Social Innovation
How IDEO brainstormed its way to problem solving success
IDEO is a design consultancy with offices around the world – here, one of its partners, Axel Unger, reveals the secrets behind developing cool ideas for over 30 years.
In 1980, Steve Jobs paid a visit to David Kelley and Dean Hovey’s office. The Stanford graduates had been running the Hovey-Kelley design and engineering firm in a small side street in Palo Alto, California, for two years at that point. “We need to build a mouse,” said Jobs. “That sounds interesting,” said Hovey, who initially didn’t have a clue what Jobs meant. They went on to come up with a computer navigation tool that was more reliable and less expensive than anything else on the market.
Today, nobody can remember why the up-and-coming Apple Inc hired a little startup for such a big task. “We thought maybe Steve wasn’t getting enough meat in his diet,” designer Jim Sachs said later.“ But for $25 an hour, we’d design a solar-powered toaster if that’s what he wanted.” Instead, they designed Apple’s first mouse, but more about that later.
Thus began the success story that is IDEO, a design and innovation consultancy that grew out of Hovey-Kelley Design in 1991. A lot has happened since then. IDEO came on to the scene at a time when businesses could still afford to ignore innovation, but global competition now means they have to constantly reinvent themselves, even family and heritage firms such as Bosch and Ford, whose core markets are China and the US. Not even a market leader like Apple can afford to rest on its laurels.
These days IDEO has given up on designing individual items such as the mouse, choosing instead to help create complete thematic and experiential worlds for all sectors of the economy, including industry, mobility and finance. Even though there’s an increasing number of firms turning consumer research into products and services, and even though consultancy based on design principles is booming, IDEO is still doing as well as it ever has, in all nine of its locations around the world.
How do they do it? Where does their wealth of ideas come from? How do they always stay one idea ahead of their rivals? And how can people work creatively in the first place? We visited IDEO’s office in Munich, Germany, to ask Axel Unger for answers to all those questions and much more.
Axel Unger is the creative mind behind every Idea at IDEO.
© Urban Zintel
Who is Axel Unger?
Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1972, Alex Unger studied Product Design at the Rhode Island School of Design in the US, then lived and worked in England and Italy. He now speaks five languages with a slight Austrian accent. In 1995, he joined IDEO in Boston. Five years later he made a sidestep into the corporate world but moved back to IDEO in 2004. He now works at the company’s office in Munich, Germany. As a partner in the firm, Unger has come up with numerous innovations. “We want our work to take society forward, not just a rich minority,” explains Unger, who says he’s particularly proud of the IDEO school project in Peru because it wasn’t just about economic growth; it was about human growth and the growth of a whole country.
No idea is too absurd and you never know if something will work until you try it.
Open secret
People working at IDEO are often asked what their creative secret is, even though they make no secret of it. IDEO openly shares its knowledge and methods via various channels, both online and in print. “The difference between us and classic consultancies is that our aim isn’t to sell as many projects as we can but to get others to internalise innovation,” says Unger.“ We don’t just give people a fish. We show them how to fish.”
That sounds very noble, but won’t that mean IDEO doing away with itself? “Our basic aim is to make ourselves superfluous to our clients thanks to the work we do,” says Unger. But new markets are always popping up, as are new challenges, such as climate change. In a world where there’s no shortage of businesses and organisations, IDEO helps its clients to stay relevant by using innovation labs as a tool.
Creating an Instagram profile and waiting to see if people are impressed just won’t do. Nor will hiring an external "future task force" who, after weeks in their ivory tower, hurl a folder of ideas on the table that the customer can’t relate to. So, how does a whole company stay innovative in the long term?
How it all began
David Kelley (born 1951) studied Electrical Engineering but calls himself a lousy engineer. Nonetheless, in the 1970s, he did work in development for Boeing, among others, and designed the engaged sign for the toilets on 747 jumbo jets. Kelley was much more interested in Stanford’s new Product Design course, graduating from that in 1978. That same year, he and his fellow student Dean Hovey founded the Hovey-Kelley Design and Engineering Company in California innovation hotspot, Silicon Valley.
David Kelley, founding father of IDEO
© IDEO
After Hovey’s departure in 1991, Kelley teamed up with the design studio of Bill Moggridge (who designed the first laptop) and Mike Nuttall. Between post-its, a xylophone and a vintage VW Bus, the three of them opened the design and innovation consultancy IDEO, which now has eight offices, in San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo, London and Munich.
Innovation Injection
IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge came up with the name for the company while flicking through a dictionary. The consultancy involves the client’s employees in the innovation process on every project and ensures CEOs actually meet the target group. IDEO also gets its top managers to fly coach or go shopping for lingerie so that they know what things are like for their passengers or customers. Board members often lose sight of that in the flurry of meetings and business dinners.
