Our North American and European teams work locally and collaborate globally — from Cambridge and Chicago to London and San Francisco. (Our China practice has its own home here.)
Steeped in centuries of academic tradition but reinvented every day by the world's biggest scientific bets, Cambridge sits at the intersection of laboratories and last-mile pragmatism. From the corridors of MIT and Harvard to the biotech towers of Kendall Square, our city is a crucible for the breakthroughs that will define the next century of health.
IDEO Cambridge mirrors the qualities of our neighborhood. We're rigorous, technical, and curious — drawn to the hardest, most consequential problems and to the engineers, scientists, and clinicians who build alongside us. We prize substance over flash, and we'd rather make something that works than something that looks clever.
For nearly 35 years our Cambridge studio has helped shape the medical devices, drug-delivery products, and clinical experiences people rely on every day. We work across pharma, biotech, hospitals, and consumer health — turning breakthrough science into things people can actually use. Our goal? Designing healthcare that meets people where they are, and leaves them better than we found them.
Built on broad shoulders and the bones of bold experiments, Chicago has always been a city for makers — the birthplace of skyscrapers, of jazz that traveled north on the railway, and of the design schools that taught a generation how to look at the everyday with fresh eyes.
IDEO Chicago shares our city's character. We're warm but ambitious, and we love a hard problem with a long timeline. We work hand-in-hand with the people who'll carry forward what we design — embedded with teams across the floors of corporate towers, in factories, in hospitals, and on shop floors. We're as comfortable in a foam-core prototype as we are in a boardroom.
Our Chicago studio sits at the intersection of business and design, working with some of the world's largest healthcare, financial-services, food, and consumer-goods companies. We help legacy organizations sharpen what they make, evolve how they work, and grow into their next chapter — meeting the moment with rigor, creativity, and a Midwestern willingness to roll up our sleeves.
Steeped in history, but forever reinventing itself, London continues to be an eclectic stew of world-class arts, iconic brands, cutting-edge tech startups, and age-old academic institutions.
IDEO London mirrors the qualities of our city. We're curious, worldly and optimistic, (mostly) self-deprecating, and don't mind a little sarcasm. We're a small, tight-knit community from around the world, and with a bit of every design discipline. And we're happiest when we're hands-on: designing, coding, and building out experiences that span purpose, product, brand, organisation, and business model.
As one of the earliest IDEO studios, we've worked with brands big and small, British and international, storied and startup, from healthcare to hospitality, and media to mobility. Our goal? Tackling the knotty, systemic challenges of a rapidly-changing world, to create meaningful impact.
Where the bay meets the bridge and the future has always seemed a little closer at hand, San Francisco is a city that runs on optimism, technology, and a certain shared belief that the best ideas are still ahead.
IDEO San Francisco is, in many ways, where IDEO began — and where we still spend a lot of our energy thinking about what could be. We're curious, technical, and willing to take risks on ideas that don't quite fit anywhere else. We're home to our Play Lab, our largest concentration of emerging-technology designers, and a long history of helping startups turn small bets into big businesses.
Our SF studio works across the technology stack — from consumer products and AI-powered services to organizational transformation and the future of children's media. Whether we're partnering with a Fortune-500 client or a five-person seed-stage team, the question we keep asking is the same: what could this become if we got it right? Our goal is to imagine and build that next thing — together.
