Life Technologies, a global biotech company that supplies scientists with products and services, needed to grow big, from a $4 billion to a $10 billion enterprise. So it hired IDEO to help seed innovation across the company.

"When we started out, it was an R&D thing for driving innovation in new products. Now it’s not just R&D; user-centered innovation is a central part of our culture. It’s what we do throughout the organization," said Amy Cuneo, Associate Director, Customer Insights.

Over a three-year engagement, IDEO helped transform Life Technologies’ corporate culture through the introduction of User-Centered Innovation (UCI), an optimistic, experiential approach to problem-solving. Far outperforming its ambitious goal, Life Technologies is now a $13.6 billion company and uses UCI to inspire innovation throughout the 10,000-person organization.

After working with Life Technologies, IDEO designers came up with three products that have gone to market, including, a new bottle that showcases superior handling and storage, easier identification, and additional room for supplements. And Life Technologies has transformed from a company that aspires to focus on customers to one that truly does.

Unplanned pregnancies are a big problem in the US, especially among unmarried 18- to 29-year-olds. Seven in 10 pregnancies in this demographic are unplanned, a statistic that applies to women of all ethnicities and socioeconomic levels. Complicating matters are the social tension between abstinence-only and contraception-inclusive education, and the difficulty and expense associated with obtaining prescription birth control.

Since 2009, IDEO has worked closely with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit NGO, to address this pressing social challenge. One of the first insights on the project was identifying the need for comprehensive birth control support. Designers looked at ways to transform birth control from a prescription (a piece of paper that is handed to you by a doctor) into a subscription (a program that ensures you start using birth control, use it correctly, and migrate to more effective methods).

Given the complex and potentially overwhelming subject matter, the IDEO team interviewed women in the target demographic; talked with doctors, counselors, and other experts with varying opinions about birth control; and hosted roundtable discussions. They developed several concepts and scenarios that allowed members of the National Campaign to see sex and pregnancy through the eyes of the young women they’re working to reach.

Research and prototyping efforts led to the design of Bedsider, a multi-touchpoint birth control support system with a carefully crafted sex-positive brand, which is uncommon for the healthcare industry. Bedsider focuses on five key areas (awareness, motivational drivers, digital offerings, services, and loyalty) and acts as a vehicle for behavioral change that’s flexible, with room to grow into a much larger movement.

The Ad Council and the National Campaign debuted a multiyear, multimedia public service campaign in November 2011. The Bedsider website offers comprehensive education about existing birth control methods. This includes opt-in reminder services, personal stories from women across the country on why they chose a particular method, a phone service that provides information in both English and Spanish, features such as “Fact or Fiction” (hilarious animated clips debunking popular myths), a “Frisky Friday” newsletter, and more.

Bedsider has launched nationally with the help of an Ad Council campaign that drives sexually active women ages 18–24 to Bedsider.org. The multimedia Public Service Announcement effort includes television, radio, print, web, and nontraditional advertising, as well as an integrated social media program.

“We hope that Bedsider will be a useful tool for women to learn about their birth control options, better manage their birth control, and in the process avoid getting pregnant until they’re ready,” said Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast in its monthly newsletter. Planned Parenthood and Philliber Research Associates joined forces with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to help test and evaluate Bedsider.

Through a social media campaign called #ThxBirthControl, people are voicing their thoughts about what birth control has made possible for women, men, families, and society. It’s all part of Thanks, Birth Control Day, launched in November 2013 as part of a continuing initiative to encourage positive conversations and more consistent use of birth control by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. To celebrate the movement, IDEO wrote, scored, and performed an animated musical featuring condoms and pill packs dancing the cancan.

According to an independent evaluation of the program, Bedsider is the first digital intervention in reproductive health in the U.S.—with adults as an audience—that has shown to prevent unplanned pregnancy. Turns out that when women and men have the ability to plan, prevent, or space pregnancies, they’re more likely to finish school, achieve their goals, and ultimately have healthier families, according to the nonprofit organization.

Chicago’s federally funded, citywide bike-sharing service, called Divvy, makes a fleet of bicycles available to commuters and tourists 24 hours a day. Alta Bicycle Share (which runs bike-sharing systems in Boston, the Bay Area, DC, and New York City) collaborated with IDEO to spread Divvy’s message, “Divide and Share!” to the cyclists and would-be cyclists of Chicago through the brand.

