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

As head of IDEO’s global change management team, which focuses on belonging and equity, I’ve seen the importance of being rigorous with and thoughtful about the information we collect and how we share it.

Telling someone to handle data with care might suggest that it’s fragile or in danger of breaking. That’s not the way I view it. I see a responsibility to keep the data whole. It’s about integrity.

That applies from the very start: gathering and understanding your DEI data. Do so with rigor. The system, process, tools, and analysis method you’re using should stay consistent. Looking at the same factors the same way every time allows you to measure progress, and the uniformity will help people trust the data.

When it comes to data related to DEI (Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei puts it nicely as “achievement” and “sentiment” data), the achievement part is fairly straightforward. It’s what the organization looks like across different levels of the employee life cycle in a number of demographics. There are the core metrics around representation in terms of race and gender, and some organizations also track sexuality, disability, and education. These metrics help us answer questions like: How diverse is our senior-most leadership level? Which groups are leaving the organization the fastest? Are we over- or under-recruiting certain identities? Are we promoting men faster than women?

The sentiment data is about bringing in the employee voice and getting at what it feels like to work at the organization. If the achievement data is the what, the sentiment data is the why. These are the questions around culture, about whether employees can say “I can be my authentic self at work” or “I have easy access to information.” These are the questions that help you get at whether the culture is too transactional, too cautious, whether people feel they can innovate. The achievement markers are the same across the board, but the sentiment questions tend to change by organization and can be shaped based on places you might have concerns about based on early hunches or focus groups.

Once you have collected the data, transparency is important. But pause first. The way forward is to proceed with care. Data and information can be a burden to people, especially if they don’t have the power to impact it, so it’s important to understand who holds the accountability. If you were to go out to the broader organization and say, “Hey everyone, we have a lot of evidence we’re failing on these metrics,” people will immediately want to know what you’re going to do about it. Building trust requires that you have thoughtfully considered possible interventions and solutions. There is responsibility that comes with transparency.

Design can be a powerful way to arrive at those interventions. Let the data first sit inside the group that is accountable for designing ways to prototype and pilot initiatives that might help improve future metrics. For example, if the sentiment data shows your people don’t feel like they belong upon initially joining the organization and don’t know where to get the information they need to do their job well, you likely have an onboarding problem. Maybe you’re putting a disproportionate amount of energy into recruiting but not ensuring those employees succeed once they are inside the organization.

With that insight, you can prototype interventions: What would it look like if we paired every new employee with someone from the same background or interest who is thriving in the organization? What if there was a two-week support circle for new employees every 60 days?

Once you have your interventions, you’ll want to test the ideas with a few groups of people and get their feedback: in the onboarding example, perhaps the ones who have been at your company for less than a year and the ones who the intervention might put a burden on. It's best practice to invite the employees at the margins of the organization (typically from a race and gender lens) to get their input on your recommendations—if they are willing and it’s not a burden to them—before sharing with leadership. If you’re able to design interventions that work for those most marginalized in the organization, the solutions will work for everyone.

Onboarding is something we’re working on at IDEO based on our last Culture survey. When we dug into the data we realized that as a creative organization, new hires want to tangibly contribute from day one. Great onboarding gives the security and confidence to do that, and so we have been piloting initiatives ranging from having two leaders dedicated full-time to onboarding within our talent organization to having new hires shadow a designer of the same craft on a project so they can start to understand how to create value from day one.

Once you’ve identified some potential interventions and soft-tested them with the right stakeholders, you are ready to share the data company-wide: “Here’s what we heard and learned and here are three to five things we’re going to prioritize as next steps.” You aren’t restricted to sharing shortcomings. Accentuate positive findings too, things you’re trying that are working or successes that you’re going to amplify going forward.

Especially with DEI data, remember that internal audiences are more important than external. A lot of companies capture this data and put it on their website as a recruiting and tracking tool, and that’s a great way for organizations to hold themselves accountable. However, the fastest way to break trust is to make employees feel like the data is only being captured for external purposes. Keep the emphasis on collecting and sharing data internally in service of improving employees’ experiences at the company and the effort will feel genuine.

