Midea, one of China’s largest appliance manufacturers, wanted to identify growth opportunities in the domestic consumer market, while focusing on people’s cultural beliefs around health and well-being. During the course of the project, IDEO found that Midea could play a key role in building a healthier nation.

The team set out to design potential future products for Tong (“through, whole, and to understand”) that are built around the basic themes of eating, breathing, and being: an easy-to-use, hassle-free herbal tea dispenser, an air balancer that improves and balances the quality of air in the home, and a body-balancing mobile phone app that encourages users to rebalance their body condition where needed, through movements created with the Chinese philosophies of well-being in mind.

The Tong project was featured extensively in the press, and opened further conversations with Midea about creating new value and extending into new markets.

Put food on the table or keep the furnace running on a frigid day? It’s an unfortunate choice many low-income families in Flint, Michigan, face.

To help customers in Flint and other Michigan towns stay on top of their utility bills and better understand the relationship between their energy consumption and the resulting costs, Consumers Energy partnered with IDEO and utility assistance provider The Heat and Warmth Fund (THAW) to create an innovative pilot billing program called Clear Control in late 2013.

The pilot was designed with three major human-centered changes to the traditional utility experience:

• Instead of monthly bills, participants received two bills per month. Shorter billing periods allowed for smaller, more frequent payments, helping customers match available funds with their ability to pay.
• Daily text updates on energy usage and bill amounts kept consumption top of mind.
• Consumers Energy offered personalized, in-home audits to help customers make low-cost, high-impact changes to their energy bills.

A year later, the results of the pilot are energizing. Clear Control participants accumulated no new debt, while the control group owed $300; pilot customers used 20 percent less electricity, reducing their bills by $200 per year; and 95 percent of participants paid their bills in full and on time, compared with 35 percent in the control group. The utility company simultaneously benefited by avoiding arrearages, late-payment fees, and shutoffs. Consumers plans to incorporate Clear Control lessons into its overall energy assistance program design and development moving forward.

"It’s no longer ‘me’ against ‘them’—now it’s ‘us,’" said one Clear Control participant.

In 1980, Apple asked IDEO to develop a mouse for their radical new computer, the Lisa. Previous attempts at mouse design, by Douglas Englebart and Xerox PARC, yielded results that were too expensive and hard to make. The Apple mouse needed to be more reliable and less than 10 percent of the cost of the earlier versions.

To start, the design team created a cheaper, much-improved mechanism that would operate the mouse, and found that a complex, plastic "ribcage" would hold the pieces together. The team similarly tested and refined the mouse’s other key components, from the audible and tactile click of the button to the rubberized coating on the ball. A record turntable spun for days, logging “mouse miles” to check the reliability of the electromechanical assembly.

The resulting mouse proved mechanically and economically sound and was changed only slightly when adapted for use with the first Macintosh computer. The basic mechanism design is used in virtually all mechanical mouses produced to date.

Food is the heart of most cultures. In China, one of the oldest cultures in the world, food is central to family gatherings and celebrations. It’s what binds people, a tangible way of showing love and respect. But in recent years, the Chinese food industry has suffered from concerns around safety.

Two siblings, Harn and Anmao Sun, set out on an ambitious venture: to create a trusted source of food in China and, by setting an example, to instigate a movement around conscious farming practices. The American-born entrepreneurs launched Hunter Gatherer, a restaurant and retail food space built around a transparent supply chain, from farm to table to grocery shelves. The venture is based on growing and serving what they call real food: The ingredients are chemical-free and come from known and trusted sources—food they’d eat themselves. The purpose of the venture is simple: to serve people real food that is their right.

Having studied and worked in the US, Harn and Anmao grew accustomed to browsing farmers markets on Saturday mornings or picking up a burrito at Chipotle. But when they returned to China, they were unsure about the safety of the food they were eating.

“In China, you wouldn’t go to a food stand, because you’d be concerned about the ingredients,” Anmao said. “You can’t take the safety for granted.”

