The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm
IDEO, the world's leading design firm, is the brain trust that's behind  some of the more brilliant innovations of the past 20 years--from the Apple  mouse, the Polaroid i-Zone instant camera, and the Palm V to the "fat" toothbrush  for kids and a self-sealing water bottle for dirt bikers. Not surprisingly,  companies all over the world have long wondered what they could learn from IDEO,  to come up with better ideas for their own products, services, and operations.  In this terrific book from IDEO general manager Tom Kelley (brother of founder  David Kelley), IDEO finally delivers--but thankfully not in the step-by-step,  flow-chart-filled "process speak" of most how-you-can-do-what-we-do business  books. Sure, there are some good bulleted lists to be found here--such as the  secrets of successful brainstorming, the qualities of "hot teams," and, toward  the end, 10 key ingredients for "How to Create Great Products and Services,"  including "One Click Is Better Than Two" (the simpler, the better) and "Goof  Proof" (no bugs).ButThe Art of Innovationreally teaches indirectly (not to mention  enlightens and entertains) by telling great stories--mainly, of how the best  ideas for creating or improving products or processes come not from laboriously  organized focus groups, but from keen observations of how regular people work  and play on a daily basis. On nearly every page, we learn the backstories of  some now-well-established consumer goods, from recent inventions like the Palm  Pilot and the in-car beverage holder to things we nearly take for granted--like  Ivory soap (created when a P&G worker went to lunch without turning off his  soap mixer, and returned to discover his batch overwhipped into 99.44 percent  buoyancy) and Kleenex, which transcended its original purpose as a cosmetics  remover when people started using the soft paper to wipe and blow their noses.  Best of all, Kelley opens wide the doors to IDEO's vibrant, sometimes wacky  office environment, and takes us on a vivid tour of how staffers tackle a design  challenge: they start not with their ideas of what a new product should offer,  but with the existing gaps of need, convenience, and pleasure with which people  live on a daily basis, and that IDEO should fill. (Hence, a one-piece children's  fishing rod that spares fathers the embarrassment of not knowing how to teach  their kids to fish, or Crest toothpaste tubes that don't "gunk up" at the  mouth.)Granted, some of their ideas--like the crucial process of "prototyping," or  incorporating dummy drafts of the actual product into the planning, to work out  bugs as you go--lend themselves more easily to the making of actual things than  to the more common organizational challenge of streamlining services or  operations. But, if this big book of bright ideas doesn't get you thinking of  how to build a better mousetrap for everything from your whole business process  to your personal filing system, you probably deserve to be stuck with the  mousetrap you already have.--Timothy Murphy