The new brand would appear on its bikes, stations, company vans, member fobs, and website—and it needed to be ready to hit the streets in just six months. IDEO partnered with local brand strategy studio Firebelly Design to collaborate on a solution. IDEO led the early research, conceptual brand development, and naming phase of the project; the Firebelly team led the visual design and developed the brand guidelines.

The brand has become a functional and fun part of Chicago’s transportation landscape and has been embraced by Chicago commuters. Just three weeks after it launched, the City of Chicago called the Divvy Bikes program the busiest bike-sharing system in the world. Six months into the service, enthusiastic cyclists have racked up over 780,000 trips and 1.7 million-plus miles, and over 12,000 Chicagoans have become members.

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After watching her husband suffer from cancer, Tomoko Namba, founder of Japan’s leading mobile internet company, DeNA, wanted to empower people with better health information to aid them in making medical decisions. DeNA partnered with IDEO to help with the design of a genetic test that had mass-market appeal.

Together, IDEO and DeNA designed all the consumer touchpoints from the ground up for the expanding new business, called MYCODE. The aim was not only to create a functioning, usable product, but also to introduce the notion of genetic testing in a privacy-sensitive country that for the most part, hadn’t yet considered it an option. What would make MYCODE resonate with mass-market Japan? How could genetic testing results be shared in a way that was accurate but also actionable and motivating?

The team worked with doctors, nutritionists, medical governing bodies, and more, setting up fast, iterative cycles, and conceptualizing and prototyping almost every aspect of MYCODE in just 16 weeks. Data design, home testing experience, purchase flow, and how the service would be used over the long-term were all considered, along with traditional branding elements, like name, logo, and visual identity.

The result is a product that puts reliable genetic information into the hands of Japanese consumers, helping them to make more informed healthcare decisions. MYCODE went to market in August 2014, just nine months after the engagement with IDEO began. Not only did MYCODE fulfill Namba’s mission, it helped the company find new ways to grow: Upon announcement of the new service, DeNA’s share price jumped 6.7 percent.

Analogous research is a form of exploration that takes a team outside of its industry to find inspiration in the ways others have tackled similar challenges. These immersive experiences allow us to move beyond our expertise to see challenges with fresh eyes. In these moments, we build new levels of understanding and empathy that help us unlock aha! moments and generate ideas that we can ultimately bring to our own design challenges.

A few weeks into a project focused on redesigning the patient surgical experience with Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH), we saw an opportunity for analogous inspiration. Our client aimed to disrupt its industry by creating a service that focused not just on clinical outcomes but on the entire patient experience–from check-in to check-out. We assembled a team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and hospital executives to help us design a better experience for patients. About halfway through the project, it became clear that they needed inspiration from outside the healthcare industry.

So we headed to the airport. Why? Because, like performing surgery, taking to the skies isn’t a simple process. It involves lots of regulation, moving parts, and coordination. While an airline’s mission is to deliver a passenger from A to B, its purpose is to deliver a seamless, customer-centric travel experience. Airlines have invested in products and services to create that kind of experience, but many surgical departments haven’t considered the entire patient journey–beyond what happens clinically under the bright lights of the OR.

We brought the hospital staff to Boston Logan Airport for a morning with JetBlue—an airline known for great customer service. When the docs on our team first caught wind of the trip, they were a bit skeptical. It’s not easy to convince a bunch of highly-trained surgeons to scrub out of the OR and go on a field trip. But they piled into cars and headed to Logan.

We started at check-in. The hospital team was issued mock boarding passes and asked to check-in for their upcoming flights. They had the option of using a kiosk, their phone, or speaking to a real, live person.

Almost immediately the team began to discover parallels between the patient experience and the traveler experience. The surgeons on the team quickly noted how many different pathways there were for customers—options for families, those with disabilities, and frequent fliers. “We only have one option for our patients, but patients aren’t all the same,” one surgeon said.

The lessons continued as we cleared security. The group stopped by the Just Ask counter, JetBlue’s customer service desk. Staffed with friendly crew members, Just Ask is exactly that—a place where customers can ask JetBlue anything. That includes getting directions to the bathroom, finding out the score of the Red Sox game, or asking to rebook a flight. JetBlue crew members are empowered to help passengers—even beyond their standard job descriptions. A pre-op nurse on our team suggested having something similar in the hospital–a place where patients and their loved ones could get the support they need. “I bet it’d be easy to prototype this type of service, and it would help us learn what patients really want,” she said.