Hunter Gatherer’s very existence challenges bedrock assumptions about how food is produced in China. A long and depressing list of scandals—milk contaminated with melamine, pork produced from diseased pigs, used cooking oil repackaged and sold as new—has rocked the public trust.

“In China, agriculture is going through a huge change,” Anmao said. “In the US, agriculture operations are regulated. Farmers’ practices are regulated. If they use pesticides, there are limits because these farmers understand that once a certain threshold is hit, additional pesticides will not yield more crops. But in China, pesticide use came about 30 years after the US and Europe, and because of a lack of full understanding, farmers in China incorrectly operate under the assumption that more pesticides means more crop yields. Also, with over 250 million farmers in China, it becomes immensely difficult to properly regulate everyone.”

New Ventures

Harn and Anmao wanted to restore trust in the simple act of eating in China, and they came to IDEO to build a scalable business based on that vision. This was essentially a startup, a shared commitment between IDEO and Hunter Gatherer.

“I’ve lived in Shanghai for the past seven years, and as a relatively active and health-conscious person, I’ve had to invest quite a bit of time in finding food that I trust,” said Charles Hayes, managing director of IDEO Shanghai. “That investment has been both in the time it takes to research the sources of ingredients but also a literal investment in paying a high price for imported food just for that extra peace of mind.”

Anmao and Harn took up residence in the IDEO Shanghai offices to incubate their business. Together with IDEO designers, they tested packaging, cooked countless meals, and found ways to introduce unfamiliar ingredients to Chinese consumers. They discussed different concepts of lunch and dinner, and how notions of freshness in Chinese culture might affect cold-storage systems. In IDEO’s prototyping kitchen, the teams tested all manner of different foods, flavors, colors, mixes, and price points, and they brought consumers in to try them out. IDEO designers, along with the founding team, also worked on the brand and positioning of what would eventually become the Hunter Gatherer enterprise—its location, human resources, and marketing strategies.

As the restaurant concept came together, finding the right food sources had to be addressed. Traditional agriculture couldn’t be trusted; organic certifications were available on the black market, and safety protocols around chemical use were nonexistent. Anmao and Harn decided to invest in their own farms. They met with farmers, asked questions about their methods, and walked in the fields to see for themselves. Eventually they settled on two plots of land outside Shanghai and began developing more than 80 different crops to be used in the restaurant.

From Seed to Table

When it came time to find the right space for the first location, Anmao and Harn discovered an open, airy storefront on Anfu Road in Shanghai’s tree-lined former French Concession area. They designed and built a retail space and kitchen, and along with IDEO designers, they trained the staff and organized workflows. The staff set the tables with Mason jars filled with flowers, hung photographs of the farmers who grew the food, and put up a sign that showcases the percentage of vegetables coming directly from the Hunter Gatherer farms, already more than 70 percent in less than a year after opening.

Customers can shop for fresh vegetables, locally sourced and imported canned and jarred goods, bins of cereal, freshly made smoothies, artisan sauces, and exotic chocolates. Upstairs, they can feast on delicious dishes in the homey restaurant.

Reviews have been glowing. One customer raved about the machine that grinds fresh nuts. Another loved the open space, the “good vibes,” and the refreshing cucumber water. Young people go there on dates, and families return for the delicious menu variety.

The convivial space has blossomed into more than just a restaurant and grocery store. It’s become a gathering place of sorts, both for the community and for partners who share the same vision. Farmers and food purveyors are invited to showcase their products at seasonal events and to mingle with customers and share recipes and stories.

“Hunter Gatherer has come to symbolize a kind of lifestyle the Chinese people have been looking for,” said Eugene Lin, an IDEO business designer. “A place they can enjoy hanging out with friends, as well as a movement and mission they can stand behind.”

A Digital Future

This is just the beginning of the venture. The plan is to open 40 more locations throughout China. But the vision for Hunter Gatherer’s growth is bigger than brick-and-mortar restaurants—where the business will truly scale is in the digital space. Eventually, the plan is to launch a Hunter Gatherer online grocery store from which anyone can buy food grown from trusted sources.

