| Costas Papaikonomou |
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Costas is one of the founding partners of Happen and for fifteen years has worked across the globe in many areas of innovation, ranging from strategy to design to commercialisation & manufacturing. He has continuously pursued the balance between technology, consumer need and business relevance, driving for the innovative leap to achieve all three. He earned his Master of Science in Industrial Design Engineering degree with a perfect score at the University of Delft, the Netherlands. Before starting Happen, Costas worked as consumer product designer and engineering manager, picking up several pan-European design and engineering awards on the way (iF, GIO, EEA). Costas has led insight-led projects across cultures and categories on all continents (including the Antarctic), for clients such as Kraft, ABF, Sara Lee, AB-InBev, Sanofi Shell, InterContinental Hotels, HSBC, Reckitt Benckiser and Duracell – helping them create evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs that grow revenue through smart execution. In the past couple of years he has successfully pioneered fusing the opposite ends of creativity, by bringing the highly analytical TRIZ methodology and the far more intuitive consumer insight process together in the SWEAT framework. These focused creativity techniques have allowed clients to take inspiration from successful solutions in other industries as possible evolutions for their own category, raising the chance of in-market success whilst lowering CapEx and risk. When not at work, Costas spends as much time as he can outdoors in the sun with his wife Patricia and sons Spiro and Dimitris. |