Introduction

In the spring of 2024, standing in the halls of the Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, we faced an opportunity. As newly appointed Latham Fellows, we were setting out to honor Richard Latham’s legacy of strategic design thinking and knowledge sharing. Versed in multidisciplinary design and product development in the technology sector, we were excited to expand our aperture and immerse ourselves in intentional, impactful design.

As part of our fellowship, we began developing Season 3 of ID’s With Intent podcast, which enabled us to interview innovators, experts, designers, and leaders associated with ID’s “100 Great Designs of Modern Times,” published by Fortune magazine. Our conversations helped us gain a deeper understanding of these innovations and the significance of their impact.

Over the course of the research, five particularly intriguing innovations caught our attention, not because of their fame or technology, but through their potential to answer a simple but insistent question: How do seemingly straightforward objects achieve extraordinary impact?

A medical drone. A prescription bottle. A water filter. A $35 computer. A kitchen peeler.

On the surface, unrelated. Different industries, different scales, different problems. Yet we were fascinated by how each of these innovations had transformed not only individual lives but also entire systems.

Zipline’s drone service led to a 51 percent reduction in maternal deaths from postpartum hemorrhage in the Rwandan healthcare facilities they served. LifeStraw had provided safe water to nearly 12 million children and is on the verge of eradicating a debilitating disease without a vaccine for the first time in history. The makers of Raspberry Pi had shipped over 68 million units, making computing education more accessible, while unexpectedly revolutionizing industrial applications. OXO Good Grips has transformed an entire industry’s approach to design and ergonomics. ClearRx helped catalyze the first national patient-centered labeling standards.

The scale was impressive, but we were most fascinated by the how. Each innovation had faced the recurring challenges that derail most attempts at transformation: entrenched systems, resource constraints, regulatory complexity, behavior change. Yet they’d found ways to turn these barriers into advantages.

As we dug deeper into these stories, analyzing their strategies and tracing their evolutions, patterns emerged. Not random insights, but systematic approaches that appeared across the five cases despite their vastly different contexts.

Perhaps we were primed to see these patterns. Having collectively spent decades at the intersection of design, engineering, and business strategy, designing and scaling computing platforms for hundreds of millions while also incubating bleeding-edge technologies like mixed reality and AI, we’ve developed an instinct for recognizing what makes innovations succeed or fail. We’ve seen how constraints in one domain become advantages in another. How solutions that work at startup scale can sometimes predict what succeeds globally. How certain principles appear again and again, whether you’re designing an operating system or a consumer device.

Through this frame, formed by years of building across disciplines and scales, the patterns became clear. These weren’t random successes. They were deliberate applications of principles we’d seen before.

Part 1 tells the five stories, taking you inside each innovation from moment of insight to global impact. You’ll stand in front of a grandmother’s medicine cabinet, beside a team confronting preventable deaths, alongside designers transforming arthritic struggles into universal principles. You’ll follow each narrative from conflict to powerful resolution.

Whether you’re a designer seeking to create more meaningful solutions, an entrepreneur trying to scale impact, an educator preparing the next generation, or simply someone who believes business can be a force for good, these patterns offer ways of seeing that can transform how you approach challenges.

We wrote this book because today’s problems are intertwined and complex: climate shocks and fragile supply chains, widening gaps in health and education, AI-driven disruption, and declining trust in institutions. In this landscape, “good enough” point solutions fail fast. We need innovations that travel across contexts and scales, hold up under real-world constraints, and link commercial value to human benefit. Our aim is to show how to create solutions that don’t just “work,” but transform the systems they touch.

The stories ahead prove that such transformation is possible—not through massive resources or breakthrough technology alone, but by seeing differently, thinking systematically, and building deliberately. A grandmother struggling with her medication, a community lacking clean water, a student unable to learn computing: These challenges became opportunities for innovations that now improve millions of lives.

The progression from idea to impact isn’t random. It follows patterns. And patterns, once recognized and learned, can be adopted and applied. This book is your guide to doing both.