Regularly deep diving into achievement and sentiment data can be emotionally taxing. If you’re doing this work, be sure to give yourself a way to take a break from it. Last year I started walking every morning on Chicago’s riverwalk, because it grounds me and gives me perspective. It’s easy to get hyper-focused on the challenges or overwhelmed by the gaps we need to fix and inequalities we need to right. Taking a moment to get my body outside and walk around helps remind me there’s more beyond the problems I’m trying to solve and helps me be present for people while I am working. There’s something so inspiring and revitalizing about having fresh air hit my face every day. And even though I pretty much walk the same route, I notice something new every day, something I didn’t see the day before. I try to bring this same curiosity to my work. Even though the challenge may look the same from day to day, there’s always a new idea or potential solution just one step away.

Proceed with care. It’s some of the best advice I can give when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion data—how to best measure it and what to do with that data once you have it.

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Clutter has the opposite effect for me, but there’s a very specific twist. If the type of clutter that drags us down is disorganized clutter—stacks of papers, discarded shoes, and items with no home—I’ve cultivated the opposite: what I like to call “curated clutter.”

I’m an industrial designer who works as an IDEO Toy Inventor in the Play Lab. My job is exactly what it sounds like: I come up with new toy and game ideas based on market research and client asks and then design and prototype them.

Like so many of us, I have been exclusively working from home in San Francisco since March 2020, and the remote working space I’ve created for myself is different from what I’ve seen so many other designers create. Theirs tend to be sleek and very minimalist. That’s never been me, even dating back to design school, when I used a desk covered in astroturf.

My workspace is an explosion of color, an arrangement of knick knacks on my desk and shelves that serve as pieces of inspiration. Some have been with me for more than 25 years. Others are recent additions, both things I’ve collected and gifts from friends and relatives who have spotted things they thought were special or entertaining and might fit well.

I don’t keep a journal, but my knick knacks function as sort of a substitute practice for that. They capture both some of the chronology of my life and the emotional state I was in when I received them. I have alien action figures from my childhood that remind me of how genuinely afraid I was of aliens as a kid and how far my thoughts and imagination could stray. But there are also items I’ve collected while dating my partner, like a meaningful piece of coral from my first trip to her home in Hawaii. It’s sort of like free-form scrapbooking, just not confined to a leather-bound tome that gathers dust. While nothing’s written down, that history is captured, and I get to scan and revisit it regularly.

The clutter is curated but not fixed. I rotate the items, and that process is rejuvenating and refreshing. To keep things from straying toward hoarder territory, I stick to a couple rules: I only hang on to the things that have some kind of value to me, and if I can’t move something without knocking something else over, I need to reassess.

I live with my partner, who is adamant that she is not a fan of clutter, but our friends will laugh and say “What are you talking about?” Her approach is an even more curated and refined way of displaying objects, and I think it’s a good illustration of there not being one “right” way to do it. Your curated clutter could be five items or five hundred. Ultimately, if clutter is made up of the things that have no home, curated clutter is made up of the things that make your home.

For many people, designing their workspace or spaces in their home is a very purely aesthetic process, like, I like the way this lamp looks, or this pencil holder looks. That process can end up being devoid of emotion, which I think can result in a space that's not necessarily built to address our emotional well-being—a consideration that’s more important than ever these days.

I know incredible designers who project a very clean designer persona and have tasteful objects in their houses: walnut, leather, beautiful brass hardware. And then you look at their inspiration boards for work and they're wacky, and I don’t see the purpose in reining in that inspiration. Sometimes the idea of what is good taste causes people to censor their living space. That’s not for me. I’d much rather be in a place that’s overstimulating than understimulating.

I would say almost every day I feel inspired by what surrounds me. It’s a library of thoughts and thought-beginners, especially my desk, which puts different textures and color combinations and parts and mechanisms in front of me. But above all else, my curated clutter provides a sense of comfort, which ends up supporting my emotional well-being. At times when I feel anxious or overwhelmed, it grounds me because it’s an extension of myself: a way of revisiting people and moments that matter. It’s like flipping through your journal to remind yourself where you come from, then feeling energized enough to flip to the next blank page and keep going.

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Multiple studies have suggested that cluttered workspaces are no good for us, or even downright harmful. Connections have been made between clutter and procrastination, stress, and even life dissatisfaction.

