London, UK

Helena
Wataya

Helena
Wataya
Foresight Strategist · Innovation Advisor Service & Experience Design Leader
Helping organisations anticipate change and design strategies for uncertain futures.
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Expertise

Corporate
Foresight

  • Craft provocative points of view that shape strategic thinking and fed into early-stage innovation.
  • Scan emerging trends, signals, and uncertainties influencing organisational futures and its opportunities.
  • Map alternative scenarios and translate complex systems & drivers into actionable insights.
  • Use sci-fi & speculative methods to explore alternative futures, drive innovation, and de-risk decisions.

Innovation
Strategy

  • Design & facilitate collab sessions with senior leadership to co-create business vision & strategy.
  • Drive incremental, disruptive, and technological innovation programmes.
  • Design next gen business models and future-fit innovation portfolios.
  • Build strategic roadmaps & experimentation plans that translates identified future opportunities  & insights into action.

Service &
Experience Design

  • Lead complex service and organisational system design projects.
  • Apply Design Thinking mindset to strategy & transformation initiatives.
  • Translate vision into bespoke products, services, and experiences.
  • Reimagine and deliver end-to-end experiences from exploration to MVP.

Applied Human-Centred Design

  • Teach Design Thinking, Service Design, and User Experience within MBA programmes.
  • Facilitate Innovation Bootcamps, Design Sprints, and Workshops.
  • Coach teams in collaborative, human-centred methods.
  • Mentor professionals to strengthen design and innovation capabilities.

Strategic Work

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Corporate Foresight

When more AI stops being a competitive advantage: reframing digital wellness strategy under declining trust

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  • Reframed a digital wellness platform’s 10-year strategy under declining AI trust and adoption risk across vulnerable populations.
  • Shifted leadership from scaling engagement to defining where automation should stop to protect legitimacy and long-term adoption.
  • Revealed a critical risk: over-optimised AI erodes trust faster than it creates value, threatening the model itself.
Innovation Strategy
Corporate Foresight

Enabling a large, legacy organisation to continuously explore future business opportunities without relying on forecasts or one-off innovation initiatives

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  • Built a regional foresight system and innovation programme to reduce strategic blind spots and enable continuous business model exploration at scale.
  • Shifted the organisation from episodic innovation to distributed experimentation linked to real strategic decisions.
  • Revealed that future readiness depends on decision capability, not foresight artefacts.

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Corporate Foresight

Helping a global professional services firm navigate AI-driven uncertainty to confront what must remain human in its business strategy

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  • Shaped a 5-year AI strategy under regulatory exposure and client trust risk from accelerating AI autonomy.
  • Redirected priorities toward defining non-delegable decisions and embedding foresight into investment and planning.
  • Revealed a key constraint: unbounded AI delegation increases risk faster than it creates differentiation.

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Corporate Foresight

Helping a global travel platform navigate climate volatility and shifting work patterns to confront whether its 2030 business model still holds

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  • Stress-tested a global travel platform’s model against climate disruption and declining reliability of travel infrastructure.
  • Shifted strategy from demand growth to demand conditionality (climate + flexibility), informing capability and positioning bets.
  • Revealed a structural shift: access uncertainty, not price, becomes the primary constraint on value creation.

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Service & Experience Design
Innovation Strategy

Using player behaviour signals from live game systems to translate emergent dynamics into strategic interventions that shape engagement, retention, and monetisation outcomes

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  • Led live game interventions to improve retention and monetisation in a high-competition free-to-play market.
  • Translated player behaviour into testable features that delivered +31% D1 retention and +10% monetisation.
  • Revealed a key tension: short-term engagement gains can undermine long-term player system dynamics.

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Service & Experience Design

From payer to care orchestrator: redesigning the service model of a leading health insurer

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  • Enabled a shift to coordinated care by addressing physician misalignment as the primary barrier to adoption at scale.
  • Reframed strategy from platform rollout to behavioural adoption across a fragmented healthcare ecosystem.
  • Revealed a systemic constraint: care models fail without trust, incentives, and workflow alignment.

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Applied Human-Centred Design

Embedding human-centred design into MBA programmes to help engineers & developers build better services, experiences, and digital products

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  • As an MBA Professor, built human-centred design capability to address the gap between technical delivery and user-driven innovation.
  • Shifted professionals from execution to problem framing and user-centred decision-making.
  • Revealed a core constraint: innovation performance is limited more by mindset than by tools or technology.

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