New Yorkers experience policing differently depending on who they are and where they live. Some communities are patrolled; others are profiled. When your neighbors’ experiences are starkly different from your own, it can be almost impossible to understand their perspective.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), a state branch of the ACLU, hoped to spark a dialogue around race and police tactics in over-policed communities, and to engage voters on this divisive issue before New York City’s mayoral election. But the NYCLU also understood that traditional slogans and billboards weren’t enough to foster deep personal conversations and effective political action—the city needed real talk.

The organization engaged IDEO to help create a city-wide, nontraditional campaign. In talking with New Yorkers, the NYCLU advocates and IDEO designers honed in on two simple truths: Transformative conversations happen only when people feel safe enough to listen—and to speak. And people become more compassionate listeners once they themselves feel heard. In a time of entrenched interests and growing social conflict, listening can be a radical act.

Together, IDEO and the NYCLU designed Listening NYC, a grassroots campaign to promote interpersonal listening, meaningful discussion, and collective action around policing.

To get New Yorkers—famously brash and always bustling—to stop and listen to their neighbors, they created a pop-up installation called the Listening Room that travels through the city to catalyze one-on-one conversations. It’s a portable safe space, with tables, chairs, two walls that provide a degree of intimacy, and two sides left open for a feeling of psychological safety.

At the center of the experience is a deck of Conversation Cards that encourage New Yorkers to share their stories and hear those of others. Simple prompts like “I believe the role of police is to _____,” and questions like “A cop stops you in your neighborhood. What do you do?” empower people to find common ground. Through straightforward but structured activities like these, many New Yorkers who enter the Listening Room expecting to disagree instead find themselves sharing stories and opinions in ways they never imagined.

Beyond face-to-face dialogue, the Listening Room also features a radio loaded with stories from different neighborhoods across the city’s five boroughs. By turning the dial, visitors can learn about encounters with policing culture from fellow New Yorkers, including two NYPD officers.

To turn talk into action, visitors are invited to send a postcard to the mayor. People choose the policy proposals most important to them—from, “Police shouldn’t be disciplining kids in school” to, “If police want to read our emails, they should have to get a warrant”—and add them to a pre-stamped postcard dropped into a special “ballot box.” The NYCLU delivered more than 2,000 of these cards to Mayor Bill de Blasio upon his reelection in late 2017.

IDEO and the NYCLU also led an interactive campaign event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Residents, students, philanthropists, and police were led through an exercise called Creative Tensions, positioning themselves around the room according to their views on everything from surveillance technology to school safety. Experts helped guide the conversation including Sheriff Jerry Clayton, director Liesl Tommy, and NYCLU organizer Brandon Holmes. The process allowed participants to see how fluid people’s positions can be.

Listening NYC has now reached thousands of New Yorkers at more than 35 locations. Schools, from a public middle school to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, have requested visits from the Listening Room, and the installation’s modular design has inspired new incarnations on topics including student safety and discipline.

The NYCLU has sent Conversation Cards to celebrities, influencers, and every member of the New York City Council. Sending postcards to Mayor de Blasio and Conversation Cards to the city council led directly to passage of the Right to Know Act—legislation that incorporates some of the NYCLU’s proposals for police reform.

Today, the impact of Listening NYC has moved beyond city limits. The NYCLU’s Syracuse chapter is introducing the pop-up installation there, while in Boston, mayoral candidate Tito Jackson even promised a visit from the Listening Room if elected. To keep dialogue flowing, the ACLU plans to distribute Conversation Cards nationwide.

Fashion thrives on reinvention. Now, digital platforms and tools are reinventing fashion. E-commerce has reshaped the shopping experience and social media has democratized the once-exclusive industry.

Amidst this furious whirl of change, the fashion platform Zalando, founded in 2008, has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies. Headcount has ballooned to 15,000 and revenues grew 23 percent year over year. More than €1 out of every €100 spent on clothing in Europe is spent at Zalando.

