I help leaders and organizations evolve to realize their full creative potential and positively impact people’s lives.
What you won’t learn from my bio:
I grew up surrounded by entrepreneurs. My mother founded a theater group and my father, a mechanical engineer, launched multiple product start-ups.
Joined IDEO:
1999
Full Bio
Bryan Yuji Walker is a long time IDEO veteran and Partner. He leads IDEO's climate domain, helping organizations design and evolve their business and culture in pursuit of innovation, growth, resilience and impact in the Climate Era.
Over his 20 years career at IDEO, he has a track record of helping IDEO see and realize the next big thing. Design Thinking. Experience Design. Transformation.
He was an early member of the Human Factors discipline at IDEO that pioneered many of today’s standard design research methods. A group that was instrumental in defining what is now known as Design Thinking.
Later, he became a core leader in the business practice focused on service and environment design for clients like Nike and Marriott. In this role he helped create many of IDEO’s experience design tools and frameworks - user journeys, behavioral segments, experience blueprints.
In the last decade, he led IDEO’s global transformation business working alongside Executives as they evolved their business and culture. During this time the transformation offer grew from the periphery to core of IDEO. Multi-year transformational programs with companies like Ford, Intercorp and Orbia became standard business. Best practices in capability building, purpose-led cultures, innovation labs and accelerators were honed. Several new corporate partnerships and ventures were incubated and grown.
What’s next?
Bryan believes climate is the defining challenge of our times. The next two decades will be defined by our ability to reconfigure ourselves within our planetary boundaries. The transition will impact everyone and require everything to be redesigned.
Forever the optimist, he sees the Climate Era as one of the greatest opportunities. It will give rise to many new businesses. It will also transform every business through the emergence of new business models, ways of working, regulations and customer and employee expectations. Similar to the internet era.
Forever the design advocate, he believes design has a pivotal role to play. Sustainable products aren’t good enough. We need new products, services and experiences that are both sustainable and simply better than today’s options. Better is what will fuel adoption at the speed necessary for a successful economic and environmental transition.
In addition to his work at IDEO, Bryan is the Design Fellow of Conservation International and a core design team member for the Aspen Institute First Movers Fellowship Program. His work has been featured prominently in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and The New York Times.
