Eli Johnston

Working closely with the CEO, we reexamined current corporate innovation products against how well they satisfied market needs. This included over 50 meetings with corporations across industries to understand innovation practices and processes.

I led a cross-functional team to redesign the corporate innovation offer for the business. We narrowed the offer focusing on larger ticket programs that create more sustainable collaborations between corporations and the startups they wished to collaborate with.

With a revamped suite, we built a sales pipeline that has now resulted in impactful work with over 90 corporates to date.

I delivered an open innovation program for Procter & Gamble’s laundry business to bring new software solutions into the laundry experience. From dozens of submissions, finalists were incubated with mentorship and tech support from ST Microelectronics and Microsoft.

I traveled to key US markets to conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups with customers of previous-generation devices. I then analyzed and consolidated research to create a product design roadmap that included specific feature additions and subtractions for the client's next-generation device.

We presented the product roadmap to the US research and insights manager, who then presented the roadmap to the US CEO.

I led the design and prototype development of a policy co-creation tool in sub-Saharan Africa.

I began by researching the gaps in public engagement with policy and existing policy tech solutions, assessing successes and failures. I then conducted interviews with various stakeholders to define the product concept. I also designed the UX flow and initial prototype to test and validate it with a government agency. I also created the product catalog, scoped sprints, and led the engineering team to create a hybrid web application and chatbot for digital policy consultation.

It also went live for citizens to collaborate on the national policy through interactive feedback and revision.

Given an initial set of data and market insights to work with from client and partner consultancy, I synthesized data and conducted additional market research to craft reports for each of seven Asian and three European markets for the company to understand shifts that are happening within the experiential retail and short-haul travel space.

The objective was for them to be able to bring value to their merchants by providing concrete opportunity spaces for growth and innovation. In the end, I identified three activation spaces for each of the spaces for each market, totaling 40 market-specific innovation pathways.