We are excited to announce the acquisition of Idea Couture by Cognizant, combining our world-class innovation, design, and prototyping capabilities with Cognizant’s leading technology expertise at scale. As future-oriented organizations with a shared purpose of helping some of the most well known clients in the world to rethink, reinvent, and humanize the future, we are excited to become a part of Cognizant Digital Works.

This new chapter stems from the original vision of founders Idris Mootee, Scott Friedmann, and Cheesan Chew to build a global strategic innovation and experience design firm – a new kind of company where design meets business, human science meets data science, insight meets foresight, and empathy meets economics.

Over our nine-year history, Idea Couture has developed innovation processes and toolkits that work across industries, from healthcare and consumer products, to financial services and electronics. Across these and many other sectors, we’ve made our mark – a legacy of corporate imagination and applied design thinking – manifested in innovative concepts, new products, unique experiences, and business models; in the cultural shifts we’ve created in client organizations; and in the human-centric, future-oriented strategic perspectives we’ve provided.

This acquisition by Cognizant reflects a new reality that Fortune 500s need to find consumer relevance, frictionless user experience, capital-light business models, industry crossovers, artificial intelligence, and scalable platforms to power them into the future. The market is unsympathetic to organizations running on outmoded business architectures and outdated models. Our current and new clients will benefit from end-to-end innovation offerings that integrate applied design thinking in the fuzzy customer-facing front end, as well as middle office business processes and back office IT applications, with deep industry and digital implementation expertise at scale. What we have here today is a new set of power tools, crafted specially for addressing 21st century challenges. 

Idea Couture currently has offices in six cities, including New York, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Mexico City, and São Paulo. Powered by Cognizant’s presence and leadership in technology, we are doubling down on our virtuosity in strategic foresight, applied anthropology, business design, and rapid prototyping and will expand our global footprint.

Idea Couture is proud and excited to become a member of Cognizant – a company that understands humans and technology, and, over the years, has ranked consistently among the top performing, most admired, and fastest growing companies in the world. We will become a core part of Cognizant Digital Works, an innovative business unit that brings together human insight, digital strategy, industry knowledge, design, and new technologies to help clients create, build, and run digital business solutions.

Idea Couture will keep its existing management and client base, and will work closely with Cognizant Digital Works to bring Idea Couture to Cognizant clients and create new capabilities to further our joint mission.

To read more, please find the press release here.

For more information, please email ceooffice@ideacouture.com. For press releases or media inquiries, please email media@ideacouture.com.