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On its face, those client experiences might sound worlds apart. And they were, but not for the reason you might expect.

I came to IDEO from those luxury ateliers and joined a team that was designing a new brand for Ford Motor Company. I brought with me the best of what I learned in Paris: a vigilance about being a brand-guideline guardian and a proficiency in creating highly aspirational brands.

Our remit was to come up with a brand for the innovation lab of the 118-year-old automotive company—what would come to be D-Ford. The lab’s remit was to use human-centered design to drive progress, so the brand had to give new meaning to the word “design,” which was very specifically associated with car design internally. It also had to be capable of being comfortably and regularly used by everyone, designers and non-designers alike.

We landed on a brand that involved no special fonts and a few shapes that quite literally anyone could draw. It may not sound lofty, but it was incredibly challenging. And more than that, it was impactful—on the client and on me.

In the luxury ateliers, I was accustomed to interacting with and designing for designers, not the wider organization. I operated in a space where brand books specs were jealously guarded and consistency was the goal.

With D-Ford, the goal was to maximize brand adoption, which was ultimately about adopting the purpose of the lab. To do that, we had to educate ourselves about the organization.

What unfolded was a co-design approach. Our team traveled to different parts of the company and spoke to people, even people who felt they were very far from design. That was such a different approach and scope for me, but it surfaced an important reality: design, historically, was seen as a practice for the few at Ford, where the number of engineers outweigh that of car designers.

With D-Ford, we needed everyone to feel capable of being a designer. Our team had to set up design tools that aligned with the typical employee’s skillset, meaning the brand system had to work seamlessly with Google Slides and PowerPoint.

We sat at people’s desks to see how they built presentations, which fonts they had installed on their laptops, and what they knew about Adobe. We realized we had to design soft guardrails—no software to learn, no new typefaces to install—so that whatever they produced in the lab could be easily shared across the wider organization.

The brand needed to stick, be easy to replicate, and take into account what we found to be pretty consistent opinions about specific colors and shapes across the company. For instance, every engineer wanted us to steer clear of red because of its association with danger.

We settled on three simple geometric shapes that linked to D-Ford’s three-word purpose statement and were ones that anyone could draw. A triangle for drive, a circle for human, and a plus sign for progress. They were graphic assets everyone could recreate regardless of their design proficiency, and they provided a simple but effective visual link to the story of what D-Ford stood for.

As for typeface, we ultimately chose the same one Ford was already using, meaning there was familiarity there, but we employed a different typesetting to create a completely fresh result.

The goal here was a grassroots ownership of the assets. When the 12-week project ended, our engagement with D-Ford continued [IDEO has had a nearly 20-year relationship with the carmaker], so I got to watch how the brand design was adopted and evolved and the life it took on in the hands of non-traditional designers.

For instance, there was one lab team member who had never designed anything for print before. He used the simple templates that had been created to design a booklet for a presentation he was giving. His enthusiasm and confidence in sharing his creative work with another engineering division was the type of behavior we had hoped the internal brand would foster.

Brand design is often mistaken with art. It has an artistic component but needs to be democratic. We didn’t want to create the brand as an art piece to look at but as an open book to use. The only way to make that happen was to be very empathetic. We needed empathy to understand the employees’ worries, challenges, and motivators within their existing culture, but even more than that, we had to understand what was needed to promote a different behavior—a culture of experimentation.

The aesthetics of design are important. It’s what gives us as designers the sensitivity to what works and what doesn’t visually. But the aesthetic is only as good as what people can do with it.

What attracted me to design in the first place was that I was going to push materials to the edge to design something that would be compelling. That was certainly true with luxury, where I regularly tested how far I could push tangible things. How much can I bend this plastic without it cracking? At D-Ford, I needed to bend people and their behaviors, and it was much less tangible.

The D-Ford work helped me understand the value of that different kind of design work and really demonstrated how impactful your work can be even if it feels at first like it’s going to be more gray.

Giving up the reins and not having tight control of the usage of the brand—it’s a challenge to the ego. But that’s part of what it means to design a brand that is owned by the people. If you distribute ownership you distribute ego.

