“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” —Tim Brown, President and CEO of IDEO Tom Hulme, the Design Director for IDEO, is speaking today at Design Indaba 2014. So what makes IDEO a big deal? Founded in Palo Alto, California USA and with offices from Munich to Tokyo, it’s been ranked as one of the Top 25 Most Innovative Companies in the world by Fast Company. It’s won 38 Red Dot Awards, 28 iF Hannover awards and more IDEA awards than any other design firm. Stretching from product design to brands to interactive experiences and services, IDEO spans the complete breadth of human-to-human and human-to-company interactions. They designed Apple’s first mouse and Microsoft’s second, the Palm V PDA and their clients have included, amongst others, Proctor & Gamble, PepsiCo, Microsoft, Eli Lilly, Ford and Steelcase. If you’d like to know more about them, you can find them on TED, 60 minutes, The Harvard Business Review, Fortune Magazine and more. It’s a company founded on unique creative principles that, today, make it the leader of the pack in a fiercely competitive, constantly changing industry. And the superb, world changing work that results from this approach, is what happens when design thinking meets business, head on.
