What We Do

We work with people and organizations to design new innovation strategies and we help leaders build new organizational competencies and behaviors to support them.  Ours is a unique methodology that integrates design thinking, systems thinking, and a field we refer to as human-centered quantitative data. A network of lecturers and professors who are also expert practitioners, we continually explore the frontier of our practice through our courses and the executive education programs that we teach. Educators in mindset and open source in our intention, our goal is to make ourselves obsolete to the organizations with whom we work. There is no black box here.

Who "We" Are

“We” are all the colleagues, fellow lecturers and professors, and collaborators of Matt Rothe, who is the founder and principal of Crazy Beta Design. Among our network are specialists in media, graphic and literary art, ethnography, organizational behavior and design, and business strategy. Matt is also a co-founder of Blue Ocean Barns and a contributing member to the executive team of KitchenTown.

Previously, Matt co-founded the FEED Collaborative at Stanford University, where he was an educator-practitioner in design thinking and food system innovation, was a fellow at Stanford’s prestigious d.school, director of Stanford’s Sustainable Food Program, and an operations executive at both Attune Foods and Niman Ranch. Raised on a 10,000 acre conventional corn farm on the plains of Colorado, Matt's more formal degrees include a BA in Environmental Earth Science from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford.

Our Services

We provide innovation strategy consulting services.  We design and facilitate highly customized workshops and executive training sessions.  We conduct customer and market insight research. And we build crazy beta prototypes of new ideas and concepts.

Our Domain

We have deep domain knowledge in the food system, though this knowledge does not, and has not precluded our ability to work effectively across industries and across international boundaries. Mostly we’re interested in really big messy organizational problems. Speaking of which, we also work in the government and non-profit sectors.

Example Projects

We’ve worked with a publicly traded global distributor of produce to develop a more customer-oriented culture.

We’ve worked with a national media company to identify new product and service opportunities.

We’ve worked with an environmental research institute to identify new innovation strategies.

We’ve worked with a group of forward thinking New Zealand farmers to launch and sustain a movement to bring their products to the global market.

We’ve worked with a large open space trust to better understand the needs of their local agricultural community.

We’ve worked with the US Department of Energy to create greater collaboration among a group of their scientists.

We’ve worked with the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment Water Directorate to develop a more human-centered approach to policy making.

We've designed and facilitated dozens of innovation workshops with executives from all over the world, from all sectors and industries.