Case Study Analysis: IDEO Product Development
The business model for IDEO began as an open-minded place to design, develop and manufacture new products. The last 20 years of proven product design driven by innovation has translated into profit margins for their clients and continuous refinement for IDEO’s process. IDEO pioneered “concurrent engineering” where design and engineering work together to produce aesthetically pleasing products that are also highly functional. This was different from many other similar companies that placed more emphasis on the industrial design than the engineering. IDEO’s strengths grew out of the ability to master this ability with high tech clients. Corporations came to IDEO because they had a proven system of developing the best products through using their key ingredients for innovative strategy.
IDEO was riding on the success of the Palm Pilot, which at the time had become the fastest selling computer product ever. This was a marketplace with which they were familiar, having worked on the Newton handheld earlier fro Apple. The Newton was an example of a disruptive technology, but the need for a truly portable handheld computer could not outweigh the shortcomings of the technology or the value proposition in the marketplace. Working on these types of projects reinforced IDEO’s stature in the industry for not only producing award winning products but also leading consumers in to new ways of interfacing with technology.
The skill abilities of team members within IDEO reflect the company’s doctrine of open innovation and the benefit of assembling those diverse teams. From their clients IDEO assimilates best practices and then integrates these practices back into their own business and proces...
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...ir knowledge base through the lessons learned by working with a multitude of companies, each with their own distinct characteristics, they were able to transition from a product development company to a company that offers a strategic partnership that provides innovative solutions focusing on the business as a whole. Now, IDEO creates and enhances some of the most creative organizations on the globe. A major shift in the paradigm established in 2000 focus on invention and the individualist nature of product design. Innovative companies such as Procter & Gamble have benefited immensely from the years of innovative evolution and learning experienced by IDEO. The more IDEO learns, the more their customers learn. This in turn helps IDEO to further their knowledge base creating a continuous loop of design thinking seemingly driven by a perpetual motor that breeds success.
During his absence, with John Sculley in power, the focus shifted to maximization of profit, and product design suffered. Steve Jobs theorized that is was one of the reasons companies decline. “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people… make great products… the products, not the profits, were the motivation. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything”.
Jeff Hawkins a graduate of Cornell Universityis best known as “the inventor who, in 1994, took blocks of mahogany and plywood into his garage and emerged with a prototype for the PalmPilot” (PC Magazine, 2000). Joining forces with friend Donna Dubinsky, Jeff “pulled off one of the most successful new-product launches in consumer electronics history, selling 400,000 units when they debuted in 1996. Now Palm Computing owns 80% of the handheld market” (PC Magazine, 2000).
Leonard, D. & Rayport, J.F. (1997) “Spark innovation through empathic design” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1997.
IDEO’s approach to the product design process is through a collective group effort that encourages suggestions, multiple prototypes, and...
The fact is currently there are no more technological constraints. Therefore, we just need to have a group of designer who have a have strong vision to make a decision and accept the role of leadership. The importance of this position is clear in an example that Petteri Kolinen said in the European Design Innovation Summit about his Nokia experience, “This led to slowness in introducing new products, and much more conservative decisions. The company dropped from being a front runner into a follower position.”
IDEO is an international design and innovation consulting firm founded in 1991 by David Kelley Design. The organization has undergone significant expansion in the past two decades. It employs over 700 people and generates approximately $150 millions in revenues. IDEO’s motto depends on creative people who can innovate design within the context of human needs (founded by Stanford University, Professor David Kelley). It has offices in Chicago, New York City, Palo Alto, and San Francisco), it has recently been ranked 10th on Fast Company’s list of the Top 25 Most Innovative Companies, has won 181 Industrial design excellence awards, has won 41 Red Dot awards, 28iF Hannover awards, 18 Medical design excellence awards and more IDEA awards
However, this vision generates an overlapping problem between the marketing department and the product development department. The marketing department, among other duties, is responsible for the identification of new opportunities and also to assure the development of new products. Unless these activities are extremely well coordinated with the product development department, there will be misalignment in the strategy of the EPD. Ultimately, this misalignment will affect a third department, i.e. the manufacturing department, since it is directly involved in the product development process.
