Better Living Platform

Digital business platforms are a new business entity within Ingka that aims to complement the core business, home furniture products, with services that support a life that is healthy, sustainable and affordable. At its center, the platform sets out to acquire new customer segments, drive visitation and incentivize customer spending. I was responsible for setting up a new business and innovation exploration to move closer to those objectives.

Product innovation started with design research and in-home fieldwork in the Netherlands, working with a research agency, one visual designer and three experience design leads, orchestrated into three innovation workstreams that workshopped insights into concept explorations with business-value potential.

To frame the project, earlier work on The Next Many proved a great starting point to identify untapped segments through the household types on the rise in the EU: single parents, housemates, multigenerational homes, blended families and people living alone. A core insight anchored the work: one in three households worldwide is now headed by a woman, one of the fastest-growing shifts of the last decade.

Two of the 20 concepts were greenlit for further development within existing teams and integrated into the FY27 innovation pipeline: Home Projects for Kids, drawn from single-parent families and feeding the Home Imagination Platform so children are included in the often-daunting process of moving homes; and a Dual-Home Shared Management System for the shared-custody households common across Western Europe and the Nordics.