Gensyn Design Team
Gensyn partners with your organization to drive innovation and implement strategic solutions that foster growth and long-term adaptability. We can help you build a thriving, future-ready business built on actionable strategies and creative collaboration.
Jennifer Hunter
Co-Founder of innovation and strategy agency, Fellow at the Strategic Doing Institute
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With the ability to bridge big thinking with practical execution, Jennifer works with leaders and teams to turn their ideas into action—aligning people, purpose, and strategy to move forward. Bringing over 20 years of experience helping leaders turn ideas into real outcomes, she embraces the importance of meaningful collaboration with the people doing the work. Creating space for innovation, Jennifer designs and guides workshops for teams wanting to tackle complexity, while building cultures ready for change—adaptive, human-centered, and aligned around shared purpose.
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Jennifer works with teams to develop strategies that go beyond efficiency gains, using AI as a catalyst for new value creation, competitive advantage, and market growth. Her approach puts people at the center—recognizing that the hardest part of adopting new technology isn’t the tech itself but aligning teams around a shared vision and making change happen together. Working with other AI experts, Jennifer builds a collaborative approach to AI adoption, which is particularly useful for teams struggling to align around a shared vision.
Based in NE Indiana, Jennifer works to build strong relationships and trust with working teams by providing a clear and organized process for working together, establishing clear and shared expectations, and enforcing a bias for action to get teams started and learning by doing.
Leadership & Experience:
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20+ years corporate and academic experience
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Fellow, Strategic Doing Institute
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Board member, various nonprofits
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Certified AI Business Leader
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AI in FW Member
Jason Barnes
With over 25 years of experience solving problems across multiple domains, Jason has developed proven processes and facilitation for organizational strategy and innovation.
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As part of the consultancy group Gensyn Design, Jason builds organizations' internal capability for AI adoption through practical, sustainable implementation approaches. His clients make informed AI investments tailored to their specific context, ensuring alignment and buy-in across both technical teams and executive leadership.
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Technological change is hard – Jason guides organizational change by balancing technical possibilities with human realities. His approach equips teams with frameworks to navigate complexity while fostering the collaboration needed for sustainable adoption. Rather than implementing one-time solutions, he focuses on building lasting capabilities across all organizational levels. By empowering people with both practical tools and the confidence to use them, Jason helps teams adapt and evolve together through uncertainty, turning technological challenges into opportunities for growth.
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Jason believes AI innovation thrives on curiosity and collaboration. While organizations often find the technology daunting and the competitive landscape challenging, his engaging approach to AI discovery uncovers hidden opportunities while building a positive team culture. By making the exploration process both thorough and enjoyable, teams develop the confidence to experiment with AI solutions that align with their unique organizational environment.
Leadership & Expertise
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Co-founder, Gensyn Design strategy and innovation consultancy
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Co-founder, Innovation Network of NE Indiana
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Experience
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18 years applying and teaching algorithm development and machine learning, statistics and design of experiments, and collaborative design processes
Steve Franks
Mr. Franks blends a solid academic background with years of hands-on practical experience in strategic planning, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
Academics
Steve holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business, with concentrations in marketing and finance. He was awarded the school’s 1996 George Hay Brown Outstanding Marketing Scholar Prize.
As an adjunct professor at Purdue Fort Wayne, Steve taught multiple sections of strategic planning, entrepreneurship, and small business management in both graduate and undergraduate programs.
Strategic Planning, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
Throughout the past two decades Steve has been predominantly known as an entrepreneur coach. During that time, he has helped over 3,000 businesses create startup, growth, or pivot strategies. These range across startups of all shapes and sizes - some that have scaled to raise venture capital and some traditional small businesses.
He did that work at the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center, with several regional community-based venture accelerators that he founded across Northeast Indiana, and for student founders via nonprofit Believe In A Dream.
Prior to that Steve worked as an innovation consultant with his mentor Ron Sears of the Design Consortium, where he participated in over 25 innovation projects for 9 companies, and led 13 of those. Two specifically relevant examples include helping a Fortune 500 firm identify merger and acquisition candidates and leading a project to improve the same firm’s entire customer experience, resulting in 20 initiatives being written into the firm’s strategic plan.
AI and Strategy
Steve views AI as a tool to unlock productive time that the firm can then invest to strategically create upside value for the long term – not just to save a few dollars in the short run.
While with Gensyn, he has helped develop and produce two workshops along with Jennifer Hunter and Jason Barnes.
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Is AI happening TO you or FOR you?
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AI for Business Leaders (also along with Angie Carel)
He also participated as a panelist for a Fortitude Fund educational AI event where he shared a suite of custom GPTs he developed for gathering data to inform strategic decision-making.
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AI for Entrepreneurs (along with Angie Carel).
Community
Mr. Franks volunteers with nonprofits Believe In A Dream, the Fort Wayne Police Athletic League, and Language Access Lab.
