Design capability, innovation practice, and business outcomes.
Twenty-five years of practice, not theory. This page holds the same content as the printed resume and bio overview, arranged for reading on screen.
These documents describe Tony as an individual and list his personal address, tony@anthonybynum.com. For LYMNL inquiries, use tony@lymnl.com.
Strategist, educator, and founder of LYMNL LLC.
Tony Bynum is a strategist and educator with more than 25 years of experience helping organizations identify growth opportunities and build the capability required to pursue them. He is the founder and president of LYMNL LLC, a growth and innovation strategy practice focused on design capability building and adoption, consulting, advising, and executive education. At the IIT Institute of Design he serves as an associate partner to the Executive Academy, which he directed from 2023 to 2026 while also serving as an Associate Professor of Practice.
Earlier in his career he founded the Design Thinking Center of Excellence at Northwestern Mutual, where he was Principal Senior Director of Experience Design. His client work spans Fortune 500 companies, global nonprofits, and academic institutions, including Amazon, Bayer, BMW, Harley-Davidson, Sanofi, and SC Johnson, and he has led executive cohorts for Johnson & Johnson, Northwestern Mutual, and Sanofi. He holds an MBA and a Master of Design Methods, and he is a named inventor on four granted United States patents, with one application pending. He has been featured at Fortune Brainstorm Design, the STEM Connector Forum, and Design Observer.
Named inventor on four US patents (9,818,148; 10,410,277; 11,188,973; 12,008,631) in a single family covering a networked shelf-label system that detects shopper presence and coordinates alerts across a retail environment, with a fifth continuation pending.
Five roles across practice, industry, and education.
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01LYMNL LLC
Advises corporate, nonprofit, and academic clients on growth strategy, innovation portfolio decisions, and the adoption of human-centered design methods across the organization.
Designs and facilitates executive education programs, capability-building sprints, and strategy sessions for senior leadership teams.
Frameworks in active client use — Insights to Impact, Map the Room, Design-Led Dexterity, the Application Gap, and the Encore Value Arc.
02IIT Institute of Design (ID)
Roles held — Associate Partner, Executive Academy, 2026–Present. Associate Professor of Practice, 2023–2026. Director, Executive Academy, 2023–2026.
Builds executive education experiences that pair live business challenges with design research, strategic foresight, and distributed leadership models.
Designs and delivers the Capability Building Series, comprising the Navigator and Practitioner programs, which are the Executive Academy’s two flagship offerings and are available in on-site, virtual, and blended formats.
Structures each program in three phases, aligns learning objectives to the client organization’s performance metrics, and co-creates rubrics that measure how well new skills are integrated into daily practice.
Created a unified design curriculum built on work-integrated learning, closing what he defines as the Application Gap between training and applied practice.
03Northwestern Mutual
Roles held — Principal Senior Director, Experience Design, 2020–2023. Internal Design and Innovation Consultant, 2018–2020.
Founded and led the Design Thinking Center of Excellence, establishing the internal design capability, standards, and practitioner training for a Fortune 500 financial services organization.
Directed experience design across product, service, and operational initiatives, and coached executives and cross-functional teams through the planning, delivery, and adoption of design-led initiatives.
04RTC Industries
Led category reinvention, consumer experience, and innovation programs for national retail and consumer packaged goods clients.
Named inventor on the In-Store Item Alert Architecture patent family, which covers networked shelf-label devices that sense shopper presence and deliver contextual alerts. Four United States patents in the family are granted and one application is pending.
05Gensler Architecture and Design
Conducted space planning, human-factors research, and design strategy for corporate workplace clients.
Three engagements, and the organizations behind the work.
Pick-up station exploration
Worked with the Amazon team to move from insight to concept, using a structured, design-led approach to guide the team in converting knowledge into action.
Product design sprints
Led product design sprints in which the team used a user-centered ideation approach to develop systemized solutions and designs for new products.
The future of community engagement
Explored with GGP the principles that make a community. The findings were used to develop strategic frameworks for the future of consumer behavior and brand engagement.
Selected clients
- Amazon
- Bayer
- BMW
- GGP
- Harley-Davidson
- Johnson & Johnson
- Northwestern Mutual
- Sanofi
- SC Johnson
Twelve cohorts across three organizations, ranging from 8 to 30 participants each.
