Design Innovation, Research, & Strategy
Innovation | Brand Design Language | Design Assessments | Process Improvement
Integrating design with the business of design, we assist you in facilitating and integrating hundreds of synergistic moments into inspired innovative applications and solutions for building your vision by design.
FUTURE PROOF YOUR ORGANIZATION
Worried about differentiating from the competition or being disrupted?
Our proven innovation methods keep you head of the curve.
HCDi Innovation
Process
Innovation Summits
Best Practice
Insight Tours
Design Research &
Immersive Labs
Global
Listening Posts
Ignite and Sustain Innovation with a HCDi - Human- Centered Design Innovation Process
Innovation Summit: Sometimes knowing where to start innovating is the hardest part.
An HCD Innovation Summit brings together industry experts and stakeholders to tackle challenges, spark new ideas, and shape the future of your organization. It signals a proactive approach to innovation—benefiting products, services, and employees.
Innovation Summit Benefits
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Mitigates risk through market exploration
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Inspires breakthrough innovation
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Gains stakeholder buy-in Prioritizes a focus
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Provides a filtered portfolio of opportunities
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Creates consistency and next step engagement
Our Innovation Summit is a focused, collaborative event designed to uncover and prioritize your biggest innovation opportunities. Tailored to your organization’s priorities, it provides a structured yet flexible approach to drive meaningful outcomes.
Typically held over one to three days, the summit may include pre-work or internal engagement tools to maximize impact. Follow-up sessions, such as design bursts and incubator models, help refine ideas and turn opportunities into action.
Ready to accelerate innovation?, contact us to learn more
Design Research and Global Listening Posts
Stay ahead by identifying emerging trends and market influencers that shape the future. Our Design Research & Global Listening Posts combine human-centered research with global insights to help organizations navigate change.
By gathering qualitative insights from diverse perspectives, we help executive teams make informed decisions, anticipate consumer shifts, and mitigate investment risks. This intelligence strengthens growth strategies, fuels innovation, and prepares businesses for what’s next.
Turn insights into action, contact us to learn more.
The future is unpredictable, but your business can be ready by developing a human-centered approach of more deeply understanding your customers, turning insights into actionable outcomes and helping to drive business strategy Future-Fortified organizations stay resilient by:
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Sensing market shifts in real time
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Keeping people at the center of decision-making
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Maintaining a strong innovation pipeline
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Responding with agility and confidence
Future-Fortified companies don’t just react—they lead. Build the right strategies, structures, and capabilities to navigate change and drive sustainable growth.
Future Fortified: Be Prepared to Respond To Market Dynamics
Immersive labs, both physical and digital can bring to life research, co-create and align teams.
Let's future proof your business. Contact us to get started
Insight Tours: Innovating Through Benchmarking & Best Practices
Insight Tours fuel innovation by exposing organizations to the best practices of successful businesses across industries, both in the U.S. and globally. These in-person experiences connect teams with cross-industry leaders to exchange ideas, tackle challenges, and refine operations.
By learning from others, organizations gain actionable insights to inform strategic decisions, optimize processes, and drive meaningful innovation.
Ideas for tours:
- Improve customer service
- Enhance your innovation process
- Integrate human-centered design thinking into your organization
- Review branding best practices
- Learn what creates an exceptional environment
Learn from the best, contact us to learn more.
Innovation Sprints: Fast Tracking Tough Challenges
SPRINTS are an accelerated way to apply Human-Centered Design to real challenges, engaging stakeholders in a focused, high-energy process. These concentrated bursts of Design Thinking—typically spanning five days to a few weeks—help teams rapidly generate ideas, test solutions, and gain quick, tangible wins.
SPRINTS are ideal for:
✔ Energizing teams and building momentum
✔ Demonstrating Design Thinking in action
✔ Creating shareable proof-points for larger initiatives
✔ Quickly addressing priority challenges
Need a jumpstart? contact us to get started.
