Team Profiles

Steve Wunker, Senior Partner

Meet Steve

Steve is a Senior Partner at Innosight. Steve leads the healthcare, financial services, and telecom industry practices at Innosight, where he works with clients to develop new ideas, evaluate growth opportunities, and improve how they organize to pursue innovation. He focuses on these three fields due to his background and his love for industries with multiple sets of customers and complex external pressures.

Previously, he led work on major development platforms for Psion, a FTSE 100 British consumer electronics firm that he led into the market for cellphones via joint ventures with Motorola and Ericsson. At Psion he was responsible for world’s first commercial WAP product, the white-label Ericsson MC218. He also led corporate ventures for the Netherlands-based African cellular carrier Celtel, launching a mobile commerce business that transacts up to 2 percent of GDP in countries where it operates. Additionally, he served as CEO of Brainstorm (now part of Opera Telecom), one of the first companies to use cellphones as marketing tools.

Steve has been a leader in interactive marketing, having been elected twice as Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association. Steve has appeared many times in general business publications as well as the trade press in his focal industries. His television appearances include Bloomberg and the BBC. He was recently a Visiting Executive at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and is working on a book under contract with Harvard Business Press.

Prior to his entrepreneurial career, Steve worked for several years with strategy consultants Bain & Company in their Boston and London offices, where his clients included financial services and technology companies. He has also worked for the United Nations, the Soros Foundations, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, primarily in the field of green energy and the environment.

Steve has written two articles in peer-reviewed publications and a World Bank working paper. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Master’s in Public Administration from Columbia University, and a BA in public policy cum laude from Princeton.

Most Memorable Innosight Moment

Seeing a healthcare innovation we'd worked on appear in Whole Foods. The concept had taken less than 9 months from inception to pilot, and cost less than a tenth of the client's usual development costs. The client's team had been limited to a small handful of people. We'd rolled up our sleeves and worked with them to implement a great idea. I liked seeing results appear quickly and inexpensively, and I also saw the product as a symbol of what a truly collaborative relationship can achieve.