The world of business has never been more volatile or unpredictable. Sources of competition and disruption can appear anywhere—not just disruption in products, services, and technology, but also in channels to market, policy, talent, brands, and supply chains. In order to survive in today’s complex...

IDEO Chicago's roof garden, and some of its bounty I love to cook almost as much as I love to eat. When making a meal, the spontaneity of grabbing fresh herbs and other homegrown ingredients from the garden is an essential part of the whole process. Over the years, I’ve given a lot of thought to wha...

Successful startups have a clear and defined purpose—an offering, product, or business model like no other. They also know when to evolve, redesign, or adapt, in sync with emerging market needs. But how? Arvind Gupta, a colleague in Shanghai, recently wrote about the importance of adaptive innovati...

If you talk to people at the Santa Fe Institute, or read any of their books, you'll learn that a key characteristic of a complex system is that the more complex a system is, the more information flows through it. If this is true, then we ought to be thinking more about these information flows when w...

“When I walked into Heath it sounded so different from my office." It was this visceral difference between the sounds of a small ceramics manufacturer and those of a consulting design studio that got Cathy Bailey started on the path to co-leading Heath Ceramics. In partnership with her husband Robin...

I was given the opportunity to contribute to the HBR Agenda 2011 and wrote a short piece on the idea of successful companies earning  'permission to innovate' from customers and stakeholders. You can see it here and the other 23 contributions from far more esteemed folks such as Dan Pink, Michael Po...

I am off to Singapore in a week for my first visit. I have been invited by the government to give a talk on design thinking and meet with various government and business leaders to talk about the role of design thinking at a national level. It is interesting to think about national scale design and...

I don't usually write about things IDEO is directly involved in but I am making an exception here. Lars Hinrichs, founder of the social networking site for professionals XING, launched his next enterprise today. It's called HackFwd (Hack Forward) and it aims to be a place where European technology ...