Design Thinking & Innovation Consultant at EY Italy
Linkedin profile

Pour 1 part design, 1 part mathematics, top it up to the brim with curiosity, add ice and sugar, and shake- you’ll have something you should positively not drink-and-drive after i.e. me.

I’m Abhimanyu Bhardwaj from India. I work as an Innovation and Design Thinking consultant at EY Italy. I moonlight as part of a multidisciplinary consulting, 21ID, that I’d started in 2017. We help startups and incumbents create innovative business models, identify product-market fit, design product-service-systems and define and execute go-to-market strategies (if this interests you, let’s talk on LinkedIn). I can often be found petting cats, drinking filter coffee and going stupidly fast on motorcycles.

I dream of a world where every good idea gets to grow up to be an innovation. I’ve believed I had the eye for design and the head for business and MDS is where it all came together for me.

Which kind of contribution has provided to your career the MDS experience?
MDS is a conglomeration of subjects, professors and colleagues unlike any other academic program out there. With a variety of modules from Design and Management interlaced with live workshops, MDS allows you to achieve the right balance of the creative and the rational, a truly difficult balance to find. I am indebted to the course for having imbibed in me a “Strategic Design Mindset” – that allows one to manifest innovation practically at will.

Outline the MDS experience according four keywords or key adjectives
Steve Jobs x Don Draper

Would you suggest this experience to other professionist?
If you were looking to do an MBA, steer clear of MDS- here you might actually learn a thing or two. Like most other things in life, MDS will give you as much as you are willing to give it. So immerse yourself in a year of poring through strategy readings (psst, get an HBR subscription), chasing after professors, asking “stupid” questions in class and jumping up everytime you hear the word “Innovation”. It’ll all be worth it in the end, I promise.