When the company purpose focuses on making a meaningful change in the world, it stokes employees’ passion, inspires them, and injects powerful meaning into their work. 

As IDEO Cambridge Portfolio Director, Katherine Londergan works with companies of all sizes to bring new innovations to life. Katherine shares with us how her team uses venture design to move from hypothesis, to testing and prototyping, to rapid iterations.

This excerpt from Creative Confidence by IDEO Founder David Kelley and IDEO Partner Tom Kelley lays out the creativity challenge of the customer journey map as a way to gain new insights and develop empathy with your customers.

We sat down with IDEO Partner Emeritus and Executive Design Director Jane Fulton Suri to hear about her experiences and insights as a pioneer of human-centered design and empathy in design research. 

Having recently joined IDEO, I was fascinated by the way design researchers can enter any situation, and instantly make people feel at ease. They can interview anyone, from wounded veterans to wedding planners, and encourage them to open up and share their unfiltered opinions. 

As a 20 year Food Network veteran and classically trained chef, Tyler Florence constantly spurs the evolution of the food & lifestyle industry. From launching the successful San Francisco restaurant Wayfare Tavern and becoming an award-winning winemaker to founding the social recipe sharing app Yumavore, Tyler’s entrepreneurial spirit enables him and his team to consistently innovate in a variety of business endeavors.

We sat down with IDEO Founder & Chairman David Kelley to hear his insights on how to empower employees and instill creative confidence throughout a team or organization.

Claudia Fry, VP of People Operations at FiveStars shared with us how she goes beyond the conventional HR model and how the fresh mindset and insights she gained from IDEO U help her team shape the employee experience and enable the FiveStars team to do their best work.

We sat down with IDEO Chicago Executive Portfolio Director, Neil Stevenson to hear about the journey of establishing storytelling as part of IDEO’s culture and why IDEO now embraces storytelling as an essential element of design thinking.

As Partner Emeritus and an Executive Design Director at IDEO, Jane Fulton Suri continues to advance design insight and inspiration and develop future creative leaders.  

As Vice President of Design Innovation and Strategy, Claudia Kotchka brought design into the DNA of P&G. We sat down with Claudia to hear her perspective on design leadership, creativity, and purpose, and to learn what it means to be a leader in innovation.