When we’re doing job interviews, the phrase “good cultural fit” gets bandied about a lot—and for good reason. IDEO’s stock in trade is creativity, collaboration, and human-centered innovation. We don’t have discrete departments, rigid job titles, or corner offices. In fact, most corporate trappings...

Brett Myers (center) and his team at State Farm Next Door; A chalkboard calendar of events at Next Door's bustling Chicago café and co-working space “In our experience, everyone is the creative type.” So true. The quote comes from Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us Al...

Moments after this photo was taken, the members of this meeting stood up and sang to me. Ever had a business meeting end with people spontaneously bursting into song? Before last week, neither had I. I’ve been in meetings all around the world—Glasgow, Moscow, New York, Tokyo—and they’ve all conclu...

Churning out homemade pasta for a shared meal in our Chicago studio One of the first things visitors notice when they visit IDEO is the food. It’s everywhere. Some might look at our breakfast spread piled high with bagels, cereal, granola bars, and coffee and think: typical Silicon Valley gimmick p...

No longer the province of the lone practitioner, design has become a broad, collaborative process. Photo courtesy of IDEO Boston. Just 10 years ago, design was considered to be a professional priesthood. The Designer (capital “D”) would be given an assignment—create a more attractive widget, say—th...

Bringing contractors into the fold at an IDEO food event In April, I wrote a piece called “Designing a Freelance Life.” The post received nearly 200 comments. Reading over them, it’s clear that freelancing is a mixed bag. Even the language we use to describe those who work on a temporary basis—“te...

Photo by Ali Guichard / IDEO Many people think of business travel as a chore. I see it as an opportunity. Not to generate new work, necessarily (though that’s nice, too), but to exercise my curiosity, think about problems in new ways, and get inspired. Sometimes that inspiration hits as soon as I ...

Illustration by Beau Bergeron / IDEO We don’t have many rules at IDEO, but we do have some cultural values that we take seriously because we feel they make our teams more effective. We prototyped these values for a couple decades before we set them in print. One of them is to Make Others Successful...

Roshi Givechi is a calm, cool, design director and associate partner at IDEO. About a year ago, she uprooted herself from the San Francisco Bay Area and embarked on a nomadic year in Asia to support our growing locations in Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, and Mumbai. When she proposed the idea of a one-...

Part of maintaining a thriving creative culture is giving people time and permission to play. One of the ways we encourage creative play at IDEO is through Designs On—, a semi-annual internal design challenge started five years ago by my colleague Blaise Bertrand. Each edition of Designs On— centers...