The group ended its day at JetBlue’s operations center and crew lounge. Here, the two teams met to discuss the day’s takeaways. “It starts by building a united team,” said the manager of onboard service and hospitality standards at JetBlue. “Sure, we can launch programs like the Blue Cafe to provide complimentary snacks to delayed customers or hand out pilot wings to young travelers. Of course, we do these little things–but what really matters is working together to create a consistent experience across a customer’s travel journey.”

When the NWH team circled up later that week, it was clear something had changed. The team was buzzing. Catalyzed by the analogous field trip, the doctors and nurses were ready to get to work. They mapped out a handful of prototypes to test at the hospital, including a redesigned lobby experience, and a way to engage with patients with different levels of confidence and familiarity with the hospital system.

At IDEO, we treasure these moments of cross-industry learning. Sometimes all it takes is for leaders and frontline workers to get out from beyond their desks and see things from a new perspective.

So, next time you’re feeling stuck, seek inspiration outside of your comfort zone. Consider how others have solved unique but similar problems. It might just be the change in perspective your team needs to recharge and think differently.

At first glance, surgery and airline travel don’t appear to be very similar. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find overlapping themes in the work experiences of surgeons and airline employees—stress, a high-pressure environment, a lot of team coordination. Actually, these industries have a lot to learn from each other. We at IDEO call this analogous research.

One way to offer air cover for ideas that may look wild at first is to build an innovation lab—a dedicated safe space where employees can focus on deeply understanding customer needs to design the next generation of products and services for the parent organization.

Unfortunately, many labs have gotten a bad rap for being nothing more than cost centers or design palaces with modular furniture, generating radical ideas that are not aligned with the core business.

But not all labs are fads. They take time to find their stride and show value—sometimes several years to see a new product or service through from ideation to market. That kind of timeline requires leaders with strong enough stomachs to ignore short-term failures, knowing it’s the only way to ensure long-term sustainability.

When setting up a lab, you might take a few cues from the organizational wisdom of ant colonies.

Every six months, a small group of explorer ants finds a new space, and excavates tunnels to enable the entire colony to relocate. The explorer ants start small, then scale, marking the route for the rest of the ants to follow.

Some would hypothesize that this process is a preventative strategy—keeping predators on the move. More importantly, savvy explorer ants avoid uprooting the entire colony until they’ve tested the new space and defined a clear path to get there.

Labs can do the same thing: keep the competition guessing and mitigate the risk of scaling a new product or service before it’s market ready.

In order to succeed, innovation labs require a clear purpose that will empower the parent organization; a portfolio of beacon projects that push the edge of the organization’s current strategy; creative teams with a breadth of expertise; and work spaces where the lab can develop and sustain its own unique culture.

Below we map the pathways to success in each of these areas, which any lab can use to mobilize, pioneer, and scale new ideas.

1. Define the lab's reason for being

Defining the organization’s purpose and reason for existing beyond making money is harder than it sounds. It requires some organizational soul-searching followed by deft communication. But once you’ve aligned on a purpose statement, it can shift things in radical ways, helping employees make decisions about what initiatives to pursue and what to put aside. IDEO’s creative business research studio has found that teams that foster a clear, consistent, and inspiring purpose have 12% more successful launches than teams that do not. Customers may also gain a new understanding of what you stand for and relate to you in a new way. And in a lab, a newly defined purpose can reignite the parent organization’s entrepreneurial spirit, creating a shared identity and reason to continually reinvent itself.

In 2016, the Chairman of Ford Smart Mobility, Jim Hackett, set out to define the purpose of the mobility ecosystem for Ford Smart Mobility. To do so, he established Greenfield Labs, a human-centered lab based in Palo Alto.

The sole purpose of Greenfield Labs, Hackett said, was to “bring humanity to mobility.” That clarity of focus helped to define a portfolio of work that oriented toward those who don’t drive cars, and the highly integrated ecosystem required to move goods and people freely through cities, countries, and the world.

Imagine that: America’s oldest car company setting out to improve things for those who don’t drive. With Jim’s appointment to CEO in 2017, Ford Motor Company articulated a new purpose: to be the most trusted mobility company, designing smart vehicles for a smart world.

For an organization whose sole objective for the past 115 years has been to mass produce vehicles, it’s a hard mental shift to make. But envisioning the impossible is a part of the company’s legacy.

To execute its new purpose, Ford will continue to build smarter vehicles. That’s core to its business. But setting out to understand the larger ecosystem is new to Ford’s portfolio. The role of Greenfield Labs as it establishes new locations in strategic geographies will be to partner with businesses and cities to bring customer needs to the forefront of the design of its products and services.

