A ReD partner recounts his meeting with a man who has lived through China’s enormous transformation.

To understand and diagnose an illness requires acknowledging the ecology in which it takes place and collecting multiple perspectives.

With the new reality of pharmaceutical R&D, companies must deliver impact and value. This paper explores how ethnographic research can fill that role in early stages of pharmaceutical clinical trials.

How understanding the social, psychological, and emotional experience of psoriasis is fueling the pharmaceutical industry.

“Deep listening means dwelling long enough at the unfamiliar, until something jumps out as meaningful”

A nonprofit cultural institute approached ReD with a immersive research project to understand the value systems of everyday Egyptians.

Surveys can provide validate insights about consumers, but when it comes to understanding what keeps people from going green, they’re often unreliable.

ReD was tasked with understanding what shared values Egyptians had across religious, gender, age, and economic groups. As our project ended, the Arab Spring erupted.

In our experience, as with art and science, creative business thinking flows best when it pivots on a “big idea”—a “structural design,” or a “paradigm.”

Here are five biases that complicate consumers’ adoption of environmentally friendly solutions.

The idea that for something to be original it has to be radically new still permeates business conversations about innovation.

A brewery’s story shows how “sensemaking” can facilitate transformations of product development, organizational culture, and corporate strategy.

While the “20% time” rule might have worked at Google, it is doubtful whether it would work outside Silicon Valley.

In business thinking, ‘core competencies’ have long been seen as the critical factor that distinguishes great from good. Great companies have strong core competencies that they constantly leverage and develop. On the other hand, companies who do not understand their own strengths and weaknesses cannot execute at the highest proficiency.

In the world of marketing, creativity is surrounded by a high level of mystique. We imagine that ideas appear in the heads of gifted individuals from out of nowhere. Because it seems that no one really understands creativity, the art directors of the world can charge exorbitant prices for their creative services. This is the case even though only about 50 percent of marketing campaigns are successful. However, California-based consultancy IDEO has developed a more rigorous approach to working with creativity.

Despite the recent criticism of the rise of spin doctors in Danish politics, the problem is not that political communication is being professionalized—the problem is that it is not professional enough. By relying on target-group analyses, the political parties end up trying to “sell” the same political message, which makes it difficult for voters to differentiate between the parties’ platforms.