Unlock BIG Ideas
Berkeley Innovation Group unlocks BIG ideas using design thinking

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.
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)
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
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
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
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
Our Partners
We create BIG results for private, public and government institutions.
Publicly-Traded Companies

SearchCo
- Creating an Innovation Funnel
- Built a clear process to evaluate employee-led innovations.
- SearchCo viewed innovations to their data centers as engineering-led projects focused on incremental improvements for internal customers; whereas the customer was the external Cloud user with unique KPIs that required a production-led solution.

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

Sonic Foundry
- Responding to disruption
Increasing value to remote employees of client companies. - Sonic Foundry realized a new, user-centered line of business within 12 weeks
Private Companies

Recology
- Gaining Efficiency of Operations
- Reducing waste creation and increasing material throughput.

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

Hummin’
- Designing during a Crisis
- Created a platform of real-time clinician wellbeing data.
Local & State Governments

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

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

Sonic Foundry
- Responding to Disruption
- Increasing value to remote employees of client companies.
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."

Albert Einstein
Theoretical Physicist
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Alan Kay
American Computer Scientist
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.
BIG Answers
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.