What if we could design a methodology to commercialize ingenuity?
The Next Chapter is an experimental initiative that converges the potential of idealist design with the power of capitalism to help brilliant ideas find traction.

  • In a risk-averse sector, Utilidata’s team of utility experts, engineers, data scientists, policy experts, and technologists were promising a radical new solution, but navigating fundraising and business development proved challenging. 

    We collaborated with Utilidata leadership to navigate a growth strategy that included series B fundraising, welcoming an Advisory Board, mapping  early lighthouse partners and pilots, clarifying a USP, product naming and storytelling, thought leadership presentations, IIJA contract negotiations, and brand identity evolution.

  • Rhode Island’s Startup Ecosystem had been overshadowed by Boston and New York for decades, struggling for recognition, investment, and growth.

    We led a perspective of how RI stakeholders might catalyze a high growth startup ecosystem. Our solution was to set a vision for 2035 in which the state claimed $2B in startup investments, a number 12x higher than it was in 2023. Leveraging preferable futures enabled us to design a big initiative to galvanize stakeholders and map precisely how that future state could be achieved.

  • Xcimer's team of physicists and engineers had built a credible path to commercial fusion energy — but translating deep science into a narrative the world could find valuable remained the gap between breakthrough and traction.

    We worked with Xcimer to turn a technical solution into a brand: clarifying their story, shaping how the technology communicates its promise, and building the strategic and visual foundation to support a $100M Series A launch.

  • Hexagon is a global leader in digital reality solutions — sensor, software, and autonomous technologies — but lacked the company’s vision of a more sustainable future.

    We worked directly with Hexagon's CEO to design a VIP brainstorming session that brought industry executives together around a provocation: how sustainability and profitability could work together to produce valuable outcomes for businesses. The format moved beyond presentation into structured, facilitated thinking — a model for how large organizations can use convening as a strategic tool.

The goal is to develop medium-agnostic strategies that imagine best-case outcomes for those working on behalf of humanity and our planet.
Strategic design, applied towards ideal futures.

  • Capitalism is the most powerful distribution system on the planet, and ignoring it doesn't make ambitious ideas more pure — it makes them less likely to survive. The question isn't whether to engage with markets, but how to design the conditions under which markets accelerate ideas worth advancing.

    Commercialization, in our practice, is not the end of the creative process — it's a design problem in itself. We treat the path from concept to traction as something that can be intentionally shaped: through narrative, partnerships, incentive structures, and experience design. The goal is to make the leap from brilliant idea to viable reality a matter of strategy, not luck.

  • Most organizations working on transformative ideas fall into one of four positions: high commercial viability with low systemic ambition, high ambition with low commercial infrastructure, strong on both but poorly coordinated, or early-stage on both and searching for traction. The Commercialization Quadrant is a diagnostic tool that maps where an organization sits today — and where the conditions need to shift for it to move.

    The quadrant helps us identify what's actually missing. Sometimes it's narrative clarity. Sometimes it's market timing, partner alignment, or a mismatch between internal capability and external perception. The value of the framework is in directing design effort toward the specific conditions that will unlock movement, rather than defaulting to a one-size-fits-all growth plan.

  • Idealist design is a systems-level strategy method that begins with a simple but radical move: define the ideal outcome first, then work backward to determine what must be true to make it real. Originating in the systems thinking work of Russell L. Ackoff and later advanced through interactive planning at Wharton, the method asks teams to temporarily suspend present-day constraints and imagine the most desirable, feasible version of their organization or ecosystem — as if it were being designed fresh today. Only after that ideal state is clearly described do constraints re-enter the conversation, as design variables rather than fixed limits. Historically used in large-scale innovation contexts such as Bell Labs’ telecommunications planning, idealist design shifts strategy from incremental optimization to condition creation. It treats the future not as something to predict, but something to architect — through deliberate choices in structure, incentives, narratives, partnerships, and experience.

The work explores how designing the conditions for commercialization enables an organization, initiative, technology, or an idea to achieve its apex—driving cultural, communal, and planetary change. 
Building communities around ambitious ideas.
Achieving "ideal" through collective action.

  • Our process begins where most strategy ends — with the outcome. Rather than auditing what exists and optimizing from there, we ask a different question: what does the ideal version of this organization, technology, or ecosystem look like five to ten years from now?

    From that ideal state, we work backward. We identify the conditions — technical, social, market-based, narrative, operational, relational — that must exist for that future to become likely. Each condition becomes a design brief. And each brief is addressed through the tools best suited to it: research, brand strategy, experience design, partnership architecture, or communications.

    The result is a strategy that doesn't just describe a direction — it maps the specific moves required to create the conditions for success.

  • We identify the conditions that must exist for success to become likely.

    Conditions can be technical, social, market-based, narrative, operational, or relational. They are also designable; influenced via signals, experiences, partnerships, and proof.

  • Preferability is a lens focused on what future is worth building, backing, and aligning around. It is a design criterion, not a prediction metric. It recognizes that markets — especially emerging ones — are shaped by coordinated belief and intentional signals as much as by trend lines. A preferable future is specific enough to guide decisions and attractive enough to mobilize partners, talent, and capital; creating directional coherence even in uncertainty.

It starts by imagining an ideal state five to ten years in the future, and then devise a series of conditions that must be met in order for that state to be achieved. From there, we leverage design as a tool to create the most ideal experience(s) within each condition. 
Made better by design.
The world would be a different place if design was given credit not as a practice, but as a tool to be used on any number of problems. Imagine if every company had a Chief Design Officer. Or if we elected 
a Secretary of Design in local government. 

People whose job it is to think deeply with logic and empathy at the same time. To find universality while still appreciating nuance. To find beauty in the mundane and to improve solutions to problems we might not even realize we have.   

Because you can design anything: a chair, a cure, an intersection, an interaction, a menu, a meeting, a feeling. 

Design is a tool to imagine better, shared futures. Applied, it inspires new ways of living, and new futures to live in.

And we intend to do just that.