Innovation rooted in culture, guided by futures, designed for regeneration
Most innovation is culturally tone-deaf, short-sighted, and extractive. Common Oddities helps organizations navigate complexity by translating cultural intelligence into regenerative strategies—ensuring your innovation is culturally resonant, future-ready, and systemically beneficial.
Start a ConversationTraditional innovation optimizes for today without understanding cultural currents, future trajectories, or systemic consequences. It creates solutions that succeed short-term but become obsolete, harmful, or irrelevant.
We help you innovate differently—by understanding culture (the codes that shape meaning), anticipating futures (multiple possible trajectories), and designing for regeneration (systems that heal rather than deplete).
Innovation that is culturally intelligent, future-conscious, and regeneratively oriented. Not innovation for innovation's sake, but purposeful change that strengthens the whole system.
Understanding the codes that matter
Culture shapes what people value, how they interpret change, and what futures they can imagine. We decode symbolic systems, meaning-making patterns, and emerging subcultures to reveal the why beneath the what.
Designing for what's emerging
Futures thinking prevents innovation from being reactive. We explore multiple possible futures, identify weak signals of change, and help you design for the world you want—not just extend today's assumptions.
Creating systems that heal
When regenerative thinking becomes the default lens, innovation shifts from extractive to generative. We map systems, identify leverage points, and design interventions that strengthen entire ecosystems.
Strategic brief interrogation, cultural context audits, future readiness assessments, and problem reframing to ensure we're solving the right challenge.
Cultural foresight programs, innovation strategies for regenerative growth, and brand futures narratives—comprehensive 6-12 week engagements.
Executive futures literacy workshops, cultural strategy training, and speculative futures toolkits to build internal capacity for ongoing foresight.
Futures councils, cultural advisory retainers, and innovation stewardship for organizations committed to continuous strategic evolution.
With 25 years of experience spanning media, advertising, consumer research, cultural strategy, and futures thinking, I bring a rare cross-domain fluency to strategic challenges. I've built and scaled three insight consultancies across Asia-Pacific, working with organizations from P&G to Google, Singapore government ministries to climate-focused startups.
My specialty is process mastery—knowing which tools to deploy for what problems, interrogating briefs to find where the real issue lies, and creating actionable roadmaps grounded in how cultures actually evolve. I've pioneered cultural semiotics and speculative futures practices in APAC, now teaching these disciplines at SUTD while advising organizations on regenerative innovation strategies.
25 years across FMCG, tech, finance, luxury, healthcare, and public sector
Based in Singapore, specializing in Asia-Pacific markets and cultural dynamics
Adjunct Fellow at Singapore University of Technology & Design (SUTD)
Collaborative practice with regional specialists in design, ethnography, and systems thinking
Whether you're navigating market complexity, designing for futures, or building regenerative strategies, let's explore how cultural intelligence can guide your path forward.
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