2. Test your strategy through beacon projects

Like the explorer ants, an innovation lab seeks out new opportunities that are complementary to—and sometimes in competition with—the parent organization’s core capabilities. Ideally, the innovation leaders and the parent organization work together to identify and solve high-priority problems through beacon projects. These are riskier endeavors that push the edge of a company’s strategic portfolio in several key ways: They compete with the core business; they must actually launch a new product, service, or venture into the market; and they build new capabilities along the way. These edge cases, which have a high degree of uncertainty and longer time horizons, may compose up to 20% of the company’s strategic portfolio. If they work, they can be game-changers.

In 2013, Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, Chairman of Intercorp, one of the fast-growing companies in South America, enlisted IDEO to help build an affordable public school system that would address the needs of emerging middle class Peruvians. After six months of research, design, and testing in a wide array of areas including brand, architectural design, curriculum design, business economics, teacher requirements, and school uniforms, Intercorp launched Innova Schools. What began as an initial prototype has now grown to 54 schools in Peru and one in Mexico. Innova is profitable and has graduated countless students who lacked an affordable schooling option. Innova is now planning to expand globally to bring affordable education to the world.

Intercorp’s second project focused on redesigning Interbank’s lobbies and in-person service experience to reduce customer queues and wait times. These observations revealed that customers would often have to wait in three different lines to request, pay, and pick up their items. The project illustrated the importance not only of improving the customer experience, but of redesigning the employee experience so they were empowered to deliver a more personalized customer experience.

Twelve months after the rollout, Interbank showed a 10% increase in new customers and an 80% increase in sales, with gains in all categories. Their NPS score showed customer loyalty skyrocketing, from 53 to 87. Those outcomes have translated across other businesses. The success of Innova Schools and Interbank inspired Rodríguez-Pastor to integrate human-centered design mindsets and methods in an in-house innovation hub, which he called La Victoria Lab. Its mandate: To transform Intercorp.

Established in 2014, the lab started small with a ragtag team of design mercenaries and a new Chief Innovation Officer, Hernan Carranza. With unique specialities in business design, anthropology, and graphic design, they called themselves an “expeditionary force for the future.” They provoked Intercorp businesses to define products and services their customers would love, utilizing human-centered ways of working.

One of the first projects sponsored by the lab set out to define the needs of Peruvian families. These family archetypes created a common ground from which all 35 different companies from Intercorp could build, with the lab as the center of gravity uniting future businesses.

Today, La Victoria Lab has grown to over 30 people, accelerating 50 beacon projects and hundreds of new ideas across Intercorp’s companies.

And while many of the 35 companies are now capable of running their own beacon projects, La Victoria Lab continues to sponsor cross-business initiatives, such as digital transformation.

With hundreds of new ideas infiltrating the organization, La Victoria Lab has already inspired new ways of thinking about Intercorp’s 35 companies—as strategic platforms in education, healthcare, financial services, retail and emerging businesses. The lab will also continue to define new mindsets and capabilities to attract, retain and develop best-in-class talent for all of its future businesses.

3. Build creative teams

Just as an ant colony needs both explorer and worker ants to survive and thrive; a lab needs and a mix of strategists, designers, and makers. Finding people who balance breadth of interests and capabilities with depth of expertise enables the lab to quickly pivot in both project and purpose if needed. Those workers are often called T-shaped, because they can go both wide across subject areas and deep on craft. It’s been shown that cross-functional, collaborative team make more rigorous, data-informed decisions, following the evidence from prototyping, solution modeling, and customer insights over hunches and gut feelings.

Here are a few of the qualities to look for in your lab’s explorer ants:

Expertise: Look for capabilities like interaction design, user/design research, software design, industrial design, communication design (visual and verbal), business design, product design and organizational design.

Mindset: Hire those who are curious, empathetic, optimistic, open to experimentation, collaborative, and comfortable with ambiguity. The no asshole rule is also critical to building collaborative teams. We’ve seen many labs fail because they held on too long to talent that was toxic to the experimental culture.

Method: Mastery of design thinking methods, including user observation and interviewing, synthesis, brainstorming, prototyping, and storytelling (to name a few) are a must. These are core capabilities to building to learn, not necessarily scaling to implement.

4. Create space and rituals for creativity

Culture is probably the biggest differentiator between the lab and the parent organization. Labs must produce radically new ideas, and a creative culture that can produce such ideas looks very different from a culture built to optimize. It’s okay to have subcultures, as they serve a different purpose and have different outcomes, but they have to work together.

