Innovation
This past week in class one of my professor talked about how some of the best inventions came from influences of other inventions that have been around forever. With entrepreneurship week coming to Penn State pretty soon I thought this would be a great topic to discuss.
IDEO
The example we used in class about influence of products begins with the shopping cart. A typical unconventional shopping cart. We see it everyday and most of us don’t really care for it. There was a challenge issued to a company named “IDEO”. Ideo is an international design and consulting firm founded in Palo Alto. The purpose of the company is to design, human centered, designed based approach to help companies innovate and grow. The challenge issued to Ideo was to take a typical shopping cart and make it better (oh yeah, they only had 5 days to complete the challenge). The next steps will amaze you. Ideo has a couple simply philosophy, the first being no one knows everything and the second being, if you want to find out the pain of a problem ask the consumers. They decided to go to shopping center and see exactly how the old design of the shopping cart worked for consumers. Once they found the pain points, all the individuals came back together and started to “fail fast”. They began creating prototypes of the model. After, they would vote on the best concept and design another round of models. Then they would decide on the final model, sometimes consisting of all the things that worked on previous models.
Value in Ideo
I believe the most valuable lesson to learn about innovation or moving forward is that you need to learn everything that has come before, that is out now, and being willing to stretch the boundaries moving forward. Ideo says they come up with their best ideas by following the craziest idea. It gives them direction as where to go, rather than being inside the box.
The original shopping cart:
The IDEO shopping cart:
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