“We have to create trust with the consumer. It’s the most difficult and most valuable thing to do in China, especially with food,” Anmao said. “Our brick-and-mortar locations will establish that increased trust. Then we can go online and grow the idea to the rest of the country.”

Will Hunter Gatherer have a hand in changing the way that the world’s most populous nation thinks about food? Its principles are already spreading, from neighboring farmers adopting more sustainable planting methods, to a growing market for products like wine.

But the true sign of success will be almost invisible—the moment when an increase in demand will result in safe food for everyone and when real food becomes commonplace.

The primary question in this moment should be: How might we each play our part in bringing this pandemic to an end? But it's a moment, too, for reflection on the future. Who do we want to be when we emerge from the worst of this? What do we want our organizations to stand for? These are questions of strategy—of what it means to win.

How does your organization define winning? What is that challenging shared goal that gets your people out of bed each day, excited to play their part? If your organization is like most I’ve worked with, you may struggle to answer that question. Despite all the time and resources poured into strategy work each year, few organizations have a widely understood definition of winning that goes beyond making money for shareholders.

Fifty years ago, in The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, economist Milton Friedman argued that the purpose of a business is to serve its owners. The leader’s role, he wrote, is “to conduct the business in accordance with their [owners’] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society.” This notion, which is the foundation of the doctrine of shareholder value maximization, is now pervasive. But it’s showing considerable signs of wear and tear as we become more aware of the negative consequences of putting profits ahead of people.

Solely prioritizing short-run outcomes for shareholders does little to bring meaning to our work; it stymies innovation; it reduces our business fitness; and it makes much, much harder the real work of strategy. Meaning comes from creating real value in the world, which means we need to think broadly in terms of who we’re winning with (and for). Innovation requires a long-term perspective, so we need to think about winning beyond this quarter or even this year. Business fitness (the financial and strategic resilience of a company over time) depends on being attuned to things that shareholders may not see. To ensure our viability, we need to seek out signals as to what customers, employees, and societies care about. Strategy is about building a firm that can win both now and in the future, so we need to be more holistic in our approach to making choices.

If it is time to move past shareholder value, how might we define winning in a more useful way, that spurs rather than stops innovation? How might we set aspirations that don’t suggest a win-lose frame? How might we seek instead to create value for customers, for employees, and for investors?

Find the right language

In the process of developing a strategy for kyu, the collective of organizations that includes IDEO and SYPartners, some leaders rejected the notion of “winning” entirely, recoiling at a word that felt tied to a scarcity mindset. If we’re winning, they asked, who is losing?

Tim Brown and Susan Schuman, the kyu vice chairs who co-led the strategy discussions, thought hard about how to navigate that challenge. As Brown notes, they came to see that “we’re really creating a community at kyu—a collective that aims to unleash creativity and to help people flourish.” He goes on: “What we realized is that communities don’t win or lose, they thrive or falter.” The kyu strategy focuses on what it would mean to create a community that can truly thrive over time. Thriving may not be the term that resonates with your organization, but language matters. To redefine winning to be more inclusive, work with your team to find a mental model for winning that works for you, then build shared definitions of the models you choose.

Shift the timeline

Another way to push on current, unsustainable definitions of winning is to publicly shift the time horizon so that sustainability, both economical and ecological, can be integrated into our aspirations. Unless we look further out, we will continue to plunder the future to fund the present and to degrade the planet to drive profit. For inspiration on what is possible, look to Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever.

In an interview for my book Creating Great Choices, Polman explained how he set out to change the time horizon at Unilever: “One of the things I had to do was to move the business to a longer-term plan,” he said. “We had become victims of chasing our own tail, cutting our internal spending in capital, R&D, or IT to reach the market expectations. We were developing our brand spends on a quarterly basis and not doing the right things...We were catering to the shorter-term shareholders.”

Polman decreed that the company would stop quarterly reporting and stop giving guidance. He embarked on a far-reaching environmental sustainability effort, and he reinvested in R&D, talent development, and brand building.