In 2014, Zalando’s co-founder and CEO Robert Gentz approached IDEO to help think about the organization’s future in the face of increasing competition. Gentz realized that building design thinking capabilities across the company would allow Zalando to make systemic business shifts, like building better experiences for customers, and balancing operational excellence and execution with innovation.

So, he invited a team of IDEO designers and Zalando employees to create an innovation lab in its Berlin headquarters. They called it The Studio, and in the three years since its launch, it has helped the company build new products, experiences, and modes of working that are powering a digital transformation across Zalando and in the broader fashion world.

Finding purpose

Gentz came to IDEO with a simple request: “I want my daughter to be proud of the company I created.” With that directive, the first order of business was to home in on the organization’s new strategy—to shift from an e-tailer to a full-blown fashion platform—and resurface purpose. After a series of interviews and workshops across the company, a unifying intent emerged:

Zalando exists to reimagine fashion, for the good of all.

To share that message, the team designed a five-day Festival of Purpose at the company’s Berlin headquarters and satellite locations, coupled with a long-term plan to help leaders and their teams weave that sense of purpose into everything they do.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando used purpose to mobilize its community

Building Innovation Capacity

With a shared purpose to rally around, Zalando started to design and build at a clip. The Studio experimented and prototyped, launching products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street style photos, and a digital tool called Collabary that connects online fashion influencers with brands. Projects are enabling cross-disciplinary teams to get into the practice of aligning around joint goals, making fast decisions, and building with agility.

But just as important as identifying growth opportunities for the company has been The Studio’s role as a hub. Zalando employees from across business units cycled into the Studio, teaching IDEOers about their business and the company’s culture, while IDEOers helped them master the design thinking process so they could lead future projects.

Studio graduates ensure that anything prototyped there is implemented, and integrate what they’ve learned into their day jobs. Their experience makes them design ambassadors who spread the practice of experimentation, prototyping, and storytelling across the organization.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando pioneered a new innovation studio

Teaching Leaders How to Scale Change

It’s one thing to start working differently in a small innovation lab, but how do you scale change across an organization and determine how it will affect each major business unit—product, technology, commercial, and logistics? IDEO interviewed Zalando employees to better understand how to embed what we called new Ways of Working (WoW), a method that combines design thinking with lean and agile approaches. WoW was then deployed by a centralized team that ran workshops and coaching sessions to help leaders adopt it, measure its impact through OKRs, KPIs, and NPSs, and help their teams understand the new processes.

Today, the Ways of Working method is being rolled out across the entire organization, reaching all 15,000 employees.

Together, the relationship between IDEO and Zalando and their multi-year project of change is spurring double-digit growth, and making good on the company’s vision of reimagining fashion, for the good of all.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando scaled new ways of working across their organization

IDEO helped position Shinho’s ingrained respect for food, family, and good health as a guiding principle for how the organization interacts with its employees and the wider world. The IDEO team integrated a new motto—“treat the world as family”—into every part of Shinho’s work, from sourcing and hiring to new ventures to the care employees take in handling each bottle of sauce destined for someone’s table.

To help transform Shinho’s internal culture, the IDEO team also crafted a narrative to communicate the company’s beliefs to new staff and outside partners. The team expressed Shinho’s foundational story through a published brand book and film, reimagined logo, and codified employee values.

“My proudest moment was when we brought the brand identity IDEO developed to life, and interpreted Shinho’s mission and vision through that lens in front of 2,000 employees at our annual meeting,” said Hanzhong Dong, Shinho's Head of Product, “It made me feel that even though we’re a group of ordinary people, we’re working on a great and meaningful thing."

Shinho’s heightened confidence and focus on supporting families has empowered the company to expand beyond soy sauce and snacks and explore new offers, from culinary training to sustainable farming to food experiences.

In July 2017, Shinho stepped onto the international stage as a tastemaker by participating in an event called Food Forward, hosted by the Michelin Guide and IDEO. Michelin-starred restaurants are synonymous with superb ingredients and service. Shinho crafts safe, organic, high-quality products that are staples for Chinese chefs, and the company shares the Michelin Guide’s aim to celebrate and expand the role of fine dining in China. IDEO brought all parties together with the shared goals of elevating China's culinary craft and culture, inspiring people around the future of food in China, and encouraging fruitful connections and partnerships.