“A lot of people deny their own creativity,” says Unger. “Everyone is born with a predisposition towards creativity but it has to be flexed, like a muscle.” For example, the education system often suppresses creativity and the working world often discourages it – but IDEO gives it free rein.
“A couple of years back, Lufthansa wanted to improve its Business Class service and win the Skytrax ranking site’s fifth star,” explains Unger. “A lot of the ideas ultimately came from Lufthansa insiders.” Spoiler alert, Lufthansa got the star.
No brainstorming session can do without Post-it notes.
© Urban Zintel
IDEO calls its holistic and integrative approach “human-centred design” – whereby all project stakeholders adopt the consumer’s perspective and focus on their needs. “The result doesn’t have to be beautiful but it does have to work so that people can and will want to incorporate it into their lives,” says Unger, who dispels the stubborn perception that design always has to look good – a solution just has to make sense, and not obsessively be the latest thing in technology.
Inside a creative mind
What actually is creativity? How can someone be creative? The individual intellectual creative process is difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend or measure, perhaps at best in terms of the economic success of the innovation that emerges from it. Since the 1960s, design research has been examining the minds of creative people in order to decipher how they think, come up with ideas and tackle tasks. David Kelley later shaped this approach with IDEO and marketed it as a concept that has its own methods, such as human-centered design.
Design thinking is not a strict process or a list to check off, but rather an organic approach that’s oriented step by step to creative phases. It is an open-ended process because,“ rigid goals are not effective,” as Unger states, even if it is now common for people to say, “Here’s exactly what I want and I want it now.”
IDEO takes the time it needs for every project. It takes courage and persuasion but it’s necessary. Many companies initially struggle with the basic principles of design thinking – how can something with no guarantee be promising? – until they notice how much more efficiently, productively and profitably they work thereafter.
The brain needs breaks, so musical instruments are available to the staff.
© Urban Zintel
Every innovation has its faire share of failures – the earlier they occur, the better.
Quick fails
Brainstorming happens at the start of any project. At IDEO, the storm tends to be a hurricane with up to 100 ideas an hour, the best of them taking shape quickly. The Apple mouse is the prime example of IDEO’s rapid prototyping.
David Kelley dissected his BMW’s gear stick while experimenting with shapes. Dean Hovey took apart his fridge and wandered around pharmacies and hardware departments to gather parts. “We just wanted to get it done before Steve Jobs drove us mad,” Kelley later said, but there was method to their madness.
“Prototypes are the learning vehicle you go by and test on,” explains Unger. Hovey-Kelley presented the first prototype within days of first meeting Jobs: the ball from a roll-on deodorant was the mouse ball and the plastic lid of a butter dish was the casing. As we know, it didn’t stay that way – all key components of the mouse were refined, right down to the rubberised ball coating. The first prototypes of a project are born to die; they inevitably fall prey to the thought process.
The product that got things rolling: In 1980, Apple asked IDEO to ...
© IDEO
... design a computer mouse. The mechanism design is still used today.
© IDEO
“Every journey towards innovation has its fair share of failures,” admits Unger. The earlier those occur, the better – though only if you learn from them, of course. Otherwise, you end up with a fait accompli after months spent racking your brains and only notice too late how imperfect things are. In Munich there’s even an old-school workshop with a lathe as well as a digital one with a 3D printer.
But they don’t create miniature models or technical sketches for conference table meetings. Depending on the subject, the teams produce to-scale prototypes and real conditions. Anything can be a prototype now: hardware, such as the rolling mouse, digital, such as the app and website for mobility startup Wirelane or services, just like for Lufthansa.
Freeing the spirit
With about 700 IDEO workers worldwide and 100 in Europe, IDEO shouldn’t be running out of ideas any time soon. To prevent that happening, the company offers its teams all sorts of things to nourish, and not clog up, their brains.
In the Munich open-place office, a team moves into one of six closed rooms for the duration of the project. But they don’t just sit there for weeks looking at flip charts and lingering over procedure and theory. For most of the time, IDEO workers are on the road, gathering information and inspiration. If someone thrives intellectually at a museum, they can go without having to ask for the time off.
The search for relatable experiences for the Lufthansa project took IDEO staff all the way to Tokyo for a tea ceremony, then back to the Munich office, where the team recreated the service situation with a prototype consisting of several business-class seats, and on to a hangar in Frankfurt to simulate a ten-hour flight.
“One time we set up an operation theatre, instruments and all, and were inspired by motor-racing pit-stops,” says Unger. “There they do things in the same precise way and work under pressure.” No idea is too absurd and you never know if something will work until you try it.
Joint fieldwork
IDEO teams don’t gather such meta-information by surveying this or that target group online. They study consumers in their natural environment. “If you want to improve software, you just have to observe its users. As soon as they grimace, you know where things are going wrong,” David Kelley once said. He broadened perspectives right from the off by using interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teams of IDEO workers with totally different backgrounds, from industrial designers to software developers, psychologists and anthropologists.
