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Amazon.com Review
IDEO, the world's leading design
firm, is the brain trust that's
behind some of the more
brilliant innovators of the
past 20 years – from the Apple
mouse, the Polaroid i-Zone
instant camera, and the Palm V
to the "fat" toothbrush for kids
and a self-sealing water bottle
for dirt bikers.
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Not surprisingly, companies all over
the world have long wondered what they could learn from IDEO, to
come up with better ideas for their own products, services, and
operations. |
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Sure, there are some good bulleted
lists to be found here – such as the secrets of successful
Brainstorming, Trend Spotting Tips,
6 Innovation Practice Tips,
the qualities of "Hot Teams", Keeping Eyes Open for Inspiration and,
toward the end, 10 key ingredients for "How to Create Great Products
and Services," including "One Click Is Better Than Two" (the
simpler, the better) and "Goof Proof" (no bugs). |
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But The Art of Innovation
really teaches indirectly (not to mention enlightens and
entertains) by telling great stories – mainly, of how the
best ideas for
creating or improving products or processes come not
from laboriously organized focus groups, but from keen
observations of how regular people work and play on a daily
basis.
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The key element of the art of
innovation is treating life as an experiment ‒ living with the idea
that you need to continuously try things as opposed to just sticking
to the knitting. |
Tom Kelley
IDEO |
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On nearly every page, we learn the backstories of
some now-well-established consumer goods, from recent
inventions like the Palm Pilot to things we nearly take for granted--like Ivory soap
(created when a P&G worker went to lunch without turning off
his soap mixer, and returned to discover his batch overwhipped into 99.44 percent buoyancy) and Kleenex, which
transcended its original purpose as a cosmetics remover when
people started using the soft paper to wipe and blow their
noses.
Best of all, Kelley opens wide
the doors to IDEO's vibrant, sometimes wacky office environment, and takes
us on a vivid tour of how staffers tackle a
design challenge: they start not with their ideas of
what a new product should offer, but with the
existing gaps of need, convenience, and pleasure with
which people live on a daily basis, and that IDEO should
fill. (Hence, a one-piece children's fishing rod that spares
fathers the embarrassment of not knowing how to teach their
kids to fish, or Crest toothpaste tubes that don't "gunk up"
at the mouth.)
Granted, some of their ideas –
like the crucial process of "prototyping,"
or incorporating dummy drafts of
the actual product into the
planning, to work out bugs as
you go – lend themselves more
easily to the making of actual
things than to the more common
organizational challenge of
streamlining services or
operations.
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But, if this big book of bright ideas doesn't
get you thinking of how to build a better mousetrap for
everything from your whole business process to your personal
filing system, you probably deserve to be stuck with the
mousetrap you already have.
~ Timothy Murphy |
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