Book Review: The Art of Innovation

The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman

I spotted this book at my local library while perusing the business book section and was drawn to it by the fact that it was written by someone involved with IDEO.

For those of you who don’t know what IDEO is, they are a world renowned product design firm based out of the San Francisco Bay area. They are responsible for many product designs you are probably familiar with, such as the Palm V and HandSpring PDAs, the Swiffer sweeper, the interior of the Amtrak Acela commuter train and others. You can check out more about what they have done and what they do on their website.

The book itself is a sort of homage to IDEO and its process of engineering innovation. At times it reads like a process road map and other times, its more of a glorified case study of IDEO projects. There is certainly information to be gleaned from both, but I found the initial chapters more interesting than the latter ones, if only because they felt original, while many of the chapters toward the end felt like rehashes of the earlier chapters, just with a different clients and projects.

The authors start off with an overview of the IDEO philosophy and a summary of their history. The first few chapters are pretty short (by page 22, we are already in Chapter 3), but keep the reader interested by introducing a lot of back story about the founders and early projects. Chapter 3 provides more meat by addressing the first real topic, using what you already know that doesn’t work spur innovation.

The project that struck a chord with me was IDEO’s work on creating a new toothpaste tube for Crest. The challenge they were presented with was to come up with a new design that prevented the toothpaste from drying and caking around the cap.

“Successful innovations recognize that people don’t always do the ‘right’ thing or make the necessary leaps to bridge the gap between familiar and genuinely new ideas.”

The team came up with the novel idea of changing the cap from screw-off to pop-off. What they didn’t account for was the fact that most people had been screwing off toothpaste caps upwards of 1000 times each year, often for many years. The habit, they found was harder to break than they had thought.

One of the keys to the IDEO process is brainstorming, which is the focus of chapter 4.

“The problem with brainstorming is that everyone thinks they already do it.”

The authors provide a list of “secrets for better brainstorming, which are outlined here:

1. Sharpen the focus–keep the scope tight
2. Playful rules–don’t block ideas; encourage them
3. Number your ideas–use them to motivate and keep track
4. Build and jump–use transitions to either continue or depart from a conversation
5. The space remembers–use the area you brainstorm in to its maximum capacity
6. Stretch your mental muscles–warm up before starting the main task
7. Get physical–use objects, not just words to define your ideas–use

I really liked this chapter because I am a fan of brainstorming, not just to solve problems, but as a tool for just getting the creative juices flowing. I frequently use my lunchtime run to do some solo brainstorming if I am feeling stuck or my mental energy feels low.

Chapter 6 covers another favorite topic of mine, prototyping. Another key tenet of the IDEO philosophy is that innovations come from iterations and the way that they iterate is through models and prototypes. The beauty of prototyping is that it not only helps you find the good ideas (or OK ideas that you can expand on), but it also helps you find the bad ideas so that they don’t bite you in your product.

I can’t count the number of times that in discussing a new feature or product with a customer or prospect that the first incarnation of the solution failed miserabily at meeting the customer’s expectations. But by mocking up the screens or the workflow or the process and reviewing it with teammates, customers and prospects, I was able to come up with a solution that met (and sometimes exceded the original request).

The failures that you experience in prototyping (and even in products) are what lead you to a better solution. In Chapter 12, the authors discuss how to leverage failures into success.

“Fail often to succeed sooner.”

History is littered with examples of products that failed, but that were revitalized by someone who saw the failure and thought about how to fix it. Not to pick on Apple, but does anyone remember the Lisa (great product, wrong audience) and the Newton (huge PDA with famously buggy handwriting recognition software)?

Finally, in chapter 13, they talk about what they view as the requirements for creating great products. They provide several examples of projects that the have worked on, but the really interesting part it the list of objectives to make a product great:

1. Make a great entrance–make users feel welcome
2. Make metaphors–create a key phrase that defines the experience
3. Think briefcase–develop something that bridges work and home
4. Color inspires–once, computers were all beige
5. Backstage pass–provide insight into what’s going on behind the curtain
6. One click is better than two–even the smallest time-savings is significant
7. Goof-proof–make sure that as you design, you can go back if you make a mis-step
8. First, do no harm–insure that your product is not part of the problem
9. Checklist–cover 100% of the essential requirements
10. Great extras–the right accessories can make the difference between success and failure

Recommendation: A good primer on how to harness creativity and bolster innovation for products.