Polman believed that shareholders whose interests were aligned with Unilever (i.e. long-run profitability and environmental sustainability) would eventually buy into his plan. Taking a long-term perspective on winning not only let Unilever invest in innovation for customers and in development for its people, it let leadership focus on the fundamentals of the business rather than managing short-run expectations. As a result, it created lots of shareholder value too. In the decade Polman headed Unilever, its stock price increased 170 percent, creating more value for shareholders than most companies in the FTSE 100. This is a win-win-win solution, and it was powered by a willingness to show up differently in the world.

Define your purpose

A third way to redefine winning productively is to connect our aspirations to a larger purpose. Think of purpose as the human “why” that explains the reason a company exists. The best purpose statements are very human: they connect the work of the organization to real people, to real needs, and to real problems to be solved. By defining a meaningful purpose, companies can demonstrate to employees and customers what they stand for and why. The purpose can then set the context for the strategy; we can define what winning means in service of our overall purpose.

One company that demonstrates the power of connecting purpose to strategy is Orbia. Until 2019, Orbia was called Mexichem and it was mainly known as a chemical company. Last year, along with a new brand, Orbia unveiled a new purpose: To “advance life around the world,” tackling some of humanity’s biggest shared challenges, like food security, water scarcity, and livable cities.

Had it continued to define itself as a chemical company, Mexichem could have followed a path to near-inevitable commoditization. Instead, CEO Daniel Martinez-Valle and Orbia’s leadership team worked with IDEO to define a higher bar with a bold new purpose. Now the team is working to connect its strategic choices, its resource allocations and its employee incentives to that larger purpose. Doing that means reorganizing the structure of the company into five business groups, each aimed at addressing a unique global challenge, defining meaningful sustainability targets for each business, and investing in innovation in significant new ways. That’s really the power of purpose: it can align the organization, motivate employees, and promise customers something they can believe in. No wonder purpose-led companies tend to have higher employee engagement, happier customers, and better overall performance. They win on multiple dimensions.

Winning isn’t easy. It’s tempting to define winning narrowly, to make the task seem easier: winning means increasing the stock price this quarter. But as the last few months have demonstrated, a shareholder-led definition of winning is not only hollow, it can leave organizations with nothing to fall back on in a time of crisis. We need a far richer, more aspirational understanding of what it can really mean to win. To get there, ask how we could define a winning aspiration, using language that fits our organization, push out on the time horizon, connect strategic goals to a larger sense of purpose and give ourselves room to dream big.

In a moment of crisis, it can be difficult to think beyond the next hour, the next day, the next week. The global COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for each of us, as we grapple with our duty of care to our employees, to our communities, to each other, to ourselves. The unprecedented disruption created by this crisis should be seen first and foremost in humanitarian terms, connecting to the very real personal toll of this disease—serious illness and lives lost, isolation and fear, worsening unemployment and economic precarity.

Like most organizations, we’re reckoning with how COVID-19 will change how we do business. And as we do, we’re learning a lot from our community—our colleagues living and working under complex, difficult circumstances; our clients whose businesses depend on global transportation; and the people we design for and with on a daily basis.

"Constraints can breed a lot of innovation,” says Charles Hayes, a managing director of IDEO’s studios in Asia. “As designers, how do we design our way through this?"

Here are a few tips based on what we’re learning:

1. Create a virtual meeting survival kit

How many tabs do you have open right now? We equate multiple screens with fractured attention. But just because a meeting is being conducted virtually doesn’t mean it can’t be designed for presence. An IDEO team recently had to find an alternative way to run a 20-person workshop for a foundation in Seattle. They asked themselves: How might we still approximate the level of engagement of an in-person meeting? Better still: how might we make sure this virtual workshop delivers on our client’s needs—focus, alignment, and a set of actionable next steps—while keeping things interesting?

Before the meeting, the team mailed a virtual workshop survival kit, complete with “sleeping bags” for cell phones, mini-whiteboards for people to prototype ideas, and physical takeaways to help the presentation resonate off-screen.

Over the course of the meeting, participants excitedly unwrapped items one by one. It was a way for the IDEO team to show up in the room when they couldn’t actually show up in the room.

