How Spotify and Google are Using Social Science to Innovate. With Tom Hoy

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My guest today is Tom Hoy. Tom is one of the founding Partners at Stripe Partners, the London-based innovation consultancy. Alongside co-founders Tom Rowley and Simon Roberts, Tom has built Stripe Partners from a kitchen table to a thriving business, advising clients including Spotify, Facebook, Google, and Intel.
Tom’s particular interests lie in designing new ways to work collaboratively with clients to maximise the impact of Stripe Partners’s work, and helping them to see the value of social science has in unlocking their most complex business challenges. His work has been featured in publications including the Financial Times and the Guardian.
Stripe Partners are our 2021 Silver Partner, and Senior Research Consultant Anna Leggett will be sharing a research project at this year’s Summit that explored opportunities to connect with marginalised communities during the pandemic.
During our conversation Tom shares how Stripe Partners began and some of the reasons for their success as an innovation consultancy. He explains their main areas of practice and tells us about two of their projects, working with Spotify and Google.
We also explore how Stripe Partners has adapted its methodologies during the pandemic, changing the way it does ethnographic research, and what has been gained and lost by doing research solely online.
Lastly Tom recommends three worthwhile reads: Recommendation Engines by Michael Schrage, Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities by Lucien Karpik, and Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam.
You can find Tom on Twitter at @thoy and Stripe Partners at @stripepartners.