Phil Agre book review:

Tom Kelley, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO,

America's Leading Design Firm, Doubleday, 2001.  IDEO, as you surely

know by now, is the leading industrial design firm.  This book is a

how-to derived from its celebrated techniques of innovation.  It is

not perfect -- to benefit from it, you have to cut through its Tom

Peters turbo-charged gee-whiz writing style.  And on first reading,

much of its advice will seem like common sense.  But persevere.  Ask

yourself: if this stuff is such common sense, why aren't you doing it?

There are just some things that we all need to be told: put together

an interdisciplinary team of fun people who respect one another, go

looking at what people actually do, brainstorm a hundred ideas, shoot

the bad ones, build dozens of prototypes, and keep everyone in the

loop until it's a real manufactured product.  The stories are great,

and to really appreciate them you should keep handy a copy of IDEO's

coffee-table book: Jeremy Myerson, IDEO: Masters of Innovation, King,

2001.  In a sense you only learn this material through stories: you

need conceptual frameworks, but the conceptual frameworks themselves

are rather simply and become alive only in the process of applying

them to real cases.  On the other hand, because it claims to package

IDEO's skills for other companies to use, the book underplays

the skills of IDEO's own employees, particularly the ones that they

brought with them from innovative academic design schools such as

the Royal College of Art.  But okay, if the stories get you motivated

to try the methods for yourself, then they've done their job.