2. Design rituals around tools

There are thousands of tools to facilitate remote collaboration—video conferencing! brainstorming tools! task-management software!—but perhaps more important than the specific tool are the processes teams put in place around them. After all, a tool is only as good as its ability to deliver on what the team needs.

Take video conferencing, for example. A reliable video chat box can be a Swiss Army knife to combat the woes of remote collaboration. But spending an entire day jumping from one serious video chat to another is a recipe for bleary eyes. IDEO teams around the world have been running experiments in how video conferencing can be a tool to build culture and connectedness in addition to getting work done.

For one, teams have been continuously changing their virtual video backgrounds—everything from a football game to a family vacation photo—to spark discussion and keep meetings fresh. Regular rituals like daily meditation or morning coffee chats have been ported over to video. And teams are using creative warmups—like a 10-second dance break or a quick show-and-tell of an artifact from the home office—to kick-off meetings.

3. Empower local communities

When travel is off the table, IDEOers have had to find alternative ways to learn from the communities for whom they’re designing. One approach that has become particularly relevant in the wake of COVID-19 is Equity Centered Community Design (ECCD). ECCD is a process of designing with—as opposed to designing for—a community.

For example, IDEO recently worked on a project to design a new lifelong learning program for the city of South Bend, Indiana. Rather than rely on traveling to South Bend to conduct research, the IDEO team hired local “community connectors” and a researcher in South Bend to conduct interviews, share prototypes, and co-design with the IDEO team remotely. Now that many cities are sheltering in place, even local communities will have to work remotely. That makes it all the more important to enlist those with hyperlocal context and lines of sight, ensuring there is sensitivity and flexibility around immediate needs. By designing themselves out of the room, the IDEO team received a level of honest feedback they may not have been privy to if they’d been physically present. This method isn’t new, but as movement becomes constrained, it’s even more important to engage local networks to be the eyes and ears on the ground.

4. When you can't do, learn

How long have you been putting off learning that skill? Cleaning up that code base? Building that website? When one door closes, listen for the creak of another opening. Travel constraints can be an opportunity to take a deep breath, hunker down, and try something new. Across IDEO, designers have been using these extenuating circumstances as an opportunity to gather digitally and learn. “We have experimented with a number of things,” says Brian Chien, a director in our Shanghai studio. “Some worked well, and some definitely didn’t.”

Whether it’s prototyping a remote brainstorm, trying out a new tool, or building something by hand, the disruption of your normal routine can be an opportunity to learn something. And if you already have the skills, teach! Designers in our Tokyo office are webcasting tutorials for young design students, sharing skills with those who aren’t able to attend an in-person workshop. What if, when it’s inadvisable to move from place to place, organizations took what they’re saving in travel expenses and invested it into L&D?

At IDEO, we will always believe in the alchemy of creative minds bouncing off one another in a shared space. But COVID-19 has pushed us to get even more comfortable with digital. And while we know necessity is the mother of invention, we still have much to learn—especially from other companies who have been at the forefront of remote collaboration for years.

Of this we’re certain, says Arlin Tao, a senior director in our Shanghai studio: virus aside, remote collaboration is the way of the future. “I think the only thing that most people agree on is when things go back to normal, it's not going to be the normal that we were used to before.”

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It's not uncommon for IDEOers to make house calls. Friendly, in-person conversations are one of our most cherished tools—that kind of design research helps us learn what people collect and eat and carry in their backpacks. Social interactions fuel the insights we use to do our design work. What happens, then, when social interaction is not good for us?

While we tied, she shared the story of leaving her corporate career in design to pursue a year diving deep into the world of knots, teaching herself a new knot every single day. With explorations traversing the historical and functional—from gathering inspiration from sailor’s knots to the future-forward and abstract—her knots have become massive installations, offering an alternative translation for structures like the circuit board and New York City subway system. I left her session deeply inspired by the simple power of dedicating ourselves to daily acts of making and craft—let’s all try it.

In one sentence, who are you?

