Case Study ING accelerator
Embedded as Service Designer with one team inside ING's PACE incubator — validating a real B2B problem for one of Europe's largest banks.
What
Service design, customer validation, coaching
Role
Service Designer & Mentor
Participants
team of 5
Company / Sector
ING / Banking (B2B corporate)
Strategic Impact
PACE is focused on making ING Businesses innovate like a network of startups while leveraging the benefits Innovation is now listed as one of ING of an enterprise combining the best of both worlds
About PACE at ING
PACE is ING's proprietary innovation methodology, combining Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile into a single stage-gated process. Ideas move through five phases — Discover, Problem Fit, Solution Fit, Market Fit, Scaling — each with its own customer validation criteria before a team can advance. The discipline: kill ideas that don't clear the bar, fast, before they consume real budget.
Methodology
The programme was built on Strategyzer methodology — Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Testing Business Ideas — applied to an internal corporate context. Working closely with Strategyzer, the framework was adapted for Ringier's specific innovation culture and business context. The philosophy: ideas are cheap, evidence is everything. Teams that couldn't show genuine customer validation data didn't advance.
What I covered
- Designed the experiment plan for Problem Fit and Solution Fit — sequencing which riskiest hypotheses to test first, and how
- Wrote the research questions for street-level customer interviews — validating that the problem was real and significant enough to act on (PACE's Problem Fit exit bar: "I have this problem and really want it solved")
- Built a Facebook group and ran targeted ads as a low-fidelity solution test — validating demand before any product was built (PACE's Solution Fit exit bar: "I want this solution, where can I buy it?")
- Led the visual and narrative design of the team's pitch presentation — translating experiment evidence into a case for advancing to Market Fit
Key Findings
ContextThe real customer segment was structurally inaccessible
The department served premium corporate accounts — large clients with no time for research participation and, under the account relationship, no willingness to expose their own end-customer data. Direct validation with the true target segment wasn't available inside a B2B enterprise engagement, which is a common wall in corporate innovation work, not a research failure.
Strategic Finding
A necessary workaround pointed the team at the wrong proxy segment
Unable to reach the premium corporate clients directly, the team validated with a more accessible substitute audience — first through street interviews, then through the Facebook test. Both surfaced the same problem: the substitute wasn't a reliable stand-in. Correcting who counted as "the customer" was the highest-leverage move in the engagement.
Conclusion: Takeaways
This wasn't methodology coaching. It was a transformation in how a team worked — from decisions made at a desk to decisions earned on the street. My role as Service Designer and mentor was to make that shift survivable: to design experiments small enough to run with people who'd never run one, and evidence clear enough that letting go of assumption felt like progress, not risk. PACE gave the team a process. The harder part — and the part I was there for — was helping them trust it.
Let's talk about what that could look like at your organisation. Contact me →