IDEO and the Michelin Guide organized the day-long event, which included guest speakers, panel discussions, and tastings with four international, Michelin-starred restaurant chefs. Speakers and panelists discussed culinary education, inclusion, and the interplay between tradition and innovation in food. More than 200 people attended from across the food ecosystem: chefs, restaurateurs, journalists, investors, and educators. The event’s livestream garnered 30 million global views and 800,000 engagements.

Shinho’s products now reach 30 million families in 232 cities around the globe, driven by a cohesive mission and brand message. This kind of values-driven growth and hunger for new partnerships is setting the course for the future of food in China and throughout the region.

Despite the rapid growth of China's economy and increased access to a wider variety of food since the opening up, the market is saturated with unhealthy, processed snack foods. Consumers are increasingly seeking better-quality options, highlighting a significant gap in the food system.

30M families

purchase Shinho’s products

60 countries

around the globe offer Shinho products

Narvar, a software-as-a-service startup that provides a post-purchase engagement platform for retail clients, was scaling fast. The company had grown from 20 to 90 employees, and was well on its way to reaching 300 over the next two years. As the company grew, its leaders wanted to make sure it could sustain its vibrant, innovative culture. Narvar came to IDEO for help identifying and defining its values in a way that would would scale with the organization.

For the IDEO team, that meant articulating a system of values that supported existing behavior, reflected the company’s aspirations, and aided in evaluating new talent and development. The team started by interviewing key “culture carriers,” from the CEO to new hires, to learn what makes Narvar special. Based on this research, the team crafted a working set of values, then invited the entire company to share their feedback. In doing this work, IDEO was also able to surface organizational issues and tensions within the company for Narvar leaders to address.

Now, Narvar lives its values every day. Team members use them during candidate interviews, employees see them daily on company walls, and managers reinforce them during performance reviews. Every quarter, leadership gives out a Narvar values award to reinforce their importance. Through this project, Narvar was able to not only capture its core values, but also use them as an active ingredient in the company’s growth.

“We engaged IDEO to really understand the challenges we faced as an organization, and IDEO helped us define and articulate our culture and values. I can honestly say that all the growth and success we’ve achieved in the past two years—we couldn’t have done that without the foundation from IDEO,” said Narvar CEO and founder Amit Sharma.

Six months ago, Dawn announced she’d step down from Planned Parenthood, having successfully helped transition the organization from the leadership of long-time president, Cecile Richards. Instead of hurling herself straight into leading at another large organization, Dawn decided to dedicate a year to experimentation and discovery as expert-in-residence at IDEO.

Dawn is now working with teams across IDEO and IDEO.org to find new ways to catalyze change. In particular, she wants to uncover how best to use data and technology to improve service delivery and support movement-building. Coming to IDEO, she says, “I saw an opportunity to ask, How do we use human-centered design principles, entrepreneurship, and data and technology to transform how we are reaching people and working alongside them?”

Not one to be daunted by ambitious goals, the first official project Dawn is helping to launch is The Billion Girls CoLab—an initiative aimed at harnessing new coalitions and diverse expertise to develop innovative solutions that will support young women’s power and health worldwide. This joint effort between IDEO.org and IDEO CoLab will bring together cross-sector collaborators to think about reproductive health in new ways. Dawn sees this work as a chance to create impact at scale, but also as a means to continue empowering others to become leaders.

“I think established leaders are afraid to leave their roles and what they know,” Dawn reflected recently. “But if we're talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, some of us who have been privileged to lead—especially as leaders of a certain age—have a real opportunity to move and make space and build up a cadre of new leaders. They need room to lead.” It can be scary, she acknowledges, “but you just have to say to yourself, ‘Well, I'm going to step off this diving board into the unknown, and what can I report back from the other side?’”

Dawn sat down with Whitney Mortimer, IDEO CMO and partner, to talk about what the other side is like, how her perspectives on creative leadership are evolving, and what she hopes to build in the near term to support a healthy, empowered generation of future leaders.

