Shilpi Kumar

Shilpi Kumar is the Founder and CEO of Khoj Lab, an innovation consultancy based in Chicago. Her mission is to help business leaders discover new growth opportunities and optimize the process as they scale innovation within their organizations using a human-centered approach. Her expertise lies in being a liaison between design and business thinking while engaging her clients in design-led methods and frameworks to enhance the value of their businesses further.

She has built a global team at Khoj Lab that reaches diverse audiences through a multi-cultural, multi-lingual (including English, Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin, French and Spanish), women-led team of researchers, designers, strategists, and planners.

Shilpi is an alum of the Master of Design Methods (MDM) program at the Institute of Design.  She also holds a Master of Design from the Industrial Design Center at IIT Bombay, India, and a professional Bachelor of Architecture from BIT Mesra, Ranchi, India.

Industry Experience

Shilpi brings over 20 years of professional experience working as a design strategist, futurist, lead user experience researcher, industrial designer, architect, and design educator. She has worked closely with operations and strategy teams to define an integrated business process for new product development and align innovation ideas to company strategy. She specializes in taking an inclusive approach with an eye on bringing together diverse perspectives from people across the organization.

She led research programs to increase strategic relevance and focus on human-centered design for new product commercialization at initiatives at Herman Miller (now MillerKnoll). At GE Transportation, she facilitated digital business growth by designing business processes to support lean, agile, and user-focused approaches.

Selected Work

Kuman, Shilpi. 2021. “Myths of innovation and detangling them.” UX Collective Bootcamp.