Fiona Bennie

Background

Hello. I work mostly on innovation and future scenarios projects. Usually to do with food, FMCG, healthcare and fashion. I trained as an industrial designer so I use design and creative methods in the work I do, to make sustainability as stimulating as possible and a driver for long term innovation.

I help our partners think beyond incremental innovation, using future scenarios and people-centred design to generate concepts for products, services and business models which will succeed in a sustainable future. Most recently I’ve been working with Unilever and Sainsbury's on Consumer Futures 2020 - a set of scenarios exploring how developed economies might be consuming in 2020, accompanied by a toolkit to help organisations use the scenarios for strategy and innovation. Other projects this year have been with the National Trust, O2, Bupa and Sony. Last year I co-authored Fashion Futures 2025: Global scenarios for a sustainable fashion industry with Levi Strauss &Co. and the Snapshot Review of the UK Creative Industries' sustainability activity.

How i got here

I graduated from the Milan Politecnico with an MA in Strategic Design and a BA in Italian and Industrial Design, I later did a Postgrad Diploma in Sustainable Development from Imperial College.
The more I learnt about design, the more I realised the world probably didn’t need many more chairs or ‘stuff’ to consume. I wanted to be in the gang who were designing-out things like waste, harmful chemicals, short shelf-lives and so on, and designing-in service solutions, leasing models and much cleverer business models and ways of consuming. I caught the sustainability bug from a brilliant professor named Ezio Manzini and never let go. After a diversion in Marketing for L’Oreal Italy and a spell at the Design Council and some innovation consultancies, I came to Forum's innovation team where I help businesses to make sustainable innovation a reality.

What would my dream Forum project be?
Whilst incremental innovation has clear short-term business benefits it’s not doing much to get us closer to a sustainable future – so my dream projects are the really tough ones. The ones that look for radical, disruptive innovations which will shape a positive future we can all get excited about – and I don’t mean pie-in-the-sky innovations, I mean ones which help businesses to grow, but don’t annihilate everything we rely on and love in the meantime (like our beautiful natural world and our social values).

And outside work?
Once away from work I tend to live out my obsession with food by growing it and eating it, I love upholstery and whenever I can I hop on a train to the Alps for some ski-biking and snowboarding.