Staff worldwide: 350
Number of studios: 12 in three continents
Famous designs: the first computer mouse for Apple (David Kelley, 1982) and first laptop computer, the GRID
compass (Moggridge Associates, 1982)
Tom Peters loves IDEO and Fortune magazine has described this small and immensely successful company as Silicon Valleys secret weapon. And in 1999 ABCs Nightline documentary challenged IDEOs Silicon Valley team to design a dream supermarket trolley. The result was impressive.
Even more impressive was the way in which a fairly largish team of talented designers worked together. To quote David Kelley, an engineer and one of the founders, it was focused chaos.
IDEO itself has also been described as a zoo... Experts of all flavors commingle in offices that look more like cacophonous kindergarten classrooms... Its laid-back demeanour can be misleading. Bill Moggridge, a British industrial designer who founded IDEO with Kelley in 1991, says the discipline comes from the companys clients: We can pretend that were completely loose and laid-back because in fact theres this enormously powerful driving force of individual project and individual client.
One of the things you cannot do though is put your finger on how the company has achieved its considerable HR success. It does not have a strategic HR function though people who operate in the area that Moggridge calls the rind (the only structure that covers the whole company and is separate from the 12 autonomous studios) cover the usual HR administration. The studio in London is light and spacey and there is a buzzy, positive atmosphere but Colin Burns, who runs the studio and is a designer himself, dislikes anything that smacks of a system.
In his book, IDEO: Masters of Innovation, Jeremy Myerson captures the essence of the companys culture: The way IDEO stays continually creative is to avoid some of the pitfalls that have befallen other well-known design firms.
Most design organisations, according to Kelley, are hierarchical ateliers with an all-powerful design master at the top, supported by apprentices. But issues of consistency, morale and succession eventually undermine this approach. IDEO has deliberately eschewed both the pyramid structure and the star system, organising the firm into a series of small, guerrilla-like operating studios which have no more than 25 to 30 people in each.
Behind the success of the company are also two conceptual innovations. First, Kelley and Moggridge brought together two different disciplines engineering and design making IDEO the first company to integrate the two. The second big idea, inspired by Moggridge, was interaction design in which the designer is encouraged to take account of the entire user experience. Myerson quotes Moggridge who used the example of a cup of tea to get his point across: We often call it beauty with a smile, he explains. First you look to see if the shape of the cup is beautiful and if the tea inside swirls elegantly. Next, as you lift the cup and bring it to your mouth, you can detect the teas fragrance. You take a sip. When you return the cup to the saucer, there is a pleasing sound. It is only after going through each of these experiences, from beginning to end, that you appreciate the tea for the first time. This is the experience, and if we can design it successfully, we can satisfy the user in other words, we can get a smile.