That made for a humbling experience. It helped me realize how complex an organization can be and that brand does not have to get in the way of it. If anything it needs to simplify. If I had listened to that ego the end result may have been loftier and better for my personal portfolio. But the work would not have had the impact the organization needed. In the end, the right impact is what every designer strives for.

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I’m in a drafty room in Farringdon, London, shaking the hands of a dozen mechanical engineers. A few months before, I was scoring paper at an airy luxury atelier in Paris.

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A decade ago, Rodríguez-Pastor asked IDEO to help him realize a unifying, human-focused, mission: to leverage the power of its business to uplift Peru’s middle class.

Beginning with a single engagement in 2011, IDEO and Intercorp’s work together grew into an unusual entanglement of organizational cultures, brimming with stories of mutual influence.

Since then, IDEO’s work with Intercorp has touched more than two dozen different companies across the group as the business grew from $2.9 billion in revenue in 2011 to $8.5 billion in 2021. Intercorp now employs more than 80,000 people and its revenue represents more than 3.5 percent of Peru’s gross domestic product.

Yet the greatest change has been in the minds of Intercorp’s leaders. In looking back on 10 years of collaboration, a key theme emerges: Working with IDEO on dozens of projects has taught Intercorp’s teams new capabilities, and that has snowballed into a new way of thinking for this broad-reaching company.

The following oral history recounts how the organization has transformed over the last decade through a series of leaps: imagining a more human-centered future, using digital experiments to gain confidence, and changing mindsets across the company to ensure resilience over the next decade.

I. Building belief: I can see what we need to do

Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor was born in Peru, and educated in the United States after his father became a political exile in 1969. The family returned in the 1990s, and Rodríguez-Pastor’s father began building a banking business, which became known as Interbank. When he died suddenly in 1995, Rodríguez-Pastor himself became the bank’s chairman, a position he used as a beachhead for growth in Peru’s liberalizing economy. With the founding of Intercorp in 1997, Rodríguez-Pastor charted an audacious path beyond banking, with its unifying force being the well-being and prosperity of Peruvians. It was a far-reaching ambition that bridged people and profit—but to pull it off, he needed help.

Rodríguez-Pastor asked IDEO for help with two distinct projects: a new school system that would be affordable for the emerging middle class; and a new customer experience for Interbank, Intercorp’s flagship bank.

Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor: “We had a big goal—to make Peru the best place to raise a family in Latin America—which was both a moral obligation and an opportunity. We saw that if you make the pie bigger, then we’re going to help a lot of people, and our businesses are also going to do better. Our education system was struggling and we wanted to help change it."

Sandy Speicher, CEO of IDEO: “It was really a brave moment, both for Carlos and for us. Carlos knew how important it was to create opportunities for people by securing their educational foundation. But Peru, at the time, was one of the lowest ranked countries on an international survey of education systems."

The new school system, known as Innova Schools, was a success on its own terms: In 2020 it enrolled 42,000 students across 68 locations in 3 countries (Peru, Mexico, and Colombia); boosted 4th grade students’ math and reading test scores 2x compared to local public schools; and saw 99 percent of graduates go on to higher education or actively prepare for college. For Intercorp and IDEO, this formative project suggested broader possibilities—for organizational change across Intercorp, which could in turn inspire societal change across Peru.

Interbank presented a different type of challenge. Peru’s history of political instability had left a consumer banking environment controlled by security concerns. IDEO and Intercorp prototyped an experimental space called Interbank Explora, which brought the staff out from behind bulletproof glass and into the middle of the banking hall, making for a more welcoming experience.

Luis Cilimingras, Partner at IDEO: “We realized the intimidating environment wasn't welcoming for customers, and also meant that branch employees and managers were out of touch with the customer's day to day experience. We asked, ‘How could you redesign the banking experience so people would feel good about going inside?’”

Luis Felipe Castellanos, CEO of Interbank: “Before, everything was done on the basis of surveys or a focus group, at the most. IDEO gave us a different way to understand our clients, and get involved in their day-to-day lives. We almost lived with them."

Luis Cilimingras: “With the new branch experience in place, Interbank’s employees told us ‘Now some of my customers kiss me goodbye!’”

