Helping organizations create a resilient and design-led future.

Hello and welcome to Arete,
a fractional consultancy providing research, design, venture building, and innovation strategy services.

a·rete [ahr-i-tey] noun: the pursuit of excellence with the highest level of courage, mastery, and purpose.
Arete Studio embodies that ethos by striving for research, design, and innovation excellence.

Services

Designed to enable your goals, while
balancing constraints and obstacles.

I. Deeply understand your customers to better serve them.
→ Uncover and articulate unmet needs
→ De-risk novel features and initiatives
→ Develop insights-based strategies

II. Identify new market opportunities to drive growth and revenue.
→ Explore evolving customer segments
→ Ideate, test, and validate new concepts
→ Design value-add products and services

III. Develop a growth program to strategically focus your efforts.
→ Tailored innovation methodology
→ Repeatable and scalable processes
→ Clear and rigorous governance protocols

Toolkit

Comprehensive and complementary
disciplines, tools, and methodologies.

  • Conduct in-depth behavioural studies revealing often hidden unmet needs and offering unique thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and patterns to improve or create valuable products, services, and experiences.

  • Define stakeholders’ needs, actions & behaviours, all primary & secondary systems involved, and relevant technological & business constraints to ultimately create an exponentially improved holistic solution.

  • Apply macro & micro research methods translating evolving needs, market trends, and socio-economic shifts with a strategic view on long-term value creation of products, services, and ventures.

  • Develop new or enhance an existing team's capabilities to strategically explore, identify, and validate new initiatives through a tailored approach including program evaluation, training, and execution.

  • Uncover and converge diverse viewpoints through targeted and structured collaborative interventions with key end-users, consumers, decision-makers, regulators, technologists, and subject experts.

Initiatives

Selection of exemplary projects
representing the craft in context.

The Business of Aging
Research & Innovation Strategy

Interdisciplinary study with a 30+ year future view on the aging industry and latent opportunities, crafting a vision for the evolving role of pensions in society as aging becomes a defining challenge of our time.

→ Delivered a 5-part series providing strategic direction to executives, identifying 90+ global leaders across 5 thematic areas, 50+ unmet needs and insights, and 40+ service and product concepts.

New Family Benefits
Venture Discovery & Design

Exploratory study aimed at creating new employee benefits by looking at family relationships, such as parenting, informal caretaking, or estate planning and their impact on the member's holistic well-being.

→ Conducted 100+ customer interviews through multiple rounds of generative, exploratory, and validation research, resulting in 10+ highly desirable, viable, and feasible concepts selected for pilots.

North Star Strategy
Process & Service Design

Holistic long-term vision (3-5yrs), actionable roadmap, implementation plan and ultimate development handoff for a newly launched financial service offering focused on sustainable growth.

→ Delivery of comprehensive future trends report, 6 customer personas, 12+ key service principles, and North Star strategic vision report with analysis of desirability, viability and feasibility constraints.

Evolving the Member Experience
Process & Service Design

Comprehensive initiative to better understand plan members’ journeys, touch-points, unmet needs, and service frictions aimed at uncovering value-add opportunities through their active and retired years.

→ Resulted in a development roadmap for service administration and member experience improvement initiatives, consisting of 40+ qualitative insights, 10+ opportunity areas, and 30+ actionable features.

Ambidextrous Corporate Innovation
Practice Development

Bespoke innovation program at a leading financial institution operating in a complex and highly regulated market exploring dual management of optimization and exploratory initiatives.

→ Built an innovation practice with a strategic focus on service improvements and growth initiatives leveraging an extensive and methodical portfolio of novel frameworks, disciplines, and processes.

Eldercare Emergency Response
UX & Product Design

Elder care startup consisting of a wearable pendant, and a life management and emergency response app connecting elders with their friends, family, and caregivers offering 24/7 peace of mind to all.

→ Partnered with the founders attending Y Combinator, leading the complete product design efforts mitigating existing elder care product stigmas with an intuitive and sophisticated consumer offering.

Jon Saul

I can help you uncover and
translate insights into value.

As a seasoned leader with 15+ years of experience in research, design, strategy, and innovation disciplines, I’ve built and led teams to explore, identify, and realize growth and incremental opportunities delivering new value in multiple and diverse industries.

I have a keen interest and specialized skillset in problem discovery, value creation, and practice development within highly complex and regulated environments such as group insurance, employee benefits, pension plans, and government offices.

SELECTED EXPERIENCE

  • Providing service design, venture discovery, and innovation strategy consulting services to bold startups, corporations, and governments alike.

  • Partnered with leading Canadian organizations to drive innovation, scaled high-performing teams, and delivered initiatives that translate strategy into measurable growth and impact.

  • Built and led the pension innovation team to execute a balanced portfolio optimizing the delivery of current services and exploring future-forward opportunities.

  • Led research and service design capabilities to explore, identify, and validate value-add employee benefits and insurance growth opportunities.

  • Engaged with executives, developed and facilitated workshops, and led the complete design and delivery of novel human-centred products and experiences.

  • Led the complete vehicle interior and exterior design for the fully armoured, ultra-luxurious, & handcrafted SUV’s flagship models: Knight XV and EVADE.

  • Offered comprehensive physical and digital product design services to startups pre-market launch, and established organizations releasing new products.