Whitney: Let’s begin with the work you’re doing with CoLab, where you’ve been deeply immersed. You’ve said that the CoLab model, which brings disparate groups and experts together to collaboratively solve problems, aligns well with your vision of how to work better on women’s health.

Dawn: We’re building a cohort that is not just people in the sexual and reproductive health field, but also others who are thinking about adolescent girls from very different perspectives and industries, including the for-profit corporations. The idea is a cohort that is domestic and global, which is something kind of new for the sexual and reproductive health ecosystem. We’re trying to catalyze a very different kind of conversation and output, researching and designing in close collaboration and asking what would it look like to build something that unlocks the power of a billion girls who are coming to adolescence around the globe over the coming decade? And what would that change for our world?

[When I was at Planned Parenthood], as much as we all tried to promote that kind of ‘fail-fast’ culture, we mostly lived in a fail-never culture, because the stakes were so high. And yet we know we’re going to have to experiment some to figure out what is going to catapult us to the next level.

Whitney: How is this approach to work different from how you were working before?

Dawn: I have to constantly remind myself, it's only been six months since I left [Planned Parenthood]. I really had to learn to live without a grenade as my metronome. Our days were so driven by constant distractions and firefights, even though I feel like we made real progress and built real things. So now [at IDEO] I’m gaining a different way to approach problems—to step back and have time to be more thoughtful. I'm more convinced than ever that this is not just a narrow fight. We now clearly have a global set of forces at play.

Whitney: You've always been clear with everybody that what got us here won't save us—we have to be looking ahead to the next thing. You're sitting on that horizon now, asking how does technology and everything we're learning about healthcare play out in a world that has such unequal access? As a creative leader, what do you need? What helps you shape something completely new, as opposed to just wanting to fall back into the matrix of an organization that already exists and will tell you what its priorities are every single minute of every day?

Dawn: Many people called me in the days after I announced and said, ‘Hey, do you want to apply for this job? Can we put you forward for that?’ They were all amazing opportunities, many in the progressive health and rights arena. It was hard to resist going to another similar operation, because of the urgency and the real difference that those organizations are making in this moment. But that urgency can get in the way of stepping back and thinking differently about how to work most effectively. [When I was at Planned Parenthood], as much as we all tried to promote that kind of ‘fail-fast’ culture, we mostly lived in a fail-never culture, because the stakes were so high. And yet we know we’re going to have to experiment some to figure out what is going to catapult us to the next level.

Whitney: Something that you do very naturally and fluidly, is you find analogous examples out in the world that makes sense inside your world. I'm wondering, as you look at scaling something new, what other kinds of methods or mindsets from the designer's toolkit are you able to tap into?

Dawn: There are just these amazing ways to step back and actually use a designer’s approach to think about how companies, organizations, movements could actually be building and thinking more about the early and upstream inputs to get the outputs we want to see later.

With a designer’s mindset, we would ask how to more thoughtfully shape the waves of cultural nurture that will carry these generations to the shores of the future.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about nature versus nurture. And then I jumped to this bigger idea with the folks at IDEO, thinking about the idea of cultural nurture: What larger cultural wave was I riding that I couldn't see then, but which shaped me—and not just me, but a generation of people?

For example, when I was in third grade, I started a student council because the playground rules were unfair to girls. Exactly around that same time was when Title IX passed. All of a sudden there was a mandate for equality in education—in sports in particular—for girls. I benefited from that immediately but I could not see the profound impact it would have. I would have been radically different had I not been told, “You get to play basketball. You get to run for whatever school office.”

I think about how powerful those forces are, and yet we don't respond to them and leverage them as well as we could. With a designer’s mindset, we would ask how to more thoughtfully shape the waves of cultural nurture that will carry these generations to the shores of the future.

Whitney: Can you see those moments now that are shaping the next generation?

Dawn: I'm thinking about it a lot around the climate and depletion of the planet, with younger people getting messages both of fear, and also of preciousness. We're also looking at stigma. There is a lot of exciting shame-busting going on in the culture right now, which of course is why I think there's so much pushback in our politics.

