Interview with IDEO’s CEO

The McKinsey Quarterly recently published an interview with IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown. IDEO is considered a benchmark for innovation, and Tim’s ideas about how to implement innovation are really interesting.

The part of the interview that resonated the most to me was:

Even though companies want everyone to be thinking about innovation all the time, the reality is that everybody’s got other roles to play. So innovation is not a continuous activity; it’s a project-based activity. If you don’t have a process for choosing projects, starting projects, doing projects, and ending projects, you will never get very good at innovation. Projects need some form—you call them something; you run them in a certain way; you fund them in a certain way. That sounds simple, but, actually, a good process for getting projects going and done is often not obvious to companies.

I also enjoyed his description of innovation at IDEO:

I always get a little nervous when we start talking about innovation, IDEO, and other organizations because there’s something unique about us: all we do is try to have new ideas and get those ideas out into the world. We don’t have to do anything else; we barely have to run a tiny little company. But because we don’t have to focus on a bunch of other things, we can focus completely and utterly on experimentation, on exploring ideas for the sake of exploring them, and on bringing unlikely people together to work.

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December 18, 2008 | Filed Under Interesting 

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