Select Case Studies
HCDITM
Brand Design Language
Innovation/Design Strategy'
Innovation
Design Strategy / Assessment
Design Strategy
Design Assessment
Jewish Family Service
GE Healthcare
Resource Fiber
CVS
IMS
Whirlpool
Lifetime Brands
Human-Centered Design Innovation process - HCDiTM
Jewish Family Services
Nonprofits Moving into the Future with HCDiTM
Jewish Family Services (JFS) is a charitable organization working to build a stronger, healthier, more resilient community in San Diego. Today, with nearly a century of experience behind them, JFS is embracing the future with the spirit of a start-up. They are one of only a handful of nonprofits across the country to institute a full-time Innovation Director and embark on a deliberate pathway toward becoming an agile social enterprise.
After careful deliberation, JFS selected INTERSECTION-INC as their guiding innovation partner on INTERSECTION’s Human-Centered Design Innovation – HCDiTM; a comprehensive set of proprietary tools and frameworks curated to structure and support organizational implementation of Human-Centered Design. Internally positioned as the "Heart of Innovation" initiative, the transformational process began by focusing on:
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Defining the current state of innovation at JFS
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Collaboratively defining the "Heart of Innovation" goals
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Improving internal cultural behaviors to be more empathic and innovative
INTERSECTION-INC lead the training and coaching of JFS's leadership team and staff through the essentials of Human-Centered Design. JFS stakeholders learned to empathize and create a common process for listening to the voices and needs of their community. HCDiTM not only introduced the organization to the to skills needed to drive innovation, it increased the quality and frequency of collaboration and communication across the organization. One lesson stands out; incremental changes are key to measurable growth. JFS continues optimistically on its innovation journey and remains a thought leader in nonprofit service design.
Resource Fiber
Strategic Visualization and Concept Design
Resource Fiber is establishing the U.S. bamboo products manufacturing industry to develop innovative products, supply industrial users with bamboo fiber and create well-paying agricultural & manufacturing jobs.
Based on our Business of Design methodologies, Intersection-Inc worked with their team to create a strategic roadmap, develop and filter numerous opportunities, create an IP strategy, analyze risk and visualize future concepts for returns in the short-term. The presentation secured their Series A funding.
Contact us for a full review of the project.
•Benefits of Strategic Visualization
•Speed Comercialization With Small Fast Wins
•Develop Go To Market Relationships
•Accelerate Cultural Adoption By Communicating Change
•Show Capital Resources Investment Opportunities
CVS Pharmacy
The Pharmacy of the Future
When we met CVS, it was an operationally driven company looking to improve innovation processes and create a vision for the pharmacy of the future by exploring the unmet needs of their customers, pharmacists and other stakeholders.
Working under the umbrella of Launch Institute, three leading design innovation studios The Design Academy (USA West coast) Experientia (Europe) Launch Institute (USA East coast) worked together to provide diverse perspectives and research methodologies to better understand their customers' pharmacy experience and inform their strategic vision and business models. An innovation studio was developed for the client where innovation workshops were held to teach the process and distill the research. Ethnographic observations, interviews, secondary research "Learning Journey's" and The Design Academy's Salon were some of the methodologies used to provide best practice and rich insights from a global perspective on customers, pharmacists, healthcare environments, communities, and alternative health experiences.
Research and customer touch points encompassed
• Trends • Form & Space • Workflows • Interaction • Customer Archetype Visualization • Ethnographic Research • Product • Experience design (UX)
Results
• Gave CEO and innovation 'voice'
• Sustainable innovation process development from research to concepts to opportunities and filtering
• Brand product and service experience concepts and opportunities
• Team design thinking skill development and alignment across disciplines
• Business model development
GE Healthcare
The Magic of Science & Empathy Creating the Brand Language Thread
Intersection / The Design Academy consulted with GE Healthcare on mentoring and unifying the global design team through a Design Philosophy, The Magic of Science and Empathy, and values which have been translated into a brand design language experience.
The Global Design Philosophy presented by Bob Schwartz, GEHC General Manager Design, was rated by GE Healthcare one of their Top 5 Highlights at RSNA 2010 show in Chicago.
'The 'Magic of Science and Empathy' initiative is GE Healthcare's own drive to connect the functional features of its products with emotional benefits. We look to meet the healthcare industry's unmet needs," says Schwartz, General Manager of Global Design at GE Healthcare.
