Kunitake Saso, Founder & CEO, BIOTOPE

When Kunitake Saso (MDM 2013) discovered design methodology at ID, he saw the potential to transform how Japanese businesses approach innovation. In 2015, just two years after completing his Master of Design Methods, he had founded BIOTOPE, a strategic design consultancy that bridges rigorous creativity with business transformation.

At BIOTOPE, Kunitake and his team take a unique approach: they transform a client’s vision and philosophy and turn it into creative expression. This helps the team develop a strategy to guide comprehensive organizational change through four integrated design practices: strategy, business, culture, and brand.

But Kunitake wasn’t always a creative thinker. In his early professional career, he worked in brand marketing at notable corporations, including Procter & Gamble and SONY, and found himself approaching every project with a very linear way of thinking.

Seeking to expand his approach beyond these linear approaches, Kunitake found his way to ID’s Master of Design Methods program.

Adopting a more creative mindset became Kunitake’s personal mission at ID, where he began documenting his journey through a blog about the design methods, mindset, and ways of creative thinking he was learning

These insights evolved into his book, The Non-Designer’s Guide to Design Thinking: What a Marketer Learned in Design School, published in Japan in 2015 and later translated to English.

The book resonated professionals who had no prior experience in design but were looking to integrate design thinking in their place of work or day-to-day life.

More than 50,000 copies of the book have been sold to date.

The Non-Designer’s Guide to Design Thinking distills Kunitake’s design thinking into four essential elements:

1. Thinking: Hybrid Thinking
2. Mindset: Creator Spirit
3. Process: Human Centered Co-Creation
4. Environment: Switching to Creative Mode Through Tools and Space

Before discovering ID, Kunitake found his first glimpse of design thinking’s potential when he read Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, which outlines new ways of thinking for an evolving future. Through this introduction to design thinking, he saw a key to unlocking his creative side.

What began as curiosity about creative problem solving grew into deep expertise at ID, where he learned to navigate between divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) and convergent thinking (refining solutions)