Steve Sato – Sato+Partners, LLC

Email
360.335.3351

Steve’s expertise is in:
– helping executives successfully position and promote key innovation, design and
- experience initiatives
– building sustained “design/integrative thinking” capability within client
- teams and value chain partner organizations
– customer-centered business strategy and planning
– bringing to bear to projects, qualified expertise from an extensive professional business,
- experience design and innovation network

Steve is the founder of this management consulting firm that works with executives of experience-design and innovation, to help them more successfully promote, position, practice and produce customer driven innovations. His firm’s focus is on using “design/integrative thinking” to address these business challenges; conventional thinking by value chain partners often erodes the original intended key values to customers - even when the original concepts were customer-centered. The firm works with clients to reduce this erosion and to build the organization’s capability to use design/integrative thinking competitively.

Until October 2008, Steve worked for the VP of Corporate Design at HP.  Steve was responsible for building the HP-wide design and innovation practice to be a more competitive, reliable, strategic tool.  This required him to architect the programs and direct development of the HP experience-design and innovation system, and work with HP businesses to build design and innovation capability. Steve also worked with the VP of Design to create and sustain a “campaign” with HP executives to gain commitment to establish (customer-centered) design and innovation to be used more strategically.

Previously, Steve has been an internal consultant to HP’s VP’s, directors, program and project managers in developing customer-centered innovations, strategies, business models, organization designs, plans, roles, processes and tools. Prior to joining HP, Steve was a program manager and co-directed practice development at the customer-centered innovation planning firm, Doblin Group. Steve was also a researcher at Accenture’s advanced development labs in remote collaboration. He has also taught graduate level courses in Social Human Factors and Graduate Seminar in Design Theory at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Steve has a Masters in Design from the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, Masters of Engineering Management from Northwestern University and a Bachelor's of Science, Mechanical Engineering, from the University of Illinois.
 
Steve’s passion for fly fishing and the outdoors is what drew him, his wife Dixie, and two Portuguese Water Dogs, Jude and Breeze to the Pacific Northwest. Rainy winters redirected part of his enthusiasm to woodworking, particularly furniture-making. He is also involved with Big Brothers, Big Sisters.

Close window