Intersection / The Design Academy developed a color palette based on the DNA strategy.
Healthcare is a major issue in our culture that requires a design's eye to bring a holistic and empathic experience to patients, caregivers, and medical professionals. Intersection / The Design Academy is experienced in creating the innovative framework to transform institutions to realize their human and social capital to heir greatest advantage.
Human-Centered Design Innovation (HCDi) puts people at the center, powered by data and technology. While many organizations have strong innovation processes, they often lack the operating model to sustain them. HCDi bridges this gap by combining creative problem-solving with a structured framework—aligning innovation with strategy through clear tasks, accountability, structure, and measurement.
Turn ideas into lasting impact.
IMS Integrated Medical Systems
Design Brand Assessment-Strengthening the Brand through the integration of Design into the Strategy Vision of the Company
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IMS is an innovative medical equipment developer recognized as a 'Product Leader' in the Military market who develops integrated product systems for the medical field that clearly demonstrate viable improvements in managing the care of patients and greater efficiencies for the medical practitioners and medical institutions worldwide.
Challenge Intersection / The Design Academy, Inc. was contracted to assist and advise on a product development and branding strategy for their commercialization initiative. This first Phase was an Assessment to better understand the company background, objectives, product and positioning and provide recommendations of how to move forward.
The Assessment and recommendations focused on how the Company could reduce Disruptive Technology and Market risk through Design Management and User Experience processes, Improved Product Design, and Cohesive Branding Strategies that help enforce a Product Leadership position in the commercial market.
Methodology The assessment team's focus was on assessing the Company's product in terms of a commercial application. Including function, service, aesthetics, materials, device attachments, monitor, software, design language, development process and brand identity of product and communications. While its primary focus was on a Product and Brand analysis, it is within a corporate context, taking into consideration company culture and organization.
The assessment employed a discovery practice in the collection and analysis of evidence. Special attention was given to the evaluation of physical evidence in the form of product, communications materials and other media through which the product and brand is experienced. Analysis was based on interviewing key staff, clients, advisory board members, and contractors, client/expert workshop with an analysis of 'discovery' materials provided. The interview phase was critical and involved a series of interviews, but also observations centered around key areas of culture, organization, process, product and people as it relates to design and branding.
In conjunction with the Assessment, Intersection / The Design Academy also worked on product development, which added additional insights to the Assessment process.
Key Output A knowledge-base platform and recommendations on which to build a product and brand commercialization development plan to leverage design and key core competencies at the Company. The Company uses the Assessment as a strategic plan framework.
The longer term goal is to develop an integrated corporate commercialization strategy and plan with a 'design innovation mind' that increases company brand value and minimizes risk while maintaining leadership in the military market, with a focus on potentially profitable innovation of applying technology to commercial market. |
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Whirlpool
Aligning Engineering and Design teams to improve design-making,
communication and speed to market.
Reading the forces that drive product development, what Cagan and Vogel from CMU call "the SET factors of Social, Economic and Technological change", is a challenge particularly in large companies. The number of decisions that must be made when developing a new product is staggering. The larger the company, the more departments and individuals there are and the greater the number of decisions. When companies plan for new product development they can consciously or unconsciously tilt the balance.
Our goal was to evaluate the process at Whirlpool and develop a model of Whirlpool's decision-making process.
A secondary goal was to increase the communication and relationship between design and engineering.
Methodology
The model of product development was established by observing an existing program at Whirlpool, best practice benchmarking and leveraging our work with other companies where we developed similar models.
We looked for issues of how customer trends are factored in planning, how different departments were represented at each stage of the process and how the brand legacy is considered.
Lifetime Brands
Assessing operations of global product development and design to recommend
improvements for their 5-year plan.
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Lifetime Brands is "North America's leading resource for nationally branded kitchenware, tabletop and home decor products." Lifetime Brands markets their products to major Housewares retailers in the United States. Their continued growth significantly impacts their current design innovation structure, process, culture, integration, quality, brand development and how the value of design is defined and measured.
In their quest for pursuing world class design, the Lifetime Brands Product Development & Design Department asked the Intersection to assess their operations to better define the current structure and make key recommendations that could be strategically prioritized into an actionable plan. |
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