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by This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it on Friday, 12 September 2008
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Tom Kelley, general manager of one of the world’s most successful design firms, IDEO, on how to be a good innovator.
Tom Kelley is losing his voice. It is little wonder - he has been talking all day. Nursing a hot tea and honey, he soldiers on with our interview. Public speaking constitutes a large portion of his job these days but it hasn't always been that way. It was a talent that he discovered later on in his life: "Imagine that you are 45 years old and you discover you've got this latent talent that you can be pretty darned good at!" he explains. "That's a gift."
His official role is general manager of IDEO.
On its website the company is described as an "innovation and design firm that uses a human-centred, design-based approach to help organisations generate new offerings and build new capabilities".
It harbours one of the greatest teams of innovators in the world. But if you don't already know about the company, that description will do little to enlighten you.
The best way to understand the company is through examples of its achievements. IDEO was called in to help design the very first Apple mouse (Steve Wozniak speaks very highly of the processes to this day); the team worked with Organ Recovery Systems to improve kidney transport; they designed the world's first notebook computer for GRiD; they've collaborated with Zyliss to create ergonomic and useful kitchen tools. Their expertise is not limited to products.
The team also works on customer service, sustainability, health and community innovations. It has been ranked as one of the most innovative companies globally by the Boston Consulting Group and Fast Company.
Its founder, David Kelley (Tom Kelley's brother), was honoured with the prestigious Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum's National Design Award for Product Design.
He established IDEO on his own in 1978 and Tom joined in 1987, with the task of growing the company. He says that the relationship between the two brothers is intensely symbiotic: "The nicest thing ever said about me in the press was by a guy at Wired magazine, who wrote, ‘David and Tom Kelley are like Walt and Roy Disney in the sense that together they make a complete protein'. Of course, the comparison to the Disneys is aspirational, but the analogy is true in one other way - with the Disneys, Walt was the guy who built it from scratch and Roy was a good partner to him. Walt was driving and Roy was kind of helping along the way."
So you're Roy? "I'm Roy."
He plays down the work that he has done for the company but in the nine years before he joined, IDEO remained at a steady headcount of 19; since joining, Kelley has grown it to its current level of 550, overseeing work in all areas of the company, from business development and marketing to human resources.
A natural in the field, he has since written two books on the subject - The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation - to share his accumulated wisdom. Sharing is key to his perception of a good innovator, a perception that he happily discloses: "I think all good innovators think in metaphors - they have world experiences so when they see somebody's problem or situation, it looks a little bit like this situation over here, or here. The more data points that you have, the more opportunity you have to cross-pollinate, to take an idea from over here and apply it."
"Good cross-pollinators are people who have a big intellectual curiosity. They read a lot, they travel a lot, they are conscious about things that they observe. They take in new learning all the time.
"Some people take in new learning and then they want to hold it in. A cross-pollinator doesn't think that way. A cross-pollinator, when they've taken in some new information, they're practically an unstable element until they've shared it with, like, three friends." He is so keen to foster this attitude within his workforce that they even have ‘show and tell' at the office, "like the kindergarten classes".
Kelley sees travel as a part of intellectual curiosity that can have a very positive impact on innovation: "When you travel, especially internationally, you have this heightened sense of awareness. You notice everything. I think it's got to do with evolution. You're in a situation that might have threats to it and so your brain is hyper-aware on the look-out for threats or opportunities. I think it's genetically encoded in us to do it when we travel but great innovators are able to turn on that part of their brain all the time."
It is safe to place Kelley himself in this bracket. He has travelled extensively ("I fly every week and I flew every week for seven years running. I've been to Argentina, Brazil, the UAE, Singapore, China...") and remains avidly curious about the world.
Public speaking plays a role in keeping his curiosity fresh: "It's my continuing education because I meet interesting people who I would never otherwise have had a chance to meet. This is the most fun I've ever had in my career.
"I speak to at least 10,000 people and sometimes even double that. I talk in places where they're not familiar with IDEO. We're trying to get our ideas to go viral in a way that gets more people open to innovation. In fact IDEO has a group called Transformation, which is trying to change the world."
Change the world? That's a big goal. "I don't want to get towards delusions of grandeur," he tempers; "we know that we're only changing a little part of the world." But nonetheless, fostering innovation in as many places as possible is Kelley's aim. "I consider that to be intrinsically part of the company."
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