Case Studies

Plan International is an independent development and humanitarian organization that advances children’s rights and equality for girls around the world. Their challenge and opportunity is to design with and for the Indian diaspora community in the US to prototype a new model for better engaging existing and acquiring new members to support their global mission.

The Minds that Move Us initiative challenges communities to design innovative education and training models that create social equity and economic mobility, driven by the market demands of business and industry as well as the needs of youth and adult learners.

Our collaborative exploration of personalized medicine puts individuals and families at the center of the design process and bridges the exciting space between enabling agency at the consumer level and leveraging emerging technologies to transform customer experience and outcomes.

The National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) serves as the national health care advocacy organization for America’s medically underserved and uninsured and the community health centers that serve as their health care home.

How might providers re-design and/or better integrate their services in order to form next practices and new business models that will deliver more inclusive, person-centered support to the disability community in RI, in a way that enables its members to have and build great lives?

In 2016, BIF worked Children's Health to help them understand the experiences, identify service gaps, and explore opportunity spaces for low-income families with a medically complex child.

The Student Experience Lab partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to engage teachers in creating and leading local communities of practice focused on issues of equity and closing opportunity and achievement gaps.

In partnership with the Alliance for Innovation and Transformation (AFIT), the Student Experience Lab is designing and testing new models and next practices for community colleges. These models will address current challenges facing community colleges in order to transform student outcomes and create sustainable higher ed institutions.

If deeper learning approaches are going to spread, there must be intentional methods for sharing practices and communicating with a greater majority of educators. In order to reach this majority, these practices must be accessible, desirable, and popular among broader audiences of educators.

In collaboration with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation BIF supported a collaborative effort between environmentalist groups and New England fisherman to create a shared vision for sustainable groundfish stocks in New England.

In 2016, BIF worked Children's Health to help them understand the experiences, identify service gaps, and explore opportunity spaces for low-income families with a medically complex child.

BIF worked with The Health and Wellness Alliance for Children -- a cross-sectoral, nonprofit group of community organizations in Dallas, TX focused on helping children achieve their health and well-being potential -- to engage families and put them at the center of determining where change needs to happen.

Students Design For Education (SD4E) is a groundbreaking initiative to create a school designed by high school students. SD4E is driven by a team of students hungry for transformation, supported by community members and educators passionate about student success, and powered by BIF’s extensive experience in human-centered design.

BIF is partnering with the Hewlett Foundation to prototype School Hackers, a free online platform that inspires and enables educators to share creative ways of repurposing existing resources and capabilities to move their students toward deeper learning.

In partnership with Children’s Health in Dallas, Texas, the Patient Experience Lab is imagining, designing, and testing new models for care.

Today’s young adults face uncertainty as they transition out of high school and are forced to navigate their next steps to determine how their interests might translate into a viable career path.

At BIF, we believe that great stories can change the world. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the Business Innovation Factory is exploring how storytelling and narrative methods can improve healthcare and contribute toward building a Culture of Health.

Through the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and building on the research of Feedback for Teachers, BIF prototyped and tested TD4Ed, an online platform that teaches design thinking and enables teachers to innovate in the classroom, school, and district.

BIF teamed with Southern New Hampshire University to design and test the lowest cost, highest quality degree program.

How might we bring the minority male student experience to life in a way that makes their voice central to our conversation about transforming the education system to improve their college experience and completion rates?

Working in partnership with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center we set about to understand the human factors that contribute to the inexplicably high rates of preterm births — babies born before 37 weeks of pregnancy and design solutions to reduce the trends.

In partnership with Children’s Health in Dallas, BIF worked to create the Children’s Wellness Experience: a transformative, sustainable model for care that is rooted in human-centered insights, moving us away from a focus on “sick care” to a broader focus on “well care.”

Connected Aging is an exploration into the aging experience, including a deep, ethnographic dive and solution concepts for reimagining aging through the lens of social connection and participation.

In partnership with Babson College, Entrepreneurs of all Kinds is rooted in a deep understanding of the experiences of entrepreneurs of all kinds and engages them in the conceptual development of wholly new experiences.