My report is on the company Hewlett – Packard (HP) which was founded in 1939. I mainly focused on the Personal Systems Group (PSG): business and consumers PCs mobile computing devices and workstations which is one of the major industries of HP. In order to succeed in the business industry a company needs to understand its customer’s needs and create wants for them. HP found out that the customer needed light weight, useful notebook PCs through its Research & Development (R&D) centre. Hence, it created a want; a New Commercial Notebook PC Compaq Evo Notebook N1015v which packs the power and performance necessary for mobility into a stylish design for only $899(US $). HP also finds out about its customer needs through online feedback forms and survey. Via that, HP was also able to understand that not everyone are able to use their products hence it has created this HP accessibility products which can be accessed by anyone including people with disabilities and age – limitations. Example of such product under the PSG industry is the Mobile Speak Pocket which was specially made for the visually impaired people. ( Refer To Exhibit 1a – 1c )
I chose this three characteristics based on the responsibility of the teams that is to find innovative solutions to their clients’ problems. These three characteristics are key to a project team at IDEO because IDEO is a company corporate philosophy is that teamwork improves innovation and creativity. To improve innovation and creativity a team must be diverse, be able to communicate and resolved their own conflicts. According to Forbes.com, diversity is “critical for organization’s ability to innovate and adapt to a fast-changing environment.” In addition, in a Forbes study found that workforce diversity and inclusion as a key driver of internal innovation and business growth. Effective team communication will develop and improve team cohesiveness. The team will go through the stages of development (forming, storming, norming, performing, and later much later adjourning). This stages will help the team build a relationship, and team cohesiveness depends on the strong relationship between the member, and open communication improves sharing good ideas. Lastly, having a self-managed conflict team will reduce conflict resolving
The existing individualistic culture was one that had developed around a product development need. Whilst smaller “silos” were indeed conducive to supporting the flexibility and innovation inherent in this culture, and suitable for the creation of a wider array of product designs within the existing firm, they proved to foster a degree of duplication of efforts as well as the limiting knowledge sharing throughout the organisation. New ventures require the support of the parent company and its resources and this needed to be changed for the success of DMPS.
In 2010, a UK study “found that emotional intelligence, which includes qualities such as self-confidence, commitment and empathy, is seen as pivotal for organisational success” (Bennett, Perry, and Lapworth 2010). Specifically, empathy is particularly important for design thinkers proving to motivate helping behaviour between leaders, members and users. (Myyry and Helkama, 2001).Those who have empathy are able to view the world through different ‘eyes’ or perspectives and thus understand different ideas and concerns. The power of outrospection creates the revolutionary relationships between the users and business. Case study analysis by Agnieszka Szóstek exemplifies how Microsoft’s creation of the “User Experience” team captures the necessity of design thinking to succeed within the competitive technology markets. The team’s initial key strategies included “...focus on user experience in the development of Microsoft products” and “extensive user research methods”. The collaboration between Microsoft and “Digital Art centre” aimed no longer to simply use arbitrary styling products but rather defining the entire experience as an emotional connection between buyers and their products. The 3 spaces of design thinking were covered at the event whereby users and the Microsoft team collaborated to design unique accessories and covers for the new Surface Pro Tablet. The results of this event allowed
With a near total saturation of the consumer electronics market, companies need to look beyond their boundaries and add value to their offerings, and sometimes it means total reinvention of the company.
Many large organizations are realizing that they need to be more innovative and flexible. Intrapreneurship has become more important nowadays for organizations. Intrapreneurship helps organizations to a transformation of dreams into reality. This essay will describe the intrapreneurship and compare the differences between Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneurship and show some examples from the business world. It will further explain why larger organizations are pursuing an agenda of intrapreneurship. In addition, it will look at the difficulties of developing of an intrapreneurial culture. Finally, it will suggest strategies which could be adopted in pursuit of an intrapreneurship culture.
In order to increase the sale and number of customer to the company, SAP America established autonomous regional Profit & Loss (P&L) center with their respective sales, consulting and training teams. This resulted in every regional office to work on their own sales and marketing strategy to improving the sales. In order to penetrate the market and build a base, they created an industry strategy called ICOE’s, who act as bridge between the customer and product development organizations.
Now IDEO has to re-think how they have to modify their innovation process to develop the VISOR product. Now they have to plan how their project leads and other stakeholders will manage the creativity and innovation particularly for the completion of this project.