Customer Reviews

IDEO: Masters of Innovation

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This is a great (and very beautiful) collection of works by the design firm IDEO. There is some content about IDEO's philosophy of innovation and process, but if you're buying the book for such content only, than don't. Instead, buy "The Art of Innovation" by Tom Kelley. You will be disappointed by the fairly shallow treatment of IDEO's great process in Myerson's book. Some of the content has also been previously printed (in magazines), and FOI's (Fans of IDEO) will have already read many of the quotes included within the text (e.g., Tom and David Kelley, Tom Peters, Robert Sutton).

In a nutshell, buy for the pictures, and view them to complement Tom Kelley's awesome book.

From THE design firm, IDEO, this book has cataloged a range of product and environmental designs that are at the forefront of our culture. With innovation after innovation from IDEO I would have thought this book would be more . . . well . . . innovative. In their defense, this is the best way to have their design portfolio on your home coffee table, at least for now. Incredible pictures and some good documentation, but The Art of Innovation, by Tom Kelley, is the roller coaster story behind it all, this book is meerly a slide show from the trip.

Having worked with IDEO when I was @ Kodak I was a little disappointed. The process working with them was better than reading the book. It was a little bit more self promoting than I like in a business book

Most of the reviews I read convinced me to buy this book. Most of what you are going to see are beautiful pictures of final products...I would have liked to see more "getting there" i.e. "Process" stuff.

It is full of images of things I am sure we will all be living with in another 5-10 years; very innovative. But on the level of Design, it's really not a "how to" or even "how WE" which is what I was hoping for.

Still a pretty good read for the price.

IDEO's method for solving inventive problems derives from Alex Osborn's development of "Brainstorming" in the 1940's, and like Brainstorming it gives the illusion of productivity while in fact wasting cognitive resources. Genrich Altshuller, the creator of the Theory of Creative Problem Solving (which also goes by the Russian acronyn TRIZ), criticizes Brainstorming in his book "The Innovation Algorithm" by pointing out that it lacks an efficient search strategy and depends on attacking a problem with a mob in the hopes that with enough people it can stumble onto a solution through chance. By contrast, with a rational inventive problem solving algorithm, which Altshuller helped to develop, one person could find a solution in a day and free up the other 49 people to engage in other valuable activities. Inventors in the West have yet to study and absorb the implications of Altshuller's revolutionary findings.