Whitney: How has your identity and orientation as a leader shifted? How does that alter your sense of your capacity and what you need in order to have the impact you want to see?

Dawn: As they say in IDEO fashion, I'm diverging before converging. What I have tried to do is not converge on a solution or direction too quickly, because by nature that would be what I’d do—solve the problem as quickly as possible. In my previous life you could not sit around and admire the problem for very long. But I’m learning to be in love with the problem for a bit longer. I’m asking, can data and technology unlock a different paradigm of care? Is it stigma or rights or both that are foundational to solving the problem of abortion access? And what is it that I’m best equipped to do and help lead people toward?

Whitney: When you were at Planned Parenthood, you were early to see the potential, say, to use VR as an engagement and empathy-building tool. What technologies are you seeing as most critical and exciting now, as you're exploring what will be the new paradigm for reproductive health and healthcare?

Dawn: Well, I know augmented intelligence is the phrase of the year, but it really does have amazing potential. For example, take the idea of personalized prescribing and apply that to contraception. We know contraception is a game-changer, a life-changer, a life-saver. But we also know that when people get hormonal contraception, some people are going to have side effects. That means they’re either not going to keep using it or they’re going to want to switch. And that’s when there is more risk of getting pregnant. Imagine if we could harness AI to look across all of the prescription data sets and provide doctors with the tools to better match individuals with the product or formulation that suits them best. What if you could, by orders of magnitude, improve the ability of women to get a prescription or method of their choice that works for them right from the get go? That’s one example of how we might use new capabilities to create impact at scale.

Whitney: With the political climate being what it is, and an election on the horizon with unknown outcomes, how do you think about the challenge of something like improving access to and adherence to contraception or of empowering a billion girls around the world, irrespective of what may happen politically in the US and elsewhere?

Dawn: The one thing I 100% believe is you can’t think of anything completely outside of politics. It's just so clear what a powerful shaping force politics and government policy are. At the same time, there is a narrowness to the political lens. And when you start to think of these other actors and other ecosystems, you realize there's a lot that is possible—there’s potential to organize, to employ tools we're not fully utilizing. Part of what I want to do now is build out the progressive toolbox so that we're able to better work over or under or around the political obstacles, even while we recognize they cannot be ignored. The CoLab model has a lot to offer in leveraging many sectors and approaches and drawing them together to power solutions.

Whitney: What is the role of brand in that scenario?

Dawn: I actually think it is very important—not to create a name or brand a product, not that kind of thing—but the idea that we could use the principles of brand to communicate the power of girls to change the world. The idea that we can impress upon people the importance of raising up generations of girls, giving them the tools and the freedom to make their mark. That, I think, is something we need to capture and tell to the world.

We have to do everything we can to connect girls and to empower them and to make room for them. We have to get over some of our false distinctions and start to help them see that there’s a kind of global sisterhood that’s powerful, and that they have the opportunity to save the planet. That’s the small task we're going to hand off to them.

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When Dawn Laguens looks back on her eight years leading brand and public strategy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she describes a typical work day as “catch grenade, throw grenade back, run two steps forward.” To be sure, the years from 2010-2018 were eventful for everyone, and particularly for people like Dawn, who were on the front lines of vicious political conflicts, while simultaneously doing the daily work of advocating for accessible and effective healthcare solutions for women worldwide.

Spring in London vibrates with the tweeting of birds and the drilling of construction excavators. It’s a surreal symphony of nature and gentrification.

I was late for work and speeding up my usual way when I got detoured by a few meters of plastic barrier. As I walked around the construction equipment, I heard one worker shout to another.

"I'll pick up my gloves and be right back," he said. He walked by me and leaned towards a hole in the temporary barrier where his gloves were neatly stored.

"Excuse me," I started with my typical nosey flair. "Why do you keep your gloves in there?" He must have a locker, I thought to myself, or even a pocket where to store them on site.

"I work on different areas of the site,” he said, “and I need different gloves based on the job. These barriers crack very easily, so they provide the perfect storage space when I need it and where I need it."