Johnson & Johnson, surgical products. Design Thinking Certification delivered through the Rutgers University Professional Development program. Six cohorts of 15 to 30 senior leaders drawn from product, research and development, marketing, and engineering.
Northwestern Mutual, Design Thinking Center of Excellence, customer experience practice area. Two Navigator cohorts of 15 leaders each at the senior director through vice president level, and three Practitioner cohorts of 20 to 25 program managers, product owners, and project managers.
Sanofi Pharmaceuticals. One Navigator cohort of eight senior customer experience leaders.
Academic appointments
Associate Professor of Practice, IIT Institute of Design, Chicago
Adjunct Professor, Northwestern University, MMM Business and Design Innovation programCourse: Design for Equity: Design Research Methods. Introduces the tools, methods, and approaches of equity-centered design (ECD), and builds a foundation for human-centered design through research methods that reveal often hidden inequities in daily life.
Faculty Co-Chair and Instructor, Design Thinking @ Rutgers, Rutgers UniversityCourse: Design Thinking @ Rutgers, Executive Education and Continuing Studies. A four-day facilitated program for mid- to senior-level executives in the tools, methods, and mindset of design-led innovation, offered on a rolling basis.
Visiting Professor, CEDIM The School of Design, Mexico City and MonterreyCourses: Design Thinking for Innovation; Retail and Consumer Innovation. Both treat innovation as a discipline that bridges business and design, using design thinking to guide the discovery of end-user needs in the creation of new products and services.
Adjunct Professor, Lake Forest College, Entrepreneurship and InnovationCourse: Finding Product Market Fit with Design Thinking. A 15-week course in which students use design thinking to understand user needs, frame opportunities, and prototype and iterate until a product or service solves the right problem for the right segment.
Education
Master of Design Methods (MDM), Design Planning — IIT Institute of Design, 2007
Graduate coursework, Organizational Psychology — The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, 2006
Master of Business Administration (MBA) — Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, 1999
Bachelor of Science, Business Administration — University of Wisconsin–Stout, 1993; minors in Public Relations and Graphic Arts Management
In-Store Item Alert Architecture — a single patent family. Assignee: RTC Industries, Inc. Co-inventor: Bradley Thomas Johnson.
A networked electronic shelf-label system that detects shopper presence, identifies the shopper from a mobile device, checks their purchase list or stated criteria against surrounding products, and coordinates alerts across shelf labels throughout the store.
Each continuation claims a different form of protection over the same disclosure. Counterpart filings in Australia, Brazil, China, South Korea, and Europe.
Eleven selected appearances and pieces.
Fortune Brainstorm Design, Macau, on-stage panelist before a global audience, 2025.
STEM Connector Forum, “Beyond Skills: AI Powered Insights to Fuel STEM Engagement,” 2025.
Design Observer, “The New Era of Design Leadership with Tony Bynum.”
The Summit of Business Design, featured speaker.
Experience Inbound, “Insights to Impact: A Practical Design Thinking Framework for Marketing and Sales Growth.” Session covered by Stream Creative in “What If Your Team Is Solving the Wrong Problem?”
“Why Learning While Doing Is Now a Leadership Imperative,” IIT Institute of Design, Medium.
“How to Build Organizational Dexterity: Calling an Audible When Markets Shift,” IIT Institute of Design, Medium.
“Most Companies Won’t Reach 10 Years: Six Lessons from Enduring Organizations,” IIT Institute of Design, Medium.
“Helping Organizations Change,” video conversation, IIT Institute of Design.
Chicago Graphic Design Club podcast, episode 65.
Northwestern University, “Designing with Equity in Mind,” 2022.
Problem framing and reframing, so that teams address the real challenge before selecting a solution.
Strategic foresight, translating anticipated market shifts into decisions that can be made now.
Design-led strategy, combining business analysis with human-centered research methods.
Design capability building and adoption across executive and practitioner levels.
Workshop, sprint, and executive session facilitation.
Executive education program design and delivery.
Keynote speaking on innovation, organizational dexterity, and work-integrated learning.
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These documents describe Tony as an individual and list his personal address, tony@anthonybynum.com. For LYMNL inquiries, use tony@lymnl.com.