SRI NOMURA INNOVATION CENTER · PROGRAM DESIGN · EXPERIENCE STRATEGY · INNOVATION LEADERSHIP
Designing innovation programs for executives trained to avoid the behaviors those programs depend on.
How might you design a learning system for an audience whose cultural conditioning runs counter to the learning itself?
4
innovation tracks launched
companies represented
60+
companies represented
12+
participant returned as a client
1
The situation
Japanese executives were coming to Silicon Valley for a year. The goal: absorb design thinking, startup culture, and emerging technology, then return to their companies with new product and revenue ideas.
Nothing existed when Elysa arrived. No program. No framework. No model for how this kind of learning should work for this particular audience.
The design problem was deeper than curriculum. Silicon Valley innovation culture runs on collaboration and public failure. The executives in the room had been trained, professionally and culturally, to avoid most of that. Getting someone to prototype in front of peers is hard enough. Getting them to do it in a second language, inside a culture with different rules about hierarchy and risk, is a different design problem entirely.
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What I owned
Everything. Program architecture, content sequencing, facilitation design, integration with SRI's existing technology speakers and lectures. There was no model to inherit and no precedent to follow.
The question: what should these executives experience, and in what order - was mine to answer from scratch.
Within one year, four innovation tracks launched, reaching representatives from 60+ companies and generating dozens of intrapreneurial projects.
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The constraints
Culture and language were the central barriers. Many participants spoke minimal English. And the collaborative, mistake-forward culture of Silicon Valley was genuinely uncomfortable for an audience whose professional training pointed elsewhere.
Then the brief changed. What started as a year-long program needed to accommodate executives who could only stay a week, or a few months. SRI wanted marketing flexibility, multiple entry points, and the ability to test the program with short-term participants.
That shift had business logic. It also wasn't the optimal design for the learners.
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The trade-offs
A one-week program won't produce the same behavior change as a year. Getting a Japanese executive comfortable prototyping in front of peers, publicly and in a second language, takes more than a week. The depth of shift the program was designed to create doesn't compress cleanly.
The decision to build multi-track flexibility was the client's call, and it made sense for SRI's ability to reach more companies and test what worked. Elysa designed a system that held across all three tracks while knowing what was being traded.
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The calls I made
One recommendation she pushed for repeatedly, and didn't get: a global cohort.
The core design constraint was cultural. Her position was that facilitation alone couldn't fully close that gap, but peer modeling could. Introducing participants from other cultures into the same room would create something the program design couldn't manufacture: real examples of people engaging differently with hierarchy and risk, in real time.
It hasn't happened. She believes it still would fundamentally change what participants take back.
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When a participant came back as a client
One participant engaged deeply enough that their management approved a budget to bring SRI and Elysa in for a proof-of-concept design sprint. That's the signal the program had worked.
The sprint introduced a constraint that couldn't be designed around: the client was a fintech company, and regulatory requirements meant user research couldn't be conducted independently. The client had to own that piece entirely.
Elysa developed the research structure and made the case, repeatedly, for why deep discovery was necessary for the proof of concept to mean anything. The client ran a survey. That's not the same as the kind of user research the project required, and the difference showed in the work.
She had to find ways to bring user perspective into the room through other means — getting creative about who was present, what questions were being asked, what could serve as signal. The design process had to work within what was actually available.
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What changed
Four innovation tracks launched within one year. Representatives from 60+ companies. Dozens of intrapreneurial projects generated.
The program went from nothing to a scalable, multi-track model that could hold a week-long visitor and a year-long resident. The participants who stayed long enough to do the harder work left with something real to bring back.
The proof-of-concept sprint with a returning participant showed the other thing the program produced: executives with enough conviction in the work to invest further.