Jeff Hsu, Chief Innovation Officer, Far Eastern Group

Jeff Hsu (MDes 2012) discovered his passion for design while serving as an officer in the United States Marines in Djibouti, an underdeveloped country with limited natural resources.

In 2007, following two combat deployments in Iraq, Jeff led a humanitarian aid mission in the East African country as a forward operations officer for the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. Leading 200 Marines and engineers, he was tasked with building a water storage facility to Marine Corps standards for a mid-sized village.

But from what he would later recognize as a design standpoint, such an undertaking would have been a big mistake. The residents would likely be unable to repair such a complex facility if it broke, and the valuable materials—particularly metal components—risked being salvaged for scrap.

So rather than have the Marines build the facility on their own, Jeff worked with local villagers to build the system together, largely out of wood, giving residents both agency and ownership.

“That was where I realized good design thinking,” says Jeff, who had quit a job on Wall Street job to join the military, as many in his family had. “My time in the Marines, dealing with people and chaos and the complexity of war and seeing a whole different side of the world, I realized there’s a lot more to life and business than just the numbers and profit margins and shareholder value.”

When he left active duty as a captain in 2008, Jeff went to business school, earning an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. But he wasn’t interested in finance, accounting, or marketing. “I fell in love with innovation and the design process,” he says. This passion led him to pursue a Master of Design at ID.

After graduating, he worked for two years as a consultant before joining his family’s company, Far Eastern Group (FEG). One of Taiwan’s largest conglomerates, FEG spans more than ten major industries and encompasses nine publicly listed companies. There, he started DRIVE, the company’s first internal design team and innovation center.

And he faced cultural perceptions about design that he had to overcome.

With ID’s help, he’s been changing how design is understood. A key part of this effort has been DRIVE’s partnership with ID’s Taiwan Immersion Program, led by Marty Thaler.

“It keeps me abreast of what’s going on with design and how to use its capabilities to push design forward,” Jeff says.

DRIVE was tasked with helping to plan the company’s A13 retail project—a new department store in a Taipei district already home to four others.

To make the store stand out, the team worked to recruit an Apple store for the new complex. And they succeeded—Apple built its global flagship store within the A13 complex, and the team then designed the retail space around it. Despite being a relatively small store, it’s now FEG’s third-highest revenue earner out of 24 department stores.

After completing the project, Jeff says company leadership began viewing design as more than just “making things look good.” Jeff’s DRIVE team now includes 16 designers and is looking for its next big challenge within the company.