I make sculpture and installations that elevate the vernacular and inspire awe and understanding; in the context of knots, I work at the intersection of function, design, history, and aesthetics to illuminate what’s most fascinating about knots: the journey of the line.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I developed fluency in the language of knots—and found my artist voice in the process—by learning one new knot every day of the calendar year in 2016 (which was 366 total knots because of the leap year).

How do you get over creative block?

You know, I never have creative block. I have a list as long as my arm of investigations I’m dying to explore and large installation concepts that are awaiting a home.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

I’m currently hiring, so today I'm posting a listing for a studio manager position, ordering custom-made cordage for a hotel project in the Maldives, and later on, I'm heading to Gensler San Francisco for the opening reception for a show I’m having there.

What’s your dream installation site?

An airport. I’m obsessed with the notion of the journey of the line, which is evident in my work. The rich metaphors that arise from journeying and traveling are particularly well suited to airports.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I really want to see my work in an airport... and then a TED Talk.

What’s the weirdest or coolest knot you’ve learned? Why?

The five-strand star knot. During my Year of Knots, I tried for over an hour to learn it, only to end up frustrated and in tears. It's complex and the old-timely sailors knotting books were cryptic. But then I mastered it, and now it is my favorite knot to make.

What are you most curious about right now?

People often call me a "fiber artist," but I don’t restrict myself in that way. I’m interested in the journey of the line. So while it’s wonderful to render a line in rope, because rope allows for creating shapes in space without weight, almost anything can be a line. I’m curious about exploring other materials—glass, tubing, metal, and more. I’m still looking for the project that will want me to tie knots out of ethernet cable.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Always and forever: artist Janet Echelman, who makes sculpture on the scale of city blocks that respond to wind, weather, and light. I met and befriended her last year and we spent a day in Paris looking at art. Janet is lovely and her art absolutely takes my breath away. She has a permanent installation in Terminal 2 at the San Francisco Airport that is so beautiful, when I have a flight to catch, I will go to the airport early just to gaze at it. Endless respect to Janet Echelman.

Learn more about Windy's craft in her book, The Year of Knots.

I was feeling a bit sleepy at a design conference this past spring when, upon entering the auditorium for the next talk, I was handed a simple length of rope. My ears perked up with anticipation and curiosity. Enter Windy Chien: ingenious fiber artist who would coach the entire room of conference-goers in learning how to tie a donut knot (it’s adorable and makes for an amazing necklace).

By looking to the neighborhood pub down the block, it was easy to see that if they wanted to keep customers around longer, they needed to have a similarly linger-worthy offering. It seemed to be working.

In an age when boundaries between sectors are blurring, traditional businesses need fresh approaches that keep them relevant, even as the tech titans add capabilities that could eclipse the old guard. When leaders are willing to look beyond their own industry for inspiration and ideas, they often gain a competitive advantage.

The financial services industry is a perfect candidate for this kind of approach. Money is changing in radical ways, and along with shifting regulatory environments at home and abroad, we increasingly find new players entering the financial space. It often seems like the future of financial services is being designed outside the domain of the industry giants, which begs the question: Are traditional financial firms equipped, at present, to satisfy customer needs? People want convenience and access, security, privacy, social features, comfort, experiences, and a range of incentives—many of which are more readily supplied by a digital platform than a stately bank. But some traditional players are taking a new tack.

When the first Capital One Café opened in late 2015, the bank was attempting to address these very concerns. Millennials, having come of age around the 2008 financial crisis, harbored a well-documented distrust of traditional banking and felt turned off by the branch experience, so Capital One attempted to reinvent the bank branch in the image of a coffee shop and coworking space—again, looking outside their industry for inspiration. “Customers are over the corporate thing,” a bank representative said. It’s hard to imagine someone would choose to enjoy their coffee inside a bank if other café options are available, yet by most measures Capital One’s experiment has been a success, offering a more welcoming and attractive experience than speaking to a teller through bulletproof glass. By innovating on the experience, Capital One has entered retail banking in a novel way.