As I looked at his hiding spot, I thought about designing for the end of life of products, like construction barriers, mailboxes, and or a simple shoebox. It was the first time I considered the new use cases that can come from deterioration and change.

As he walked away, he smiled tightly; I had acknowledged his hidden creative side.

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Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

1. What a Computer Learns From Watching Hours of Cartoons

Find out what happened when an IDEO CoLab designer tried training a neural network to generate its own cartoons—and what he learned about the danger of bias in training data. Read the story!

2. Inviting Algorithms to the Design Team

Your future design partner may be an algorithm. Here’s what emerged from an experimental collaboration between a graphic designer, a data scientist, and an algorithm. Read the story!

3. To Design a Better Future, Embrace the Uncomfortable

How can we explore the future of technology? By prototyping it. Check out the 5 near-future concepts that came out of a new IDEO exploration called The Discomfort Zone. Read the story!

4. No Beards Allowed: Exploring Bias in Facial Recognition AI

One IDEO designer created a facial recognition AI game that helps users understand how machine learning models are trained—and subtly hints at the areas where bias could creep in. Read the story!

5. We Built a Bot to Assign Parking Spots. It Fought Back.

When IDEO Cambridge moved into a new studio with a too-small parking lot, they built a bot to manage traffic... but the bot fought back. Here’s what this rogue AI taught the team about “raising” a bot—and how they tamed it. Read the story!

Bonus: Check out the follow-up post where a design researcher explores how his colleagues' interactions with the bot signaled shifts in studio culture.

6. Training a Computer to Find Shapes in the Clouds

The average 25-to-34-year-old only spends 13 minutes a day relaxing. Here’s what happened when one IDEO intern tried "outsourcing" some of her leisure time to a computer. Read the story!

7. What the AI Products of Tomorrow Might Look Like

How can designers leverage the power of AI to build a better future? To explore this question, we created an award-winning speculative design exhibition called HyperHuman. Read the story!

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As designers, we help build the future we want to see. So when a new technology emerges, we're always eager to take it for a test run, push its edges, and see how it fits into visions of the future. When it comes to AI, the opportunities are endless, but the stakes are high—our work can have serious implications that affect the lives of real people at unprecedented scale. Designers at IDEO are constantly working on cutting-edge experiments that explore the possibilities—and potential pitfalls—of a future where humans and machines are ever more entangled. Read on to explore a few of those experiments and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

But the painful reality is that most corporations don’t enjoy the conditions necessary to enable true startup behaviors. The DNA of a large, established business looks far different than that of a fledgling company. And just like with actual startups, creating new ventures is hard, risky, and doesn’t always pan out.

So how, exactly, can you design the conditions for success?

If you have a big company’s DNA, you need to catalyze strategic changes—small mutations that make it possible for a startup model and mindset to thrive inside a much different species. Sometimes, it happens naturally. If a legacy company hits an acute adapt-or-die moment, there’s no choice but to change (à la Netflix or Microsoft). But for companies where transformation is inevitable but not immediate, it’s entirely possible to engineer the conditions that generate pressure for a controlled shift. Here are three ways senior management can provoke the conditions for success.

1. Question your business model

Many legacy companies have been successful because they’ve focused on their core business, while many startups have flourished by routinely abandoning theirs. The key is to do both: Keep the core business running while a new venture pursues something entirely different.

Recently, American Family Insurance was looking to innovate outside of its traditional business model while staying true to its mission to help working families. One of its customers' biggest pain points was an inability to save enough money for an emergency. A $400 surplus—a cushion to get through a medical crisis, for example—was beyond many people’s reach.

Initially, American Family thought budgeting tools might provide a solution, but from the very first research interview, it was clear that budgeting wasn’t the barrier—cash-strapped people budget masterfully. The problem was having enough income to put away a little extra.

So, the insurance company embraced a radically new opportunity, creating a service to help families living on the edge bridge the gap between their paychecks and their security threshold. The company built a new business venture called Moonrise—a platform that would allow businesses to tap into an on-demand workforce, and allow people to access short-term work when they found themselves on shaky financial ground.

