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.