|
Amazon.com
Review
→
Innovation Is
Love
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.
|
|
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. In this terrific book from IDEO
general manager Tom Kelley (brother of founder David
Kelley), IDEO finally delivers – but thankfully not in the
step-by-step, flow-chart-filled "process speak" of most
how-you-can-do-what-we-do business books. 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).
|
|
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.
On nearly every page, we learn the backstories of
some now-well-established consumer goods, from recent
inventions like the Palm Pilot and the in-car beverage
holder 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.
→
The Jazz
of Innovation
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. 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
The Innovative Enterprise |
|
|