The solution was outside the scope of the legacy company’s core offering, but by moving outside of its business model, American Family Insurance was able to create an entirely new venture that helped its core customers solve a chronic, unaddressed problem.

2. Be an early adapter

It’s nearly impossible for an entire corporate organism to pivot rapidly in response to what’s happening around it, but startups have the innate superpower to move fast and get in early. When an emerging need or trend appears on the horizon, they can leap to create new products—or even new markets—far more quickly than large corporations. To achieve speed and adaptability, the new venture must be carved off and treated as its own autonomous, responsive entity.

Take the case of the 150-year old financial company that decided to widen the scope of its business to meet the growing desire for socially-responsible investment options. The company recognized early signals that the consumer desire for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing and impact investing was increasing rapidly, especially among younger generations, with whom they didn’t have many relationships. Chasing a high-growth opportunity for a new market segment, they set out to create a digital-first product that focused on socially-responsible investing.

To get started, the company didn’t simply announce a new division, or task an existing team with creating something new. Instead, they hired a founder and an outside startup team of 10. They built a company and a culture that was totally separate from their parent company’s offering, allowing the venture to take risks, prototype early and often, and above all, move fast. Throughout the venture’s development, the team continuously evolved the experience and business model by pushing prototypes to potential customers, adapting and pivoting until they reached product-market fit. By creating a team with the impetus and the culture to hit the ground running, the venture launched in just 18 months—and put its product in the hands of its consumers before its competitors.

3. Select for resilience and relentlessness

No matter the industry, startup leaders tend to have a few shared qualities that are more common among the entrepreneurial set than among seasoned CEOs. For a new venture to really work, the people behind it need to be driven by curiosity and insight, and have the skills necessary to prototype and iterate their way toward a tangible outcome. They can’t carry the static burden of “the way we do things around here.”

Intercorp, a massive Peruvian economic group of more than 30 companies, including banks, malls, cinemas, and schools, sought to build and design an innovation studio. Instead of solely relying on the business units to drive their own innovation processes, the company opted to create a central entity that could solve problems across its offerings, focusing on the needs of Peru’s rising middle class.

Intercorp purposely built La Victoria Lab in a middle-class Peruvian neighborhood—outside the walls of the corporate HQ—to immerse the team in the human-centered problems it’s trying to solve. The company also put together an interdisciplinary team of resilient and relentless talent, and set it up to embrace design thinking, identify new opportunities, and constantly prototype new value propositions. This talent stays close to the customer in order to shape new ventures in development, works through rapid digital-first prototyping, and operates within constrained timelines to get results. To drive disruptive new growth opportunities, small, cross-functional teams work quickly to design and launch digital businesses that compete with Intercorp’s core companies. Through La Victoria Lab, Intercorp’s leadership is intentionally creating urgency and applying positive pressure to disrupt its own businesses and remain competitive.

As a leader of an established company, you can’t ignore its history or DNA—nor would you want to; it’s what made the company successful in the first place. But you can constructively provoke necessary changes that allow new ventures to flourish. By openly embracing new business models, pursuing (and possibly creating) new markets, attracting and empowering entrepreneurially-minded talent, and even imposing a few artificial constraints like tight timeframes or lean budgets, companies can begin to fundamentally evolve not only what they do, but also how they do it. It’s the only way to ensure long-term market leadership—and sometimes even survival.

The tricky part of all of this, is that true venture-building, much like innovation itself, cannot be a corporate hobby. It cannot be wedged into spare time and pursued only when employees have white space on their calendars. It has to be modeled from the top, by senior leadership. One of the things that makes startup entrepreneurs effective, and ultimately successful, is their grit, determination and dedication to creating lasting change in the face of all obstacles. It's why others join them on their mission. Make it one of the reasons that others join you.

Visuals by Elin Svensson.

As tech valuations rise, and more and more unicorns are born, legacy businesses everywhere hear the message that they need to act more like startups. If you want to innovate, stay relevant, and grow, the advice goes, then you have to take risks, be nimble, and throw money at potential solutions.

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.