IDEO CEO Tim Brown Talks Ideas, and the Organizations that Stifle Them

At IDEO's core DNA is innovation. IDEO is a designer of products, services, and experiences with projects ranging from Apple’s first mass-market computer mouse to aspects of Prada’s store in New York City to the patient-care delivery model at SSM DePaul Health Center, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO sat down with the folks at the McKinsey Quarterly for an interview discussing how organizations can oftern stifle new ideas before they proliferate. But, he says, executives can change that pattern by immersing themselves in innovation. How? "It's often the role of senior leadership to defend new ideas until they're actually out in the marketplace and able to stand up for themselves," he says.

Here are three excerpts from the interview:

Excerpt 1).
The biggest barrier (to innovation) is needing to know the answer before you get started. This often manifests itself as a desire to have proof that your idea is worthwhile before you actually start the project: “show me the business proof that this is going to be a good idea.” You can understand this, of course, because it’s an attempt to mitigate risk. But wanting to know whether you’ve got the right idea—or the assumption that you’ve got to have a business case—before beginning to explore something kills a lot of innovation.

Excerpt 2).
Even though companies want everyone to be thinking about innovation all the time, the reality is that everybody’s got other roles to play. So innovation is not a continuous activity; it’s a project-based activity. If you don’t have a process for choosing projects, starting projects, doing projects, and ending projects, you will never get very good at innovation. Projects need some form—you call them something; you run them in a certain way; you fund them in a certain way. That sounds simple, but, actually, a good process for getting projects going and done is often not obvious to companies.

Excerpt 3).
You really notice a difference in organizations where the senior leadership immerses itself in innovation. I don’t mean that it runs projects. I don’t mean that it does the innovation itself. But it immerses itself by, for example, playing an active role in reviewing the innovation that’s going on at various levels in the organization in order to give people permission to take risks. Or by playing a really active role in deciding who gets to do innovation, making sure project leaders pick people who are naturally comfortable taking risks.