In my first semester at Manage&More (a support programme for young entrepreneurs from the UnternehmerTUM GmbH; see list of our partners) I participated in an innovation project at IDEO. IDEO is a famous design company – see Wikipedia for a detailed description. They were involved in the development of the first mouse (from Apple) and also helped dozens of other nameable companies like Microsoft or Pepsi to innovate new products and services or to significantly improve their products and services. We (twenty creative students) did a project for a well-known chemical company and it was an exciting project. I’m sorry, I can not tell you more about our project and its outcome – we signed a NDA. But I can tell you, we learned a lot, what helps us now to generate rapidly insights on a certain topic, to produce unexpected ideas from these insights and to finally build a consistent concept from the ideas.

Ask the expert

So one of the key concepts at IDEO is “learning from the experts”. You interview persons that are the real experts, i.e. the users or customers. So if you want to build a new computer interface device, you ask people who spend most of their time in front of a computer, but also people who don’t use a computer at all – i.e. the extreme users.

Make “why” your favourite word

What is important here: you don’t use a predefined list of questions for these interviews. Instead you observe the people’s behaviour within their natural environment, i.e. you visit the people at home, look for something exciting and ask them, why they do it like this. “Why” must become your favourite word and you must listen to the people. They are the experts – not you!

Being a T-shaped person

Another concept is the concept of a T-shaped person. A T-shaped person is an expert in a specific field, but also has knowledge in different areas. This additional knowledge connects him to other experts. With each person being a T (image a person who stretches his arms) you get a strong chain of persons – a team of experts, which will change the world, at least in a specific area.

Be crazy

What also is important is the process: first you have to study the users, next you have condense your learnings to a few key insights, then you build many many ideas, afterwards you filter your ideas and finally you choose the most promising ideas and built prototypes of it. If you visit IDEO like we did in Munich you will see hundreds of photos, flip charts and memos glueing at the wall. You must visualize your insights and ideas. Our brain works better at visualizing things.

Be different

The final concept I remember (of course, there are additional ones) is the importance of a mixed team, not only mixed by discipline, but also by personality. One of IDEOs founder, Tom Kelley, wrote a book about this and all the other aspects of innovation management: The Ten Faces of Innovation. There is also a website describing the ten different personalities.

Summary

If you are planning to start a business within the media industry and this also includes the web industry in my opinion, this book is a must read! You must continuously generate innovations (= ideas that have a market, i.e. users). Otherwise your users get bored and you loose them. Take the social networks for example. They loose their users time, because social networking is nothing new any more. If you are interested in how to encourage innovations within your company, read this book. And have a good time!