IDEO has moved from helping companies to design things that they’ve really already made business decisions about, towards a company that helps businesses decide what to do next – so we’ve really become about innovation through design.
What we’re looking for is people who are good at thinking as well as doing. You know, when one does one’s undergraduate degree a lot of the learning one needs is the doing part, in that you have to acquire the skills and the techniques. But you don’t necessarily have much opportunity to develop your thinking powers until you get into a graduate program. The other thing that needs doing is connecting to universities outside design schools and that’s something that academia’s been very slow to grasp; not much of it’s been happening so far and I think it’s well overdue. We need design discipline and business discipline under technology, with teams made up of all those different people from different points of view and background. Design has this ENORMOUS opportunity. You know, I feel the thinking is the part which is a crucial opportunity for design to make a big difference and have a big influence on organizations. The problems get messier and more complicated, and nastier, and more difficult than the conventional thinking process, which is very much to do with the conscious mind and explicit analysis. In short, people just can’t use specific analysis for these nasty, messy, complicated things. Design thinking in itself is a process that can be applied to just about any problem. It’s helpful to have the subjective, qualitative and experimentally prototypical approach that design has in its core skills to be applied to critical problems or organizational problems, as well as objects and software and so on.
Co-Founder IDEO & CCS MFA Advisor | Bill Moggridge
