Do companies that design products, office environments or hospitals care about the people who use them?
Challenge: Irrigating small-scale farms in Kenya.
Innovation: The Deep Lift Pump - an environmentally sound, cost effective, portable pump that uses human power and requires no special knowledge or tools to install and run.
If you've tried sending messages from a complex mobile phone or spent a long night in the ER, you might easily think not. But in today's competitive business environment, finding out what really suits the consumer is crucial. That's why a company named IDEO has been gaining traction and business for more than 15 years with its unique approach called "design thinking."
Based in Palo Alto, Calif, with eight offices globally, IDEO helps organizations innovate by placing end users at the center of the design process and visualizing and implementing new ways to serve and support them. Guess what - it's worked.
The company was created in 1991 when David Kelley Design merged with ID Two, run by Bill Moggridge, and Matrix Product Design, run by Mike Nuttall. The three firms had iconic designs under their collective belts, such as the first computer mouse for Apple in 1981, the first portable notebook computer for GRiD Compass in 1986, and the first ergonomically designed mouse for Microsoft in 1987.
Challenge: Creating a bike and riding experience that will attract the 161 million lapsed and non-cyclists around the world.
Innovation: A Coasting bike that enables lower maintenance and increased comfort, an embodiment of "pure riding". Three of the six largest original equipment manufacturers delivered a Coasting bike in their 2007 lines, selling out the 30,000 bikes produced, in less than six months. Seven more OEMs committed to Coasting lines in 2008.
Since then, IDEO has built a long list of clients, including the American Red Cross, Adobe, Intel, Cingular, Bank of America, the National Health Service, Procter & Gamble, Mayo Clinic,Milton Bradley, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Tim Brown, IDEO's president and chief executive, also has taken IDEO's methodology and message about innovation to theWorld Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as a speaker and moderator at the global event for the past three years.
Brown says design and innovation "encourage us to take a human-centered empathic approach to business problems as well as social problems, and so we start to see more examples of congruence between otherwise distant spheres."
To find solutions, IDEO uses a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach. IDEO's teams are composed of people from a wide range of disciplines, from architecture and mechanical engineering, to anthropology and psychology.
"IDEO likes to hire people whose mindset allows them to see opportunities rather than problems," says Chris Flink, a partner at IDEO.
Challenge: Enticing people to open new accounts.
Innovation: "Keep the Change" - a service that rounds up purchases made with a Bank of America debit card to the nearest dollar and transfers the difference from the individuals' checking accounts to their savings accounts. Less than one year after the launch, the service attracted 2.5 million customers and 99 percent have chosen to keep the service.
In following a design-based approach, teams begin brainstorming early in a project. People are encouraged to generate, not shoot down, ideas from all the disciplines, although different disciplines take center stage at different times. No ideas are considered too silly.
As part of the hands-on humancentered approach, teams don't sit in meetings all day. They go and observe consumers using a product or moving through a venue and note possible opportunities for improvement. Then they put themselves in the customer's place - literally. One IDEO team member was strapped to a gurney and put through the emergency room admission process to see the patient's point of view - which, in this case,meant mostly looking at the ceiling.
This exercise showed IDEO and their client that patients could become confused and disoriented simply because they couldn't see signs on the hospital's walls. In response, the team conceived of a Patient Journey Punch Card that would allow for a simple, graphic way for patients to know where they've been and what is coming next.
Challenge: Keeping Eclipse Aviation at the forefront of lightweight aviation innovation.
Innovation: A harmonized instrument panel with controls grouped and labeled according to flow, reach and handedness. IDEO used geometry to give the cabin a larger feel and added amenities. Eclipse Aviation has sold more than 2,500 jets, worth $3.8 billion.
Where else did IDEO go for ER ideas? Try NASCAR. Yes, straight to pit row where IDEO took client and design teams to observe NASCAR pit crews.As odd-couple as that may sound, both ER and pit crews work under significantly stressful conditions where time is of the essence. And while ERs and race-car pits seem to have little else in common, the goal was to use the experience to spur creative solutions.
"Seeing something that is analogous can be inspirational," Flink says. "The pit crew's behavior was something an ER team could consider.We use that as a way to jar thinking and see the opportunity from a fresh perspective."
"Empathy" is also extremely important at IDEO, according to Flink. It helps inspire new ideas and motivate clients to rekindle their underlying passion for the work.
"The sense of wanting to help people, for example, in the health care professions, can get lost over time," Flink says. "This can be about reconnecting and engaging folks to use their empathy to rethink how they approach their business. It's deeply inspirational to them because they do care."
IDEO is also unusual in looking at "extreme users" rather than only the target audience, Flink says. In the research phase, the company talks to both experts and novices.
In designing kitchen tools, such as salad spinners and lemon zesters for one company, IDEO's research included professional cooks who zest 20 lemons in an afternoon. These experts "often have insights that are very honed," Flink says. But IDEO also looked at children whose parents were just starting to let them help out in the kitchen.
"Kids are often completely new to such tools, and their limited manual dexterity can highlight new opportunities," Flink says.
"While IDEO's success has inspired other consulting companies to become more human-centered, innovation is not always about competition," says Flink.
When faced with the question of whether the U.S. can win the innovation race against other countries, he says companies should be more focused on "how we, as organizations or individuals, can participate and contribute."
That, Flink says,means making education and creativity a priority, and working collaboratively to find broad reaching solutions for the business, education, government, and social sectors.
"Innovation is no longer about being closed and competitive," Flink says. "Innovation benefits from networks of individuals and organizations who work together in an open manner to arrive at solutions."
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