In a nutshell:

We are seeking a Senior Business Designer to join our Shanghai location. We are looking for someone who has a unique blend of real-world experience and theory, someone who likes to blur the lines between strategy and creative, who has a passion for bringing market-leading offerings and new ventures to market. You will begin as a core member of IDEO’s interdisciplinary teams and our expectation is that you would grow into a project leader, responsible for orchestrating and delivering across all areas of a design challenge.

Why is this role important for IDEO’s work?

Business Designers make the biggest impact by generating new design opportunities by thinking creatively about financial impacts, risks, experiments, and data. Their skillset is critical to our work because they are passionate about trying new things rather than focusing on the best practices and they explore how approaches commonly adopted by start-ups might inform value creation for corporate clients. We count on them to inspire designers through business and entrepreneurial thinking.

Once here you will:

• Design a new venture that creates new revenues for the business.
• Design a new business model that enhances and extends consumer experiences while creating new opportunities for revenue.
• Help clients identify and develop new growth options within existing brands.
• Design new products, services and consumer experiences that differentiate the company from its competition.
• Create compelling new value propositions for customers.
• Design organizational structures and strategic assets to help the company drive its own innovation.

What does IDEO offer you?

IDEO is a place unlike any other. It’s a place where you can solve diverse, complex challenges for our clients or the organization, alongside thoughtful, intelligent individuals who lead with curiosity, empathy, and optimism. Sure we work hard, but we also intentionally craft moments that allow our community to pause, create, and connect. We encourage our community to bring their whole selves to work, respect the need for work-life balance, and allow for autonomy in the design process and your career. 

Relevant experience:

Our basic requirement is that candidates should have around 5 years of working experience. You should have demonstrable experience taking an idea from theory and analysis into a market launch. For instance, this could be as an entrepreneur, a core member of a startup, a venture capitalist, or a product or marketing manager at a multinational corporation. We are expecting candidates to be adept at designing business models, market research, and financial modeling. 

In addition:

• Capability to coach and teach other designers about business and energize the community with an entrepreneurial spirit.
• Capability to combine human stories and needs with hard data to identify a compelling path forward for product, service and venture creation.
• Successful candidates will combine rigorous business acumen across all of the following areas, along with world-class depth in one or two: Marketing (Product or Brand), Product Development, Organizational Behavior, Operations, Finance.
• Capability to work in diverse work cultures and comfortable with nonhierarchical organizations.
• Capability to work with, learn from, and contribute to the global community of Business Designers at IDEO.
• An MBA or a Bachelor’s degree in business is helpful but not a requirement
• Professional fluency in both Mandarin Chinese and English is required.

It would be a bonus if you have:

• Direct experience in designing and launching new ventures or direct experience working with Digital Products, Data, or Organizational Design
• Experience leading project teams
• Experience facing clients 

About IDEO:

IDEO is an internationally renowned innovation and design firm that uses a human-centered approach in design to help organizations create products, brands, services, environments and strategies. We help our clients identify new directions and offerings by designing for people’s latent needs, behaviors, and desires. As social issues enter the mind of the 21st century society, IDEO is integrating themes such as sustainability and social responsibility into our designs. A partial client list include: Eli Lilly, Hewlett Packard (HP), Intel, Marriott, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Nestle, Nissan, Nokia, Pepsico, Samsung, and SAP.

IDEO consists of design thinking experts in the disciplines of design, engineering, social science, and business strategy. Our strength in innovation stems from our unique culture based on collaboration, diversity, curiosity, openness to ideas, and empathy that defines each of our eight locations: San Francisco, Palo Alto, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Shanghai, London, and Munich. Since 2005, the Boston Consulting Group has identified IDEO as one of the most innovative companies in the world, and a survey conducted by IMD, Egon Zehnder, and Fast Company placed IDEO fifth on a list of the most admired US innovators. Beginning in 1991, IDEO topped BusinessWeek’s list of design award winners for fourteen years straight. Other awards include nineteen Red Dot awards and more than fifteen iF Hanover awards.

Pop quiz:

Please include your answer to the following prompt in your cover letter:

Please tell us about a time that you applied human-centered design to solve a business problem (200 words or less).

Application instructions:

To apply, please submit your resume and cover letter including your answer to the pop quiz question.