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R. MICHAEL HENDRIX

I am a founder, creative director, professor, and author. I gained widespread recognition as a Partner and the Global Design Director for IDEO, one of the world’s leading design and innovation firms. Often a spokesperson for the firm, I helped the public understand the full practice of design, from abstract applications such as strategy and innovation to more commonly understood work like new product development and experience design.

During my tenure I also led transformative organizational initiatives, built a global creative excellence program, and consulted with clients across various sectors and domains, from San Francisco to Shanghai. My high profile work spanned from entrepreneurship development with the White House to growth strategy for the GRAMMYs as well as working with diverse brands from Converse to Tempur Sealy.
While each industry has it’s own unique character, their challenges remain universal—accessing new markets, understanding customers, developing relevant offers and adapting the organization to deliver them. Innovative solutions require a balance of desirability, feasibility and viability, tenets of design thinking, an innovation methodolgy that appears in all of my work. Design thinking begins with understanding what is desirable from a human point of view (including sustaining our resources), and marries this with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.

Today I lead Huldunótur, a design practice that helps Iceland based organizations, brands, and individuals unleash their creative potential. I also teach design thinking and entrepreneurhship at Bifröst University, design strategies at Iceland University of the Arts and continue with my business in the US, Invisible Notes.

The following cases are representative of milestones in my career. Recent work available upon request.

05

IDEO

As IDEO made design thinking increasingly popular in the United States it attracted the interest of MBA programs and the public sector. While their adoption of the practice was welcomed, this new audience introduced a conservative mindset to the approach, often reducing it to formula. Concerned that the methodology was being elevated above the creativity of the work, I led a global brand redesign to emphasize the experimental nature of our organization and amplify it through our branding.

This redesign also established IDEO as a platform brand. By freeing the logo from a grid, it easily paired with sublogos and partners creating a flexible archtiecture nicknamed the “little black dress” because of it’s ease of dressing up or dressing down. Secondary design language emphasized the iterative and in-process nature of design.
To ensure the brand was not merely expressed but truly lived, I introduced new tools and systems that linked creativity to performance across the company. These included company-wide make-athons to co-design the identity; the State of the Art sentiment dashboard to help executives assess creative momentum; and discussion cards for project teams to reflect on the strategic ambition of their work. I also led the redesign of the Cambridge studio interiors—featured in Metropolis magazine—to embody our culture of experimentation and inclusivity. This combination of brand, environment, and measurement reinforced that IDEO’s value was not design thinking as a formula, but design as a creative force.

In 2019, with the new identity defined, I produced a short film to in collaboration with directors at Dress Code to firmly establish IDEO’s place in the 21st century design canon and demystify the evolution of design thinking. Featuring over 30 cases studies in 13 minutes, it is an oral history of 40 years of innovation. The film’s raw visual language and sets emphasized the iterative nature and curoisity that drove our work.

File Under: BRAND STRATEGY, BRAND IDENTITY, BRAND ARCHITECTURE, CREATIVE DIRECTION, IDEO

07

TWO BEATS AHEAD

Musicians are masters of innovation, constantly finding new ways to adapt to accelerating change. Two Beats Ahead: What Musical Minds Teach Us About Innovation, combines first-person interviews and case studies from Pharrell, Imogen Heap, Björk, Jimmy Iovine and many, many more to showcase their entrepreneurial mindsets. They are creators that aren’t limited by category or genre, teaching us about unlocking our own creativity in the business world.

The book was co-authored with Panos A. Panay when we were both at Berklee College of Music. In our courses, we prepared our students for the professional world by teaching them how to transfer their skills from music making to entrepreneurial behaviors using design thinking.

In addition to the course, we walked-the-walk by founding the Open Music Initiative, an open source fair payments model for creators. Our organization united labels, publishers and artists to address the opacity of artist compensation, spurring the creation of the Music Modernization Act and a new muisc licensing platform at Berklee named RAIDAR.

The book is published by Public Affairs in the US, Penguin Business in the EU, Toyo Keizai in Japan and Cube Press in Taiwan. It has been featured by BBC, Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review among others.

In 2024, a podcast, Two Beats Ahead Live! launched in Reykjavík. The series features Icelandic artists who have become entrepreneurs.

File Under: Innovation methodology, entrepreneurship

08

TRICYCLE

Each year enough carpet samples are made in the United States to cover Iceland nearly one and a half times. Each of these sample requires one liter of oil to make the yarn and backing.
I co-founded Tricycle, an innovative SaaS company, to address this sampling waste. Using CAD and CAM data from the tufting machines, our software made a digital simulated carpet printed on paper with color accuarcy. This pioneering approach gave architects and interior designers even more creative options because of the reduced environmental footprint and the speed to market. While a physical sample required weeks to create, a simulated sample shipped in a day.
Even with this pioneering advancement, adoption was initially slow. In a business drowning in greenwashing and faux fashion, we needed messaging and marketing that stood out from the crowd. Additionally, the manufacturing industry was well established and feared any possible disruption.
After a series of unsuccessful approaches we determined that embracing this fear of change was the most effective means of communication. Punk inspired graphics with educational messaging cut through the noise and raised the profile of the new format in magazines and at trade shows. We challenged the customers to go from fear of change to fear of no change.
Rather than settling for the outdated oil hungry methods, designers could refuse waste (pun intended) and embrace a climate friendly alternative that was radically better. In the process they could have a better business too. The manufacturers recognized this demand from their customers and embraced the new technology.
As Tricycle grew we began promoting other voices of sustainability. REVERB was an anthology of writings and criticisms of ten industry professionals. Its unusual format allowed readers to take as much or little as they wanted from the publication—literally.
Tricycle received top interiors industry honors, was a finalist in Denmark’s INDEX awards and was added to the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in the United States. In 2017 the company was purchased by Shaw, a Berkshire Hathaway company.

File Under: ENTREPRENEURSHIP, B2B, BRAND IDENTITY, MARKETING, INNOVATION

10

OPEN MUSIC INITIATIVE

In the digital era, music consumption shifted from “ownership” to “access,” disrupting the traditional revenue base of the industry as the lines between creators and consumers blurred. The industry's response to innovation had been artist development, lacking mechanisms to address this shift.
In 2016, I co-founded the Open Music Initiative (OMI) with Panos A. Panay and Dan Harple at Berklee College of Music, collaborating with the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School. OMI aimed to create an open-source protocol for identifying music creators and rights holders, ensuring real-time payments to song contributors and investors. This approach was a significant departure from traditional methods that involved lengthy processes to identify and compensate rightful parties, often leading to unclaimed funds.
OMI was a grassroots organization that brought together independent and major labels (Universal, Sony, Warner), publishers, artists, technologists (IBM, Intel), lawyers, industry experts, and streaming services (Spotify, Pandora, YouTube). These stakeholders formed working groups to develop the protocol, resulting in a developer API for blockchain-based information sharing.
We also initiated student-driven summer labs to explore new innovation paths for OMI members. Supported by IDEO, students developed over 20 services and products using the API, investigating how accurate creator data could enhance fan experiences. These labs provided weekly updates and helped shape additional features for the Open Music API, demonstrating how clean data and open access could benefit members by creating new consumer experiences.
The public release of the API coincided with the Music Modernization Act's approval in 2018, mandating payment distribution in line with OMI's vision but using less efficient technologies. Berklee and the MIT Media Lab developed RAIDAR, a student-centered music licensing platform, to showcase blockchain's effectiveness in implementing the law’s requirements. With its goals achieved, OMI concluded its operations.

File Under: ENTREPRENEURSHIP, B2B, Open INNOVATION, labs, IDEO, BERKLEE, MIT

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