At Ford’s original Greenfield Labs, many elements merge to set the stage for innovation, and developing even a few of these can lead you in the right direction.

Location: Labs thrive when they are physically far enough from the parent organization to explore a new idea without too much scrutiny, but close enough to test and co-create with the teams deeply embedded in execution. And importantly, they work best in locations with a diverse range of creative talent. Follow the designers.

Team time: Start with fewer meetings. Makers or designers need long, uninterrupted time to think and create. Maker teams protect this time by negotiating their own hours. Most teams collaborate from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with early and late hours reserved for administrative tasks. Status update meetings in the middle of the day are going to wear on your productivity time.

Field trips: Work hard, play hard. Making time and supplying budget to visit people in the field is paramount to lab work. If teams aren’t inspired, the work suffers. Not all inspiration visits are literal. They can be as simple as visiting a museum or competitor’s space together. Shared learning is the key.

Language: Instead of words like “policy” and “process,” Ford’s Greenfield Labs uses words like “guidelines” or “drumbeats.” They don’t get attached to job titles or hierarchies. No one “reports to” anyone. Instead of “leaders,” they use the term “stewards.” This is not a small point—words matter in defining expectations on a daily basis. It sets the tone for how we expect people to behave.

Values: After the first year, Greenfield Labs rewrote their values, one of which is “quirky.” That’s not something you’d identify with Ford, and it helped to formalize the goal of having a dynamic, diverse culture.

Rituals: Recognition goes a long way. Often teams are working on complex, long-term programs with multiple start-stops, owners, and changes in direction. One way to avoid a feeling of slow progress is to celebrate the small wins that occur more frequently. Greenfield Labs has a weekly ritual they call “putting socks on a chicken.” Inspired by a team member’s remark that some problems are harder than putting socks on a chicken, each week, the lab assembles to present one notable problem solver with a pair of wild or weird socks as a kind of high five. The tradition has become so beloved that new hires and visitors to the lab are also indoctrinated with their own customized socks (some actually have chickens on them). And notably, there is now a budget line-item for socks.

Learning from failure: Another way Greenfield Labs codifies lessons learned is to create digitally documented retrospectives and give out an annual "Phoenix Award" to honor failed projects and ceremoniously bid them farewell. If you are allowed to fail and celebrate what you have learned, people will be more likely to take the necessary risks to drive innovation.

Storytelling: It’s important to reinforce the lab’s reason for existing and to build a shared narrative with the parent organization, which can in turn be shared externally. Video is a great medium for storytelling, whether creating short and scrappy vignettes or more polished productions with B-roll and music. It gets the point across without a deck. In fact, skip decks altogether if you can.

Space: Expressing the spirit and aspirations of the lab through physical design is about more than post-its and foam core boards. The value of considering space lies in differentiating the lab from its corporate parent and infusing it with human dimension and creativity. This can be reflected through open floor plans, high ceilings, and plenty of daylight. Collaborative and heads-down working areas are also necessary for digging into hard problems.Instead of company logos, display photos of real people who use the new services or products. These are the ingredients for a hub of activity and creative expression, and they’re important visual signals that enable the work to be scrappy as it moves through different levels of fidelity.

Is a lab for you?

Labs are not for the faint of heart. If organizational change were easy, no company would falter. But with a clear purpose and portfolio of beacon projects, a lab can focus on new explorations while the parent company delivers its core offers. It’s a partnership.

In an era of fast-paced change and technological disruption, we’d do well to learn from the long-proven survival tactics found in nature. Ants know how to establish a link between the original colony and an exploratory space. Then slowly, ant by ant, they complete the monumental task of upending the entire colony to ensure their perseverance.

Unless otherwise specified, all statistics come from IDEO’s Creative Difference, a digital tool to assess, guide, and track the development of creative and innovative teams.

Visuals by Jeannie Phan.

Today’s leaders face immense pressure to optimize their core offers and cultivate new ideas. But in large organizations, new ideas are too often smothered by middle management. We don’t have to look too far back to Kodak, Blockbuster, and Yahoo for reminders of behemoths that became so attached to a core product and revenue stream that they overlooked riskier—but highly promising—opportunities.

As my team and I prepared for Typeforce, an annual Chicago typography gallery show, we started to think about how we could leverage AI and our own creative skills to build an intelligent system that could work with us—a communication designer, a production designer, and a data scientist—to create a visually distinct submission.