In Interbank Explora’s first sixty days, sales increased by 30 percent, customer satisfaction improved, and profitability grew by 32 percent. Building on that success, the changes were rolled out across the bank’s 2,200 branches.

Luis Cilimingras: “The investment and the participation of the leaders in the process made them realize: ’we need to be working in this way.’ They were just immediately converted.”

II. Launching an innovation engine: We can do this

Intercorp and IDEO began considering ways to extend their collaboration across the group—meaning to more of Intercorp’s diverse holdings—by building an internal innovation lab in Lima.

Luis Cilimingras: “Carlos [Rodríguez-Pastor] was like, ‘Okay, first time, with Innova: Lucky! Second time, with Interbank: It seems I have a partner!’ Intercorp saw us as somebody who can help them imagine the future, who is going to help drive change.”

In 2012, Hernan Carranza, then a young executive at Casa Andina, Intercorp’s hotel company, spent a summer working in IDEO’s Munich studio. Afterwards, he pitched Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor on the idea of an in-house digital innovation shop. That idea evolved into building a human-centered design team that could work across Intercorp’s companies. Rodríguez-Pastor seized on the idea, and made Carranza Intercorp’s first Chief Innovation Officer.

Hernan Carranza, Chief Innovation Officer of Intercorp: “That's when we said, ‘Hey, why don't we have a design team—a mini-IDEO—in Lima?’ That would put it much closer not only to the Peruvian family, which is who we design for, but also to the executives of the Intercorp group, who are the people with whom we co-create the solutions for the families.”

Luis Cilimingras: “We were bringing a new set of techniques and approaches to solving problems and they were bringing operational expertise and local talent who understood the context in which we were working. But these were far from what I had imagined as the 'ideal conditions' to set up an innovation team. It was jarring to realize how much I had to learn to be effective. With a product mindset, you have this vision of what the end result will be like. I had to scrap that and embrace what I didn’t know as the key ingredient for success.”

Hernan Carranza: “If Intercorp and IDEO had a child, that would be La Victoria Lab. But even a love child isn’t easy! We found a way to have our own voice that is authentic to us. But what we conserve are the foundations of IDEO’s approach: being highly experimental, being truly curious, being intuitive. All those mindsets that we learned from IDEO are the cornerstone of what we do.”

Watch "It's Up to Us", a short film about IDEO's 10-year partnership with Intercorp and how it transformed the organization.

La Victoria Lab (LVL) opened in 2014 in a converted house a few blocks away from Intercorp’s headquarters. Their first project was a deep ethnography of the Peruvian middle class, presented in a way that would engage executives across Intercorp.

Maria Paula Loayza, Portfolio Lead at La Victoria Lab: “We turned our own office into a small exhibition, so people could walk around and experience the research, as if they are dropping into someone’s house.”

Luis Cilimingras: “We invited leaders from across Intercorp, and we shared these stories with them. And that built La Victoria Lab’s brand within Intercorp—you can come to us when you have a human problem. Don't come to us with an efficiency problem. Come to us when you have something that has a deeply human need.”

In its first two years, La Victoria Lab grew to over 20 designers and launched multiple initiatives across Intercorp with a single objective: to build belief and confidence in their ability to design impactful services and experiences for Peruvian families. Given the vast scale of the conglomerate, this early work was just a start, but it was consequential in its ability to inspire Intercorp’s leaders.

III. Unleashing a digital transformation

With La Victoria Lab on its feet, its designers homed in on a “theory of change,” a method by which their small team could create work that inspired innovation across Intercorp. For years, Rodríguez-Pastor had been pushing for a company-wide digital transformation, but there was little progress. The businesses had a vestigial brick-and-mortar mentality and didn't see digital as something that would take hold in Peru for another decade. LVL saw this as their challenge: to become a hotbed of digital experimentation, executed in a way that built confidence and capability across Intercorp. Conceived to be highly visible, this category of projects became known internally as “beacons”, digital products whose design and launch would convey to the organization what it needed to change in order to scale digital ways of working.

Maria Paula Loayza: “The beacons were conceived to shine back to the organization everything that needed to change.”

Hernan Carranza: “We were not thinking of ourselves as the scalers of innovation. We were more like igniters. We were always like, ‘how do we inspire the leadership?’"

