- Please characterize IDEO’s organization, including its organizational culture and management
a) Management is facilitating innovation at IDEO with voting on ideas. Please describe if that’s true or not and argue for why or why not they do it.
As the company promoted flat organization, management in IDEO was not voting on ideas to push forward. All ideas were presented to all employees during “show-and-tells” in order to get feedback from all colleagues, not just the management team. This helped to reinforce the sense of equality and in IDEO that was a cornerstone of the company strategy.
b) What happens to IDEO’s teams after they have formed them? The teams disband and form them a new each time.
c) What can you say about formal titles in the organization? Formal titles do not exist.
d) What else do you find typical about management in the organization? Please describe.
Informal management and collaboration are very typical about IDEO. Employees were encouraged to bring creativity out even when designing their workspace. Formal titles and clothes were not used. Furthermore in IDEO people were rarely fired, but encouraged for good performance. Moreover, small work groups made it possible for every employee to contribute.
e) What is the tech box? Please describe its purpose in one sentence:
Tech boxes are big “shoeboxes” that contained different gadgets and other curiosities. Their main objective was to inspire innovators, who were always invited to check out its content and to try out these innovative products.
2. What is typical of IDEO’s innovation process? Please explain your reasoning.
Perhaps the most common trait of IDEO’s innovation process is its informality and collaborative knowledge. The innovation in IDEO started from brainstorming and prototyping, the two activities that went almost hand in hand. It was important to generate as many ideas as possible in the shortest possible time and to start developing the project based on these ideas. Brainstorming in small groups were also common during product development phase, in order to make sure that the team is still on the same page and no new idea is lost. The multitude of ideas created to creation of relatively many prototypes, however this was considered a positive thing, rather than a waste and every prototype failure was perceived as a lesson learnt.
