Profile

Ankush Samant is a dreamer, a futurist, a strategic designer, innovator and much more than that a deep thinker who observes changing human needs and finds ways to define and design experiences meeting those unsaid needs. He has more than 15 years of experience in designing such experiences for humans around the world while delivering real business value to clients across US, UK, Europe, Middle East, India, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Before joining NUS-ISS, he was leading a team of UX designers, Interaction Designers, Visual Designers, Service Designers, Business Analysts and New Media Designers at Palo IT Singapore. He lead his team to deliver key solutions for a variety of clients ranging from GovTech to private organizations in the business of retail, luxury, insurance, travel, healthcare, automotive and banking. He has led many new initiatives as part of this role that include designing with Gen AI, scalable user research, public sector service design, designing for AR and VR experiences and strategic design management for organizations.

Prior to this, he has extensive experience in being an Innovation Coach and facilitator. He worked with Standard Chartered Bank leading design thinking for them as part of the SC Ventures team. He coached multiple business heads, stakeholders, regional teams and intrapreneurs in identifying potential opportunities, mapping them to real market needs, building MVPs and prototypes, validating them in markets and eventually raising funding through various rounds of fundraising.

He has multiple publications in the field of design and innovation. Most notably, “Developing products for differently abled”, “User Centered Design Framework: Designing for Children” and “Knot an Innovation: 10 rules for successful products”.

Ankush graduated in Electronics and Communications engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. He did his post graduation in Strategy and Innovation Management from Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, India and UCLouvain: Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He is a certified LUMA Design Thinking Instructor.