Case study · Futures & foresight
The Future of Self-Care
Finding a global pharma company's next growth space in the rise of self-care.
Post-Covid, self-care shifted from the margins to the centre of how people manage their health. A global pharma company needed to find where that shift opened real growth. How is Asia different from EMEA? Where do the white-space opportunities lie — spaces the business can invest in, through acquisition or design innovation?
We scanned macro forces across the STEEPI lens — social, technological, economic, environmental, political and cultural — reading start-ups, policy, and emergent behaviour to find where self-care was heading.
Using the Future Wheel technique, workshops turned signals into future scenarios — and generated concrete design ideas for the worlds they implied.
A cross-functional workshop — R&D, design, marketing, growth — came together to prioritise the businesses worth building: some to grow now, others as a pipeline for innovation and acquisition.
Women's health emerged as the mega-opportunity in APAC — new cultural conversations growing, and start-ups already rewriting the jobs to be done. Within this wide umbrella, we provided the jobs-to-be-done, enablers and design capabilities the business could invest in, organised into three pillars: Menstrual Care, Menopausal Care, and Fertility.
The work became both an innovation brief and a growth brief — naming the jobs to be done and the capabilities needed to serve them across women's health.
Some prioritised businesses were ready to scale now; others formed a pipeline for future innovation and a strategy for acquisitions — giving leadership a defensible, evidence-based map for where to place its next bets.
