Elephant Team
Elephant Strategy + Design is a strategic design and innovation consultancy that partners with organizations to transform them into dynamic, profitable and meaningful entities. During the past 20 years, design at Elephant has evolved from a styling exercise to a sophisticated, key driver of innovation.
At Elephant we firmly believe that contemporary design requires a strong convergence of multiple disciplines. With approximately 65 professionals, Team Elephant comprises of business strategists, design thinkers, communication experts, engineers and social science experts working together in multidisciplinary teams to enhance clients’ businesses.
What was the need?
The need was felt on two fronts.
The first front was the way in which the whole design profession is seen. Design has always been considered an intuitive profession where the individuals’ creativity determines the success or failure of a particular design project. Designers traditionally view any kind of system or process for designing as something that is detrimental to their work and profession.

The second front was to systemize the design process of Elephant. Elephant Strategy + Design has been growing at a brisk pace. The number of projects, diversity of projects and number of designers have been growing continuously. With this growth, we needed a strong system that would help us not only to maintain excellence in design output but also to reduce rework, reduce redundancies, make use of the accumulated knowledge and most importantly democratize and decentralize the decision-making. The issues that were before us were as follows:
- How do we formally capture the amorphous design process and use it to provide our clients the best design solutions on a sustainable basis?
- How can our capability yield better productivity?
- How do we improve design productivity?
- How can our environment support continuous improvement of the design process?
- How does our design environment have early predictors of success / failure?

