How to breathe new life into a stale corporate culture.

Innovative start-ups are typically known for their collaborative and creative corporate cultures. These small businesses are often led by new entrepreneurs bursting with big ideas and grand ambitions to change the world—or at least their small corner of it.

It’s easy to imagine how teams in these environments would openly embrace design thinking and eagerly elicit feedback from customers and stakeholders in the development of new products.

But how do you infuse that kind of creative mindset into a large, traditional company that has been around for decades?

The honest answer is that it can be challenging. Old companies often have very established ways of doing business, with rigid protocols and routines in place. However, these obstacles can be overcome when a new or existing leader has the vision to drive change and inspire a new way of working.

A great example is Diego Rodriguez, Intuit’s chief product and design officer. Intuit is a 36-year-old global accounting and software firm, best known for its popular TurboTax software. The company has more than 8,000 employees and about $5 billion in annual revenue.

From IDEO to Intuit

Intuit hired Rodriguez in 2017, hoping he’d bring a user-centric spirit to its product design. He came with impressive credentials. Rodriguez was a founding faculty member of Stanford’s d.school and spent 17 years at IDEO, the world’s preeminent design consultancy, where he helped develop IDEO U, CoLab, Creative Difference and other initiatives to cultivate future design thinking innovators. Today, Rodriguez is cultivating that same kind of innovative culture at Intuit.

He recently shared his approach to reinventing design culture at Intuit on Design Better, a podcast for the design community. In the episode, Rodriguez discusses the way design influences business goals at Intuit, the company’s “Design for Delight” approach to product design and why building trust and empathy with customers is critical when designing any financial product.

Intuit has always been a design-driven company, but hiring Rodriguez has brought a fresh perspective to a decades-old environment. Their decision was clearly a good one: Intuit has seen revenue growth every year since Rodriguez joined the company.

To learn more about the benefits of bringing new creative strategies to your company, read our post on 8 Stats that Prove Design Thinking Pays Off.

Learn how to enable innovation skill-building at scale or download our free ebook Kickstart Innovation: A Guide for Organizations.