About Me
I am a seasoned innovation strategist, human insights and foresight expert, who is passionate about exploring the future and shaping the sociocultural dynamics between people, technologies, and brands.
For the past 15 years, I have been working at the intersection of human-centric insights, strategic foresight, product innovation, and organizational transformation in Berlin, Copenhagen, New York, London, and Toronto. I have been advising Fortune 500 companies in healthcare, retail, automotive, IT & communications, finance & insurance, food & beverage, utilities, consumer tech, and other industries.
I bring deep experience across the full research-driven innovation process. My expertise spans from framing business challenges with clients, scoping, managing, and executing complex projects, to activating outcomes. I design immersive, mixed-methods research studies, run multi-market ethnographic insight and foresight work streams, uncover the ‘Why’ behind the ‘What’, distill strategic implications and identify new business opportunities for product and service innovation.
On the applied side, my experience covers co-creation and ideation, concept development, user experience design, prototyping, validation, roadmapping, strategic planning, and facilitating workshops and internal capability-building initiatives that help transform an organization. Client engagements and fieldwork have brought me to the UK, the US, Canada, France, Denmark, India, Austria, Switzerland and all over my native Germany.
I hold a PhD in Cultural Studies and Organizational Ethnography from Justus Liebig University, and an MA in Communication & Cultural Management from Zeppelin University, Germany. In my ethnographic dissertation, which was published by Walter de Gruyter, I helped AUDI AG understand the workings and dynamics of its own innovation culture and how it is deeply shaped by organizational memory.
Collaborating with leading research and innovation consultancies in Europe and North America, such as ReD Associates, Idea Couture, Human Futures, Sturm und Drang, and A Piece of Pie, I have executed over 50 projects for dozens of clients.
Pursuing an Evidence-Driven Innovation Process
Prepare
Frame the business challenge, align stakeholders, and assess the competitive landscape to establish a focused direction.
Explore
Investigate human behavior, emerging market shifts, and weak signals of change to reveal what could matter next.
Generate
Distill and translate evidence into opportunity spaces, then co-create, develop, and validate distinctive product and service concepts.
Strategize
Assess commercial viability, organizational capabilities, and business impact to prioritize concepts and build a development roadmap.
Realize
Build functional prototypes, test technical feasibility, and refine desirability and usability through iterative feedback with target users.
Deploy
Prepare the organization for scale, define the go-to-market strategy, and move validated offerings into production and market rollout.
Why Work With Me?
I combine the human depth of a social scientist, the temporal perspective of a foresight expert, and the pragmatism of an experienced innovation consultant.
I deliberately look to lead users, fringe adopters, and overlooked segments to uncover developments that conventional market and user research often misses.
I combine ethnographic evidence with weak signals of change and market shifts to show not only what is happening, but what could happen next.
My work does not end with findings. I translate evidence into opportunity spaces, concepts, strategic choices, and practical development priorities.
You work directly with me throughout the project, from framing and fieldwork to synthesis, facilitation, and strategic recommendations, without junior hand-offs.
Fifteen years of work across technology, mobility, healthcare, consumer goods, and retail help me recognize patterns beyond a single market or industry.
I bring an outside perspective while working closely with internal teams and agency partners, adapting my approach to the realities of your organization.
Would you like to start a project with me?
Whether you are exploring an emerging market, shaping a new offering, or improving how your organization innovates, let’s discuss the challenge.