Insight of IDEO

Our insight about the activity with IDEO 
  
         First of all, when we knew that we have a chance to visit IDEO Shanghai, we believed that it would be just ordinary company visit. We would be put into the room and company’s representative would stand in front and keep on saying how IDEO established and etc. However, we were quite surprised that they didn’t talk much about company’s history at all. What they talked with us was about their values, beliefs, working process which they claimed that these are the core value of IDEO. We had to admit that we didn’t really believe in the value of what they said yet. (Sorry A.Ed lol)

            Then, A.Ed told us that we had a chance to do some small activity in IDEO’s way. We were very excited as most of members in our team love doing activity outdoor, personally. We were assigned to do some little research about Carrefour and local wet market. Before we start doing the planning and activity, A.Ed tried to mention to us a lot about how observation on how people think, act, react with the environment is an important skill which every good entrepreneur should have. We didn’t pay much attention to that yet as all of us knew well how important observation skill is but we didn’t know that we still really didn’t understand how to do that. However, we would learn about that in the activity.

            For us, what make IDEO interesting and successful are their core beliefs and the way they work and study to come up with business solution. At first, let us explain to you a rough working process of IDEO.

            1. They will develop broad problem picture which they will study about and put up some rough ideas.

            2. After that, they will do fieldwork by themselves to gather data and try to gather as much information as possible. They try to record both visual and sound information to study again after coming back.

            3. Each of members will take out interesting quotes or things they get from their observation and share with other members. However, they have to make that information into story which other members can easily understand.

            4. Everyone will help adding and discussing about what other members have brought up.

            5. From available ideas, they will try to ask questions to get deeper understanding. For example, why do they …., what are they thinking when….., or how do they feel when….

                6. From that, they will ask the most important question, it is “What might we …….?”.

            Those were all IDEO’s representative told us. We found it easy at first until we really had to do it. When we officially started with our activity, we gathered everyone in team and tried to list out what we would be focusing on. However, we found ourselves being blocked by our own wall. We used knowledge from textbook we had learned a lot. We like to focus on customer segmentation, brand image and other fancy words. However, during our plan, IDEO staff came to see our idea and he suggested that we were trying to jumping to the conclusion too fast and this is something that many companies like to do. He told us to do it without personal judgment or we will put our own ideas into the report unconsciously. He showed us that everything on the board is something any companies can do but IDEO works in different aspect. Then he told us that we would understand when we went down to do actual fieldwork.

            After we did the fieldwork, we found out that observation skill was not the only one. There are many other skills we need to make sure that we can extract the ideas and see opportunities which other people can’t. For example in our group, when Carrefour didn’t allow us to interview with their Steve Jobs, we had to come up with several ways which helped us to gather information needed. Not only that, we had found out many facts and ideas which we had never known before. If we didn’t come down ourselves, we would have missed that important information. Moreover, we also learned to remove our pre-judgment.

            Another best part is when every group came back together and tried to tell their stories. We had heard things from totally different aspect from what we normally did. Every team came up with new information and new way of looking into the problem. I was confident that without this activity, most of us will still be stuck within what we study from textbook.

            We believe we have seen some values and beliefs which make IDEO becoming one of the best innovative firms. Moreover, the entrepreneurial abilities which A.Ed mentions to us whenever he can, we find it annoying sometime at first but now we know how important it is. A good entrepreneur should know things, see things, understand things which other don’t and be creative in getting the information or things they want. Like A.Ed said, innovation doesn’t always mean a product; it can be service and anything which are different from others. Same product in a right package may increase its value many times.