While you might think of typography as designing or selecting just the right font and arranging it immaculately, submissions to Typeforce range far outside that, including everything from carved sculptural elements and needlepoint to hand-drawn tableaus and digital installations. It was our first time submitting to the show, and our goal was to take advantage of this wide-open opportunity and use our individual crafts to make something out of the ordinary.

We imagined a creative process where Kristen, our communication designer, would give an algorithm examples of posters with interesting type compositions, and it would try to learn from them and spit back lots and lots of attempts to create something similar. Kristen could use the algorithm’s generated posters as starting points for creating new posters to feed back into it, as well as clues for what it still needed to learn. Trying to train the algorithm could itself become a great set of constraints for creativity, and when it was over, we could show off the visual artifacts of that back-and-forth process at the show.

We landed on Dadaist and Futurist compositions as an interesting place to begin. The Dadaists made things that didn’t make sense, reacting to a world (at the time, in the midst of World War I) that also didn’t make sense. That felt relevant to today as well, and had the added bonus of being something a computer might be better at producing than more immaculate, grid-based layouts.

So we got to work collecting historical examples we liked, and Kristen traced them so I could feed them into our algorithm as digital files. I got to work on the algorithm itself, which we named Kurt, after the Dadaist artist and designer Kurt Schwitters.

For Kristen, teaching Kurt initially felt weirdly similar to teaching a human design student. He made compositions and she looked at them, identified his strongest concepts, and "suggested" ways that they could be improved through the next round of examples. Then he responded to her feedback.

After this first exchange, though, the differences between an algorithm and a human design student became more apparent. Kurt's learning was reactive, limited to the examples he's seen and the only way he knows to think—in numerical variables like font sizes, rotations, and X-Y coordinates. Human designers often start out this way too—just absorbing examples of design and then mimicking them—but they usually grow past it. Instead of just copying a poster they see, the poster might inspire them to push aspects of it further, or combine them with other styles that work well together. AIs like Kurt can’t do this the way a person can—certainly not yet, and probably not anytime soon.

Kurt also doesn’t understand English, much less design terminology or ideas about why he’s doing anything. He can’t understand feedback about tone or context that Kristen might give her real students, like "your typography feels a little uninviting and impersonal. Is that tone appropriate to your audience/content/message?" And being able to respond to those sorts of questions in a sensitive, nuanced way is pretty central to being a good communication designer.

Ultimately we filled the wall with 90 prints, which made for a nice display of Kurt’s strengths—his ability to learn, and how prolific he can be—as well as Kristen’s—her skill as a designer and how she used those skills to teach.

Designers like Kristen can lean on Kurt to do things humans can't, like create dozens of compositions in a minute, or provide modifications or jumping off points that are really off the wall and decidedly not what an experienced designer would do. Some creative thinkers are already experimenting with these kinds of techniques; Robin Sloan, for example, a writer who hacked a text editor to complete his sentences using a deep learning model trained on a bunch of old sci-fi stories.

We imagine a future with more tools that creators can “teach"—unique products of an individual’s sensibilities that serve to amplify their intent and challenge them creatively, like a synthesizer that learns to play along and accompany in a style complementary to a musician’s vision. We hope Kurt inspires other designers, engineers, and data scientists to explore this future by building “collaborators” together.

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As a data scientist, I know computers are great at trying lots of things quickly. But when it comes to learning artful nuance, they can fall flat. At the same time, human graphic designers are great at tweaking and critiquing, but they can only move their hands so fast in Illustrator. It's a juxtaposition that begs the question, can AI and humans collaborate to leverage their unique strengths?

Battle terminology sneaks in (kill, crush, destroy, capture, acquire); and as in war, it becomes necessary to take the humanity out of those “targets” in order to execute on the plan.

But it’s not impossible to imagine a world where business success goes hand-in-hand with seeing and respecting the humanity of our competitors, or customers, or colleagues. Even at IDEO, where we champion a human-centered approach, the words we use in meetings and briefs can fall into the tried and true trope of conquest.

As a thought exercise, we made a list of the common terms that can dehumanize customers and competitors, and a list of alternatives that might infuse our conversations about individual and organizational performance with more humanity, agency, and reciprocity.

No one needs more business jargon, but we have a hunch that changing the way we speak can change the way we think, and in turn can change the way business feels and what it delivers. We’re trying it out and invite you to do the same.

Business is competitive by design. To succeed, as an individual or an organization, requires assertiveness, power, and strength. As a result, much of the language we use while doing business implies a desire to overpower—or even disempower—our competitors.

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.