IDEO is a global design company committed to creating positive impact. The firm founded in 1991 in Palo Alto, California has employed over 600 people as of 2015. The firm employs people from a number of disciplines including business design, branding, communication design, food science, education, food science, and organizational design among others (IDEO, 2017).
The company has served the design needs of clients such as Apple, Coca Cola, Nike and Ford. They consider themselves as the expert in the field of process of designing rather than the specific product design itself. To add to that, the company hires people from a diverse background. There are MBAs, linguists, marketing expert, psychologists and biology students in their team. The company also believes that the team leader should be someone good with groups and not someone because that person has been with the company for a long time. The diversity in team members help bring a lot of innovative ideas from a variety of perspectives. The video shows how IDEO works in designing a shopping cart for a client.
Leadership
Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent (Sharma & Jain , 2013). The team leader in this project is Peter Skillman who is an engineer and is the leader as he is good with groups. He could inspire his team in thinking differently and bringing innovation in this project. He made every idea feel welcomed and in the end the team decided to use the most useful part from every idea.
Nonetheless, in one of the scenes, it was shown that the seniors, or so to say, were having an informal meeting which would contradict to the team leader’s statement that the leader might not be the one who has expertise in shopping carts specifically. It could also have made the other members feel left alone. And, at some point of time, they also introduced time limits for the team to present their ideas.
Teamwork
IDEO has a diverse team. It was made clear in the video by Peter Skillman that it was impossible for the boss to be the one with insightful experience on shopping carts. They believed that every one of them had some inputs to give in the development of these carts. Besides, the team also got contrasting perspectives on the designing process due to the presence of divergent team members. They were all working on the same goal. They had ideologies like encouraging wild ideas and building on the ideas before judging it. They attentively listen to each other’s ideas. They work together to build many prototypes as they believe in enlightened trial and error.
As much good of a team work is depicted in the video, it is not clearly shown as to why the people who were chosen to stay till midnight were chosen. The teams were working as a cohesive unit but such kind of differentiation could have divided the team members as they could have felt isolated or had to stay even if they were not feeling like staying.
Innovation
The team is divided into different group based on the need area. They build prototypes which had scanners attached to the cart, ones which could pile handbaskets into and some which enabled customers to communicate with the supermarket staff remotely. As they have different focus objects to work on, they came up with different ideas. A product as a supermarket cart is used by a diverse group of people and they have different needs and expectations from the product. If they were all working in a single group with a single broad goal, they might not have come up with a product. But they have been divided into multiple groups with varying goals which fostered innovations in the product. Some of them focused on child security while some worked on communication while building the mock cart.
The team are given liberty to go to the market, know what people want, observe the problems people face at the supermarkets and work on their ideas. However, later they were obliged to finish their work sooner which could have affected in their final product.
Sharma, D. K., & Jain , M. (2013). Global Journal of Management and Business Studies. Leadership Management: Principles, Models and Theories , 309-318.
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IDEO is a global design company committed to creating positive impact. The firm founded in 1991 in Palo Alto, California has employed over 600 people as of 2015. The firm employs people from a number of disciplines including business design, branding, communication design, food science, education, food science, and organizational design among others (IDEO, 2017).
The company has served the design needs of clients such as Apple, Coca Cola, Nike and Ford. They consider themselves as the expert in the field of process of designing rather than the specific product design itself. To add to that, the company hires people from a diverse background. There are MBAs, linguists, marketing expert, psychologists and biology students in their team. The company also believes that the team leader should be someone good with groups and not someone because that person has been with the company for a long time. The diversity in team members help bring a lot of innovative ideas from a variety of perspectives. The video shows how IDEO works in designing a shopping cart for a client.
Leadership
Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent (Sharma & Jain , 2013). The team leader in this project is Peter Skillman who is an engineer and is the leader as he is good with groups. He could inspire his team in thinking differently and bringing innovation in this project. He made every idea feel welcomed and in the end the team decided to use the most useful part from every idea.
Nonetheless, in one of the scenes, it was shown that the seniors, or so to say, were having an informal meeting which would contradict to the team leader’s statement that the leader might not be the one who has expertise in shopping carts specifically. It could also have made the other members feel left alone. And, at some point of time, they also introduced time limits for the team to present their ideas.
Teamwork
IDEO has a diverse team. It was made clear in the video by Peter Skillman that it was impossible for the boss to be the one with insightful experience on shopping carts. They believed that every one of them had some inputs to give in the development of these carts. Besides, the team also got contrasting perspectives on the designing process due to the presence of divergent team members. They were all working on the same goal. They had ideologies like encouraging wild ideas and building on the ideas before judging it. They attentively listen to each other’s ideas. They work together to build many prototypes as they believe in enlightened trial and error.
As much good of a team work is depicted in the video, it is not clearly shown as to why the people who were chosen to stay till midnight were chosen. The teams were working as a cohesive unit but such kind of differentiation could have divided the team members as they could have felt isolated or had to stay even if they were not feeling like staying.
Innovation
The team is divided into different group based on the need area. They build prototypes which had scanners attached to the cart, ones which could pile handbaskets into and some which enabled customers to communicate with the supermarket staff remotely. As they have different focus objects to work on, they came up with different ideas. A product as a supermarket cart is used by a diverse group of people and they have different needs and expectations from the product. If they were all working in a single group with a single broad goal, they might not have come up with a product. But they have been divided into multiple groups with varying goals which fostered innovations in the product. Some of them focused on child security while some worked on communication while building the mock cart.
The team are given liberty to go to the market, know what people want, observe the problems people face at the supermarkets and work on their ideas. However, later they were obliged to finish their work sooner which could have affected in their final product.
References
IDEO. (2017, 01 08). Fact Sheet. California.
Sharma, D. K., & Jain , M. (2013). Global Journal of Management and Business Studies. Leadership Management: Principles, Models and Theories , 309-318.