ilana ben-ari
TOY DESIGNER TURNED SOCIAL ENTREPENEUR
Founder of Twenty One Toys
Inventor of the Empathy Toy and Failure Toy
Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Female Founders of 2020
about
Ilana Ben-Ari is a multi-award winning toy designer turned social entrepreneur. Her inventions have brought the transformative power of play into 1000s of boardrooms and classrooms around the globe.
Featured in Inc. Magazine as one of the Top 100 Female Founders of 2020, her inventions have been praised in TIME magazine as a technology that is reshaping the future of learning.
featured in
speaking
keynotes
Ilana’s an Internationally recognized Keynote Speaker who’s traveled the globe delivering over 30 Keynotes with her toy inventions. In highly interactive Keynotes, she invites the audience to play her toys live with audience participation while discussing the role of empathy, resilience, and creativity in the future of work and learning.
Loblaw Digital Creative Summit
Fireside chat on design, innovation, and business
Keynote for the Festival of Curiosity
What do Empathy & Failure have to do with Creativity?
Intuit Quickbooks Connect Conference
Panel discussion on entrepreneurship
Keynote for City of Toronto, Money Forum
How One Social Entrepreneur is Bootstrapping Their Way to the Top
Keynote for DisruptEd
Empathy, Resilience, and The Future of Work and Learning
Keynote Ontario Association of Architects
Why Empathy is the Number One Job Skill for the Future
C2MTL Conference
Panel discussion on entrepreneurship and design
Toys as Tools for Communication, Inventing the Empathy Toy
virtual fireside chats
Bring Ilana into your next team meeting or classroom lesson. She loves sharing stories and insights about bootstrapping her own toy business and the design process of bringing her ideas to life. Get a sneak peak of her journey in her medium post “These aren’t my pants”.
“I’m loving this live demonstration of The Empathy Toy. Amazing invention. Fascinating to watch it in action.”
“Ok, I was right. Ilana Ben-Ari was amazing! Why didn’t I become a toy designer? @oaarchitects made a perfect choice.”
So inspired by your talk on empathy. We work with people with visual impairments on campus. Developing empathy is the key to our success. Thank you for your ideas that will help us build on this!
In the News
How we kept our businesses alive in 2020
Our impact in reducing school bullying
CBC feature on the 21Leaders School Program
“How a learning exercise for the visually impaired evolved into a new toolkit”
Twenty One Toys is a multi-award winning training and development toy company using toys to teach what textbooks can’t – skills like empathy, failure, and creative communication. The World Economic Forum has called these skills the future of work, but we stop teaching them after kindergarten. Twenty One Toys was created to change that.
A multi-award-winning educational tool used in 1000s of schools and offices worldwide. The Empathy Toy® is a blindfolded collaborative puzzle game that can only be solved when players understand each other.
Their latest creation, The Failure Toy® is a game of balance and experimentation that’s already winning over teams by helping them build healthier relationships with the f-word: failure.
A multi-award-winning educational tool used in 1000s of schools and offices worldwide. The Empathy Toy® is a blindfolded collaborative puzzle game that can only be solved when players understand each other.
Their latest creation, The Failure Toy® is a game of balance and experimentation that’s already winning over teams by helping them build healthier relationships with the f-word: failure.
“Ben-Ari’s toys don’t just develop empathy — they also foster resilience, collaboration, and creativity.”
Amanda Lang discussing the Empathy Toy in Chatelaine,
From her book “The Beauty of Discomfort”.
“The Beauty of Discomfort”.
awards
Competition – 1st Place Award
Get Inspired
Coffee Talks – get advice from Ilana