Steve Kretschmer is the founder and Executive Director of DesireLine, Istanbul, Turkey.

Over the past decade Steve has shaped the understanding and expectations for global demand of novel contraceptive technologies (CTs), male and female through envisioning, designing and leading the CT insights research, which have become a benchmark for understanding global demand for novel male and female CTs. This includes the largest male contraceptive demand research study completed to date.

Steve is the founder and Executive Director of DesireLine, a consultancy designed to influence and evolve the Development sector to realize transformational impact in improving the health and well-being of the world’s most vulnerable populations through deep understanding of who they are and what they need and want by treating them as ‘customers’, rather than as beneficiaries.

Through DesireLine, Steve has networked, led and integrated the approaches of multidisciplinary teams representing expertise in behavioral, social and data sciences, and human-centered design. A key function of its work has been adapting successful use of these disciplines from the commercial sector to effectively addressing development challenges, more sustainably.

Steve’s experience is originally grounded in 25+ years of commercial healthcare market research work consulting for pharmaceutical, biotech and device companies on understanding their patient markets, and provider and payor stakeholders to optimize prescribing, uptake, use, adherence and formulary coverage for their products. Over the past 10 years, Steve has leveraged this experience to support governments, donors and implementers to evolve their thinking and methods to realize greater impact, and through more sustainable approaches.

Steve holds an MBA from The Pennsylvania State University Smeal College of Business with focuses in Marketing and Organizational Development, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Thomas Aquinas College.