The Idea in Brief
What do Reebok Pump sneaker inserts have in common with inflatable splints and IV bags?
Design Continuum applied pump technology from these medical products to create best-selling basketball shoes.
This knowledge brokering—using old ideas as raw materials for a host of new ideas in wholly different contexts—lets companies innovate continuously, a vital capability for any firm.
The key to knowledge brokering? Systematizing the constant generation and testing of fresh ideas. Here’s how to take the mystery out of innovation.
The Idea in Practice
1. Capture good ideas. Investigate multiple markets, industries, and geographical locations for proven technologies, products, and business models. Play with the ideas—in your mind and with your hands. Learn how and why they work, what’s good and bad about them. Fantasize about how to use them. Observe people using similar products. Example:
Design Continuum’s engineers watched doctors using surgical tools during operations. Noticing the surgeons’ elaborate habits to make up for their “missing third arm,” the engineers applied those habits to develop a tool that allows simultaneous holding, rotating, and operating on kneecaps.
2. Keep those ideas alive. Embed ideas in objects that designers can constantly see, touch, play with, and discuss—e.g., display plastic parts, toys, prototypes, and sketches in your office. The most respected people at IDEO are “part pack rat [they accumulate huge collections of intriguing objects], part librarian [they know who has and knows what], and part Good Samaritan [they share what they know and help others].” Example:
IDEO’S “Tech Box” cabinets bulge with seemingly unrelated products like tiny batteries, holographic candy, and Hawaiian flip-flops. Tech Box curators document each piece and host weekly conference calls to discuss new additions and potential uses.
3. Imagine new uses for old ideas. Look for analogies between new problems and the old ideas you’ve captured and kept alive. Even simple similarities can lead to breakthroughs. Example:
The similarity between a child’s toy—a battery-powered squirt gun—and an emergency-room tool led Design Continuum to develop an inexpensive, disposable “pulsed-lavage” medical product for cleaning surgical wounds.
Design your organization’s physical layout to get people talking constantly about their work and about who might help them to do it better. Example:
Idealab!’s one-story building has few walls, so everyone runs into everyone else. Concentric circles of desks radiate from the CEO’s office. The innermost circles are early-phase projects in most need of new ideas and support.
4. Put promising concepts to the test. Quickly turn ideas into a real product, service, or business model—but just real enough to test, and early enough to catch mistakes and make improvements. Example:
Idealab! tested on-line car selling by building a simple Web site, hiring a CEO for 90 days, and charging him with selling one car. The site got 1,000 hits the first day and sold four cars. CarsDirect.com was born.
Ask any CEO in the world to write a top-five wish list, and we guarantee that “more ideas—better ideas!” will show up in some form. Most likely it’ll be right at the top. CEOs know that ideas and innovation are the most precious currency in the new economy—and increasingly in the old economy as well. Without a constant flow of ideas, a business is condemned to obsolescence.