Daniel Mai, PhD is a Berlin-based
Innovation Strategist & Business Anthropologist
I help organizations make better strategic decisions in situations of uncertainty, before emerging change becomes someone else’s competitive advantage. By translating shifting behaviors, cultural dynamics, and market developments into actionable opportunities, I help companies identify where to grow, how to adapt, and what to build next.
When established assumptions no longer provide reliable guidance, I use deep foundational research to make sense of unfamiliar contexts and explain the “Why” behind the “What.” I combine this human insights approach with a strategic foresight perspective to anticipate how people, markets, and technologies may evolve, and to identify the actionable implications for future products, services, and business models.
The result is a stronger evidence base for strategic decision-making: clearer opportunity spaces, more relevant innovation directions, and greater confidence about where to place the next bet.
Research & Innovation Services
My work spans across human insight and foresight, product and service development, and improving the conditions that allow an organization to innovate.
Exploratory Human Insights
Go beyond the average customer. Ethnographically learn from lead users, fringe adopters, and overlooked segments that are already shaping your market’s future by decoding their practices, expectations, and emerging behaviors.
Strategic Foresight
Anticipate what comes next. Identify the weak signals, emerging shifts, and unconventional developments in society, technology, economy, environment, and policy that shape tomorrow’s market reality, to reduce uncertainty and plan for different scenarios.
Co-creation & Concept Development
Turn ideas into tangible concepts. By engaging lead users and team members, co-create and conceptualize products and services that connect people’s emerging behaviors, market shifts, business ambition, and what your organization can credibly deliver.
Culture of Innovation Assessment
Improve how you innovate in practice. Uncover how everyday routines, processes, informal dynamics, and structures enable or constrain innovation inside your organization, and where targeted changes will work toward your vision.
I work in two commercial modes:
For Consultancies
I join consultancy teams as a senior freelance partner, leading or supporting exploratory research, foresight, synthesis, opportunity framing, concept development and testing across German- and English-speaking markets.
For Companies
I help companies identify where an emerging capability can create meaningful commercial value by exploring application contexts, stakeholder problems, adoption conditions, market shifts, and plausible opportunity spaces.
Project Cases
Selected case studies that demonstrate some of Daniel’s previous engagements:
Clients
Collaborating with leading consultancies in Europe and North America, such as ReD Associates, Idea Couture, Cognizant, Human Futures, Sturm und Drang, and A Piece of Pie, I have executed over 50 research and innovation projects for dozens of Fortune 500 companies across many markets.