The late Harvard academic Clayton Christensen developed the concept of “jobs to be done,” arguing that customers have a need to get a job done, rather than a need to acquire a specific product or service. It’s a slight but important turn of the dial from the traditional way of thinking. Here’s how legendary economist Theodore Levitt described the idea back in 1969: “Last year 1 million quarter-inch drills were sold, not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes. People don’t buy products; they buy the expectation of benefits.” To advance the argument a step, perhaps what the customer needs isn’t a one-inch hole but the ability to hang a picture. Maybe an adhesive hook would do the job better than a drill.

Innovation is often driven by the urgent need to solve a problem. In 1922, a group of army officers observed that returning soldiers, who hadn’t driven cars while on active duty, had a hard time getting auto insurance. The officers formed the United Services Automobile Association to provide insurance to military members and their close family. Later USAA expanded to offer a wider range of services including banking, investment, and other types of insurance. Since their members were often scattered geographically—sometimes on the other side of the globe—USAA pioneered mobile banking, initially by phone and mail and later online. Even today, with almost 13 million members, USAA has only one full-service bank branch, located in San Antonio.

This company, which was founded to offer auto insurance to service members, is now regarded as a shining example in the banking world of loyalty and customer satisfaction. Several of my clients who work at major retail banks have admitted to me in private that they still do their personal banking at USAA because they so admire the firm’s customer service. From that original need in 1922, USAA created a new service model that has lasted nearly a century.

Many of today’s most inspiring models for innovation are scattered globally. The European Union’s Open Banking efforts have created fertile conditions for EU mobile-first banks such as N26, Starling Bank, and Monzo. These firms score off the charts in customer satisfaction rankings, above even USAA’s benchmark. In the EU, mobile-first banks have grown through a mix of purpose and convenience, the human-centered design of their interactions and offers, and a supportive regulatory environment.

Alipay in China—which has a staggering 900 million users—is a smartphone wallet app that has revolutionized mobile payments, including the development of “Smile and Pay,” facial recognition technology that allows consumers to pay for goods without even carrying their mobile device. Alibaba has aggressive plans for global expansion of Alipay, all but guaranteeing that domestic US firms will come into direct competition with the Chinese juggernaut.

In many African countries, citizens have so little faith in their nations’ financial stability and fiat currency that a new kind of money has emerged: prepaid mobile phone minutes. People pay for a broad range of goods and services—from procuring groceries to settling their electric bills—by transferring mobile phone minutes. Kenya’s most ubiquitous service, with more than 30 million users, is m-pesa, launched by the country’s top mobile phone companies, Vodafone and Safaricom. Who would have thought that mobile phone companies would emerge as the central disruptors in Africa’s financial services sector, disintermediating the banks?

The financial world has been slower to innovate than, say, the technology world, for a few key reasons. First, financial firms haven’t been forced to innovate at the same pace; second, regulation has disincentivized competition; third, most radical thinkers are no longer drawn to the financial services, as the center of action has moved to Silicon Valley.

Millennials comprise the largest population in our workforce, and three-quarters of them say they’d prefer a financial offering from a large technology company over one from a traditional financial services firm. And the tech world is responding. The Apple Card recently launched in an effort to redesign the credit card and disrupt the status quo. PayPal and Venmo, beyond their use as payment services, essentially function as savings accounts for many customers who store money in the app. And millennials aren’t the only focus of this evolution: A handful of new firms, such as EverSafe, have introduced new products that help the elderly population manage their bills and protect against financial exploitation.

Money is always changing—the way it moves, the shape of it, and how we store it. Financial services firms need not only to keep pace, they need to be leaders of innovation. New solutions could come from unexpected places, so it’s critical to take a global perspective, benchmark beyond industry peers, and consider the experience of the people providing and receiving services. Building the next 100-year financial services firm will depend on doing all of these.

Illustration by Emil Wikström

The bike shop in my neighborhood recently started serving beer. They keep a keg on ice in the back room, and customers can sip pints as they browse the bicycles, gear, and hardware. I was curious what was behind the move, so I asked the owners. They told me they’d been trying to figure out how to get customers to spend more time in the store, and hopefully to make a purchase, so they decided to take a page from another industry’s book.

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.