The Art of Innovation is a great book about how to manage creativity. It shows how IDeO turns brainstorming sessions into creative products. IDeO designed the Palm V, the original Apple mouse, Amtrak's rail cars and many other products. The book talks about their method for managing creative people and creating a fun and highly productive environment. Prototyping is described as a way to test ideas quickly before too much has been invested in a design. Some people find this book to be a little long and repetitive, but I thought it was an excellent read with some great ideas on managing the creative process and managing people.
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. 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
Must have
Not every designer but also every innovative business-man should read this book. I've read many design-management books and applied many technics to improve innovation, but only this book tells you what is wrong and what is right with the best big test area in the world, IDEO.
Innovating the process of Innovation
Full of information about the development of innovative products and services
Ever wonder what it would be like in a creative environment?
If you have ever wondered what it would be like to work in a creative environment and how to pull one together modeled on what IDEO does, this is just the book. I really came to be a little jealous of the workplace and people described in the book as it sounded like a really fun place to work and a really stimulating place as well. I was also trying to imagine how some of these principles in the book could be implemented in my current workplace and had a hard time imagining many of my colleagues really going along with them, but then .. maybe I am in the wrong workplace??
This is a fun book and inspirational.