A New, Design-Led Approach to Venture Building for Emotional Wellbeing

A New Design-Led Approach to Venture Building for Emotional Wellbeing: Introducing Ron Gabay, Head of Venture Design & Innovation at Joy Ventures

We are excited to announce the appointment of Joy Ventures’ new Head of Innovation & Venture Design, Ron Gabay, who recently served as a senior strategic designer in a Volkswagen corporate venture and brings with him extensive experience in seeding and transforming ideas into winning ventures through a design-led approach.

When we started Joy in 2017, the consumer product for emotional wellbeing category was still in its infancy and we realized early on, as we embarked into uncharted territory, we would need to pioneer a unique, interdisciplinary model that hadn’t been done before, one that not only invests in existing startups, but also sparks new ventures by nurturing and interweaving innovation from our science, tech and design communities. In the last couple of years, we have created the blueprints, laid the foundation, and built the structure for what is now our Joy startup studio. With a growing portfolio, three academic grant cycles under our belt, and deep collaborations with universities and design institutes, we have spearheaded an ecosystem that serves as the fertile ground for the creation and success of wellbeing startups. 

This experimental, outside-of-the-box, approach has required us to be relentless in analyzing the different puzzle pieces of our business and to develop a tight feedback loop that allows us to continuously strengthen and build upon our processes. As we took a deeper look into our current strategy, we pinpointed several opportunities to further leverage our business assets and to accelerate the high-potential ideas we have amassed into ventures.

We are excited to onboard Ron Gabay as Head of Venture Creation & Design, to take Joy’s venture creation efforts the next step forward. Ron brings with him his well-honed design thinking approach from his previous work in corporate, startup and consulting environments and a deep understanding of how to leverage the unique puzzle solving powers of both business and design as a source for innovation.

Ron will not only help us to strengthen our foundation for venture creation, but will also lead us into new directions by partnering and developing innovation programs with collaborators from our design, tech and science communities. As we launch our Entrepreneur in Residence platform, Ron will support our EIRs through the phases of discovery, ideation, and product validation, all the way to launching new ventures with the best chances for success.

In today’s environment, the demand for emotional wellbeing products is reaching new heights, making innovation in this field more critical than ever. We are truly thrilled to add Ron to the team – his passion and dedicated human-centric approach to venture design will help drive our mission to create meaningful products that bring wellbeing to every person’s life and catapult our blooming field into the future.