“We don’t want people like us. We want to grow as a culture,” says Unger, before citing rheumatoid arthritis as one such example.“ We once visited an elderly lady to see how she followed her treatment on a day-to-day basis. She said she was fine. We watched anyway. She took the childproof pillbox and opened it with a knife. That was utterly fine as far as she was concerned.” You can’t find out the fine details like that for optimising solutions via questionnaires. You have to do fieldwork and be heightened to the needs of other people in order to ask the right questions.
“The success of our company depends upon hiring people who are not only smart and talented, but who also have great emotional intelligence,” IDEO chairman Tim Brown writes on his Design Thinking blog. This isn’t just an advantage when out doing fieldwork. At IDEO, people can look forward to something that many leaders have trouble with: respect. The central point is teamwork.
IDEO is all about the us. Isolated, socially awkward geniuses need not apply. Narcissists needn’t either. There’s a team behind every success and IDEO doesn’t do team-building trips. What it does instead is carefully pluck future IDEO workers out of the dog-eat-dog society: the types that will help others up the ladder to achieve success rather than doing them down.
One for all
David Kelley is the friendly face of the global company, but at the IDEO office in Munich workers frequently celebrate individual teams and their projects. Recently there was a collective rest week that involved paid extra holiday for all workers worldwide so that the light bulbs in their heads don’t go out and that they don’t burn themselves out.
He who laughs last
You can, of course, choose to be cynical about the harmonious and serene way IDEO works and poke fun at the peculiar-seeming methods, the colourful post-it walls, the table football and the bongo drums. But IDEO is more than just the sum of its people and agency clichés. Many clients have real fun working with IDEO and enjoy the unconventional way IDEO workers unleash their ideas. Never underestimate the child within. Bodystorming, unfocus groups, quick and dirty prototyping – it might all sound crazy, but IDEO openly admits its weakness of sometimes drifting into creative chaos and being driven mad by its childlike curiosity.
That Zalando project
A brainstorming wall for the Zalando project
© IDEO
The online mail order company grew fast but had lost sight of who its customers were. Who was actually buying all these clothes? IDEO helped Zalando open an internal innovation lab to develop new digital products, services and experiences.
That Lufthansa project
With the Lufthansa project IDEO developed a new Service-Concept.
© IDEO
The questions IDEO had when it came to improving Lufthansa’s Business Class service included “what are good service and luxury in today’s world?” and “what’s important for travellers?” People from IDEO and Lufthansa and the end customers worked it out together: people who travel a lot want control over their own time and want personal service; they want to decide when to eat themselves, be spoken to personally and not be handled as if on a conveyor belt. The crew now takes orders, like a restaurant, and not via tablets, but on paper, which is more intimate than a tech tool.
That Innova project
With „Innova“, IDEO wants to improve the educational system in Peru.
© IDEO
IDEO has been involved with projects with Intercorp (a multinational conglomerate in Peru) in health, finance and education, to name but a few. An Innova example: the aim was to improve the school system to prevent the decline of a threatened urban middle class. The plan to provide free schools soon proved redundant because free schools were viewed as substandard there. Instead, school fees were reduced, the schools better equipped and the teachers better trained. There are now more than 80 Innova schools in Peru, Mexico and Colombia.
Next stop: The future
Ever since its inception, IDEO has had the lofty aim of doing good in the world – aka impact through design – and aims to work on projects beyond private enterprise; the Innova schools and Aviva clinics in Peru are IDEO’s designs for a new education and health system, for example.
To set itself further apart from the competition, IDEO no longer wants to just change the world – now it want to save it. To put too fine a point on it, “Solutions have to do more than just be of use to people and companies. They have to be sustainable too,” explains Unger. “We can’t just focus on the end customer anymore.” Quasi-human and nature-centred design: the planet now rains down green Post-its with every project – because you won’t be able to teach anyone to fish if there are no fish left.
Different approaches lead to creative ideas.
© Eduardo Alvarez Lucas
From thinking to design
“We’re experts in the design process. You can hire us to make a machine, a mattress, an app or a space shuttle. It doesn’t matter,” David Kelley once said. Design thinking is the foundation of IDEO but just one element among many for creating complete experiential and thematic worlds.
- Design Thinking: People from different disciplines work together in an inspiring environment and develop concepts that are tested several times for its benefits, feasibility and marketability. Stanford professors Terry Winograd, Larry Leifer and David Kelley are among its developers and representatives.
- Human Centered Design: The iterative approach begins with the end user and ends with innovative solutions tailored to their needs. Progress doesn’t always require huge investment. Often it is enough just to dedicate yourself fully to the target group.
- Rapid Prototyping: This Stanford-taught approach has been an IDEO hallmark since its earliest days. “Innovation requires rapid experimentation,” says Unger, and developing initial solutions, scenarios and prototypes as quickly as possible so as to test them on relevant end users.