Maria Santolaria, Program Director at IDEO: “Our thesis was that by injecting something—a team that worked differently, or a digital product that was built and launched in a different way—the organization could mimic that behavior and change organically.”

The most popular of the early beacons were for Inkafarma, Intercorp’s consumer pharmacy chain, and Interseguro, their insurance company. Inkafarma’s project became a model across Intercorp for a digital-first strategy. By making it seamless and convenient for Peruvian customers to get medications delivered to their door, Inkafarma’s mobile platform predicated many of the features that would become essential during the COVID-19 pandemic. The app now drives up to 20 percent of Inkafarma’s business in urban areas.

Hernan Carranza: “In creating Inkafarma’s delivery app, which considered the needs and pain points of the consumer first and foremost, the team started designing and implementing on the fly, with the goal of putting functional products in the hands of users—in order to capture real reactions.”

Maria Paula Loayza: “At first, everybody at Intercorp was kind of looking at us weirdly, because what we were putting in the hands of consumers was crude. But we were able to apply our learnings as we went, and show how these small projects could be like proof points—prototypes that build confidence and begin the complex process of transforming organizations.”

Patricia Conterno, VP of Digital and Analytics at Interseguro: “Interseguro was not then a company centered on the user. When we developed a new product, we just did what we thought was right and hoped people liked it. Our beacon with LVL helped change that. Now we're constantly experimenting, testing with users, and trying to solve any friction they might have. To do so, we’ve now put 15-20 percent of employees in digital transformation roles. Once we launch a product, it is never finished.”

IV. Changing mindsets: This is us now

As La Victoria Lab’s reputation grew within Intercorp, IDEO’s role shifted. Intercorp had the ability to tackle core business opportunities in-house, so IDEO turned to guiding critical, strategic programs (like climate change and DEI initiatives); industry deep dives in sectors like health care; and continued support for leaders as they embraced new mindsets and ways of working.

Hernan Carranza: “A specific behavior we developed with IDEO is what we internally call ’tunking,’ which is when someone leading a creative project looks to others for honest feedback. I remember Luis Felipe Castellanos, the CEO of Interbank, once called me and said, ’Hey, can you send me six, seven more tunkeros to look at and tune my five-year vision?’ I thought that was fabulous. It's a sign that this leader is becoming a more vulnerable person, a more open leader who wants to listen to other perspectives.”

Luis Felipe Castellanos: “Leadership is not about having all the answers, it's about having the right questions. Working with IDEO has made me a much more human leader, focused on understanding the human being behind all of our solutions and all of our offerings.”

Fernando Zavala, CEO of Intercorp: ”What IDEO and La Victoria Lab have done is to permanently push us to think differently, to open our minds, to confront our ideas and, based on that confrontation, to get the best out of it.”

Hernan Carranza: “IDEO infected us with this little bug of permanent curiosity. To be constantly learning all the time—but, even more importantly, constantly unlearning. For Intercorp’s leaders, La Victoria Lab has become a stone in the shoe, always looking to discomfort, to challenge, and to take solutions to the next level."

After a decade, IDEO and Intercorp have come to an unusual understanding of what they have most meaningfully created together: not projects and businesses, but people and culture. It has been a transformation not only of design and efficiency, but also of mindset and approach.

Hernan Carranza: “I think my main learning in this last decade is that the transformation of a conglomerate of 80,000 people starts with the transformation of oneself as a leader. If you are able to start transforming your mental model, that makes another leader, another leader, and leadership begins to cascade.”

Sandy Speicher: “They’ve built this massive organization of learning. They’ve taken this model that we designed with them, and built an organization that continuously learns, and continuously designs, and continuously evolves.”

Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor: “Ten years into our relationship with IDEO, Intercorp is a totally different company. We are a much more customer-centric company. I think we have more empathy. We want to become the best place to raise a family in Latin America. I think that's achievable within the next 10 years. It's really up to us.”

Illustrations by Stephanie Sizemore

When the public sector falls short, should business step in? That question was top of mind for Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, President of Intercorp, a Peruvian conglomerate with an expansive range of companies from banking to education to health care to retail.

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.