarize medical histories and symptoms without time constraints could provide healthcare workers more time to focus on patient care, complex cases, and advancing their fields. Hospital administrators could use AI to create digital twins, aiding in patient assessment, disease mitigation, and treatment plans. And with an expected 20 percent increase in demand for care, but only a projected eight percent growth in workforce, AI could reduce the administrative burden by over 40 percent, making it a vital tool for the long-term sustainability of healthcare systems 

But these myriad applications need to be so much more than the latest cool tech, or a tool for operational efficiency. If we are able to demonstrate the genuine potential of the technology by placing the human experience at the center, we will enhance the healthcare experience and improve patient outcomes. But only if we avoid the missteps of the past.

3. Addressing burnout is crucial to the sustainability of health systems

The healthcare sector is facing workforce shortages and severe provider burnout, which was only worsened during the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shifting expectations of the next generations of healthcare workers—Millennials, Gen Z, and soon, Gen Alpha—make attracting and retaining healthcare professionals even more challenging, further straining availability of talent.

It is hard to be compassionate at work when your workplace doesn't have compassion for you. We need to center the experience of healthcare workers to address this crisis head-on. Healthcare organizations can create holistic approaches to staffing, leverage technology to support administrative tasks, become more purpose-driven to align with the values of a new generation of caregivers, and create authentic work environments that support the reasons younger generations get into healthcare. Designers have a unique role to play in envisioning and implementing solutions that not only alleviate burnout, but also reimagine the future of work in healthcare. 

4. How is women’s health not a more urgent priority?

Women make up more than 50 percent of the patient base and influence a significant share of healthcare spending and decisions, and yet women's health continues to be marginalized. Centuries of historical biases in medical research and clinical trials, along with more recent policy shifts, have resulted in a chronic a lack of understanding and funding, and an inability to effectively treat women.

This is fundamentally an issue of equity. Elevating women's health requires focused efforts to address these historical gaps, including increasing representation in clinical trials and prioritizing gender-specific research. The rise of health startups focused entirely on women is beginning to fill this void, but much more needs to be done.

By championing women's health initiatives, prioritizing better understanding the needs of women, and supporting female-led ventures in health, we can significantly improve care and counter these long-held biases. This not only enhances health outcomes, but also designs for the influence women have in healthcare decisions.

5. Data could change the whole game

The explosion of personalized data presents both an incredible opportunity and one of the most significant challenges in healthcare today. The question of who controls data—individuals, organizations, or government—remains unresolved. 

Healthcare urgently needs to find the appropriate balance of data use, and to do so at a human level. Personalized data should be owned by the patient. Carefully anonymized data needs to be shared for learning and improvement. And empowering people to understand and use health data remains an outsized opportunity for healthier living.

Designing systems that balance these valid concerns requires a collaborative effort across sectors to establish patient-centered solutions that treat and respect each patient today and tomorrow. Doing so will be the key to unlocking growth and scale.

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6. Emergency rooms cannot be the first mile of care

Emergency medicine has become the de-facto single point of entry into healthcare for many, rather than a safety-net, which is neither sustainable nor efficient. To improve outcomes and reduce costs, we need to radically rethink how and where patients best access care.

Innovative solutions, such as telehealth, community-based care, and better deployment of in-home services could radically improve care for chronic conditions. Meanwhile, strengthening public education to help people discern true emergencies can alleviate strain, and reimagining triage systems by integrating data when patients are en route to emergency rooms can improve speed and efficacy, creating a human connection between patients and healthcare practitioners in a way that meets patients in the context of their lives.

To do that, we’ll need to design for flexibility and resilience, and always place humans at the center of the experience, ensuring that emergency services can adapt to varying levels of demand while maintaining high standards of care.

The challenges we face are significant, but they also present unprecedented opportunities for transformation. By thinking radically about the role of technology, centering onthe human experience, and designing widely and inclusively, we can create healthcare systems that are more equitable, resilient, and sustainable. 

At IDEO, there’s nothing we love more than diving into the biggest, gnarliest challenges of an industry alongside leading experts. If you are interested in exploring these opportunities further or partnering with us to drive change in healthcare, get in touch.

Together, we can create a healthier future for all.

Globally, healthcare systems are under massive strain—and not just because of the lingering effects of Covid.

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.