About

Unlock BIG Ideas

Berkeley Innovation Group unlocks BIG ideas using design thinking

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Our BIG Mission

Create Positive Change

BIG's mission is to develop and deliver disruptive innovations that create positive change

We believe in building cultures of curiosity

Build an innovation culture and help your organisation break through to create positive change.

We believe in sustainable innovation

Design thinking is a misnomer; we believe it is a “learn by doing” discipline that requires intentional actions to meet user-centered needs.

Our Approach

BIG Design Thinking

We help organizations find a better way by unlocking the new.

Innovation Services

To unlock BIG growth

  • The BIG Why™ (4-6 weeks)
  • The BIG Idea™ (6 weeks)
  • The BIG Test™ (4 weeks)
  • The BIG Disruptor™ (12 weeks)
Understand
Ideate
Disrupt

The BIG Why™

Understand your business and its challenges

  • Identify the number of ideas among your current employees
  • Evaluate the current idea development workflow
  • Develop recommendations for increased velocity and transparency of idea generation and development
4 Weeks
Understand

The BIG Idea™

Unlock novel human-centered ideas based on needs

  • Twenty stakeholder interviews (internal and external)
  • Project-team workshop
  • Agreement on insights
  • Executive team presentation with 4-5 big ideas
6 Weeks
Ideate

The BIG Test™

Test how ideas work in the real world

  • Co-create with project team 1-2 minimum-viable products
  • Design discovery experiments to gauge are we meeting users’ needs
  • Report findings to the executive team, gain buy-in for further development
4 Weeks
Test

The BIG Disruptor™

Advance MVPs to high-fidelity prototypes

  • Prioritize hypotheses gained from MVP testing
  • Iterate on the most important hypotheses to gain additional information
  • Run validation experiments for data that enables a final “go or no-go” decision by leadership
12 Weeks
Disrupt

Our Partners

We create BIG results for private, public and government institutions. 

Publicly-Traded Companies

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Health

GE Health

  • Customer-focused B2B Sales
  • Aggregated voice-of-customer to increase share-of-wallet.

Private Companies

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Environment

Recology

  • Gaining Efficiency of Operations
  • Reducing waste creation and increasing material throughput.
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Sports

Oakland A’s

  • Reimagining the Fan Experience
    Prototype and test fan improvements for the new ballpark.
  • The Oakland A’s had twelve new ideas from fan engagement to stadium design that were tested before drawings of the new stadium were completed

Local & State Governments

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Government

CityInnovate

  • Designing for a Diverse Population
  • Guided civic innovators to empathize and design for all.

Educators at Heart

As instructors of design thinking at UC Berkeley Haas, we combine our applied innovation curriculum with our expertise in strategy work to unlock innovation.

"If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got."
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Albert Einstein

Theoretical Physicist

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
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Alan Kay

American Computer Scientist

Our Team

Meet The Changemakers

Clark Kellogg

Clark is a curious soul who brings an unending passion for creativity to his Design Thinking practice. He has led consulting engagements with corporations, non-profits, governments, and universities in North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. He has twice completed a 365-days of art challenge.

Jeff Eyet

Jeff is a radical diverger who lives for the “aha!” moments found in extreme use cases that inform the user’s journey. He’s a master of low-cost, high-learning prototypes to gain actionable feedback from potential users. Ask him anything about dog training.

Shannon Eliot

A former journalist, Shannon loves digging deep to uncover user stories that inform society's most wicked problems. She believes that anyone can innovate and is passionate about fostering inclusive spaces that catalyze creative sparks. She speaks four languages (poorly) and plays the fiddle, although rarely simultaneously.

Have a question for BIG?

BIG Answers

What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a critical thinking methodology using the designer’s mindset of curiosity, creativity, and collaboration to uncover the unmet needs of users to create innovative outcomes. It is a stuffy label for something that in practice is advanced common sense: empathy towards our fellow humans. 
How can design thinking help your business?
Executives are rewarded for solving problems with the latest information as quickly as possible. However, this assumes the correct question is being asked. By diverging, seeking new information before converging on a solution, we believe design thinking is the engine of innovation.
What does innovation really mean?

Innovations are an outcome, usually a product or service, that captures the value of an emerging technology’s value creation for a target set of users. However, an emphasis on technology, or feasibility, ignores the user’s needs, known as desirability.


For example, we don’t buy Bluetooth connectivity, we buy hands-free conversations. Thus, we believe design thinking is the methodology to capture user-centered needs and to create a pipeline of innovations that maintain an industry-leading position.

How can innovation help your business?

There is a strong link between innovation performance and the organization’s overall success. In today’s business landscape, disruption is a constant threat. A well-managed and successful innovation process is the only way to maintain your leadership position. Whether challenging the competition, or identifying a leapfrog opportunity to redefine an industry, design thinking is the tool for your organization to quickly respond to the rapidly changing business landscape.

Can innovation be a core strength of an organization?

Yes, and having a culture of innovation as a core competency gives your organization a sustainable competitive advantage. The key is teaching employees to practice empathy for their customers’ end users and then allowing them to creatively address the pain to create a gain. Design thinking allows for a sustained, well-maintained innovation funnel that will ensure the durability of your leadership position.


For example, Apple’s core competency is innovation. It introduced the iPod as an "innovative” way to listen to music and maintained that position with the iTunes store. Apple’s iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but by reframing music from albums to curated streams composed of individual songs, it leapfrogged far beyond the competition and redefined the word, “mobile.”

How does the design thinking innovation process work?

BIG uses the same methodology they teach at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which consists of four phases:

Discovery: Getting to know your customers’ and their end users’ pains, gains, and jobs-to-be-done without offering solutions. The key is asking the right question, specifically that you’re addressing the human-centered need.

Insights: Looking for patterns in the data from the Discovery phase to uncover the “why behind the what,” that drives users to action.

Ideation: Building off user-centered Insights, we co-create solutions inspired by emerging industry, technological, and social trends plus the latest academic research.

Prototype & Experiment: Bringing the fruits of Ideation to life with low-cost, high-impact prototypes. We lead the testing of these prototypes for desirability with current customers and prospective users.

If successful, we move on to testing feasibility. If desirability is not met, we repeat the design thinking process informed by our earlier work.

How long does it take?

An average engagement takes twelve weeks. To fit your organization’s unique needs, the project can be customized with shorter “train the trainer” models or longer-term “innovation as a service” offerings.

What can you guarantee?

Our clients have received a deeper understanding of their customers and end users’ needs, which leads to prototypes of products and services that reinforce an existing leadership position and defend against disruption from competitors and startups alike.

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