Looking at the innovation process at Ideo
I chanced upon this set of videos via Design Observer and Konigi at a very timely moment, because just last week I finished reading ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation: Ideo’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization’ by Tom Kelley, brother of David Kelley, the founder of Ideo. It’s a really great read that gives an insider’s view of the circumstances and methodologies that are crucial to always coming up with innovative ideas that can change the lives of a product’s users for the better, something that Ideo is well-known for.
The videos are from a 1999 programme on ABC’s Nightline, and track a team at the company as they go about fulfilling a challenge to build a new kind of shopping cart in 5 days. I was intrigued by the fact that most of what Tom says in the book was in fact said in the videos by David a decade ago. The host of Nightline says that the programme was a huge hit with viewers and resulted in a lot of publicity for Ideo. It’s not difficult to see why. There are hundreds of business books that give some tired trite titled ‘how to make your company better than the rest’ and so on, but these videos show exactly how this is done in Ideo and the book doesn’t sound false in the least. I think the book is extremely useful because it is a sort of bolt-on to the video. The content stays true to the company’s mantra of years ago, even as it expands on their beliefs.
I found a couple of things mentioned in the video particularly interesting: David Kelley says that ‘being playful is of huge importance to being innovative’, so he actually encourages things like people throwing darts at each other and part of an aeroplane wing being used in the decor of the office. The other thing was an Ideo employee saying ‘enlightened trial and error succeeds over the plans of a lone genius’, emphasizing the value of teamwork as he explains the company’s prototyping process.
I’m glad to say we at Made By Many do some of the things Ideo mentions – prototyping, for example, and building what we call ‘cool walls’, full of our research and ideas.
3 comments
It’s fascinating that Ideo has maintained its incredible thought leadership in the design/solutions market. Especially given they have essentially been doing the same thing for 20 years!
I believe it’s down to the fact that their competency is not in design, certainly not in products, or even in thinking up strategy or understanding brands. What they are uniquely good at is ‘approaching problems differently’. They do this with diverse people asking unusual questions, experimenting with loads of techniques (ethnography research, consumer observations etc) and talking through different angles to the problem(s).
It is no wonder when they finally come to generating ideas, they have so many good ones.
I have recently been wondering why there is no Ideo of digital. And in my experience, I think it’s because agencies are not that well suited at approaching problems.
Agencies are too often caught up in web trends and happenings or limit themselves to familiar creative or technical options. Also they are ensnared in the trap of leaping to ideas and solutions before thinking through the problem (client briefs are rarely good for defining the true business problem). Certainly, the increasingly outdated ‘lone genius’ (ie planner) model is antithetical to the very spirit of collaboration, connectedness and collective intelligence.
It’s not as though Ideo rush to their clients saying, ‘there’s this really cool new plastic compound which is the answer to your problem’ – something digital folk too often do with latest technologies (Twitter anyone?).
So could there be a digital Ideo?
No reason why not. But they will, for starters, need to spend more time understanding and exploring the problem that needs to be solved, instead of leaping to technical solutions such as a campaign, offer, microsite, blog, UGC competition etc.
An Ideo philosophy with a startup mentality. Now that’s a place I’d love to work.
Where do you work?
Well, actually in the freelance market now as haven’t quite found that ‘digital Ideo’! Just come off a long stint at R/GA who do some good stuff (actually recently had a v good chat to @malbonster). Prior to that worked for range of web startups.
I certainly think there’s huge potential to innovate in this area. One obvious area is to work out if you can somehow involve the ‘crowd’ in a meaningful way to approach problems. This is less about wisdom of crowds and more about collective intelligence and diversity and richness of input. Understand MxM has some ideas on this; about trying to cultivate a ‘loose network’ of people to input on things. Think that’s v clever.