7 Innovation Insights from an IDEO Design Entrepreneur

I had the good fortune to work this summer with a group of exceptional students as part of the Bits + Blocks Lab at Harvard. Focused on creating new ventures inspired by the blockchain, the Bits + Blocks Lab is a part of a new offering we’ve created at IDEO to explore and shape cutting-edge technologies. This startup creation lab was staffed by 25 student design entrepreneurs, each working in multidisciplinary teams of four to five.

It was an intense but rewarding summer for everyone involved. When it comes to understanding the potential of a new technology like the blockchain, we believe that a holistic venture is the right unit of prototyping. This approach helps creatively balance issues across business, technology, and human needs. To that end, each team designed a complete business—spanning the product experience, business model, and brand. Getting all of this prototyped in just nine weeks was no small endeavor.

Here is a set of reflections on the Bits + Blocks Lab by Shuya Gong, an undergraduate at Harvard studying engineering. Shuya was a Bits + Blocks team member, and her team shipped a really great blockchain-focused prototype. I hope you enjoy her insights on the innovation process as much as I do.

Take it away, Shuya!:

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My summer journey began at the Make-a-thon event held by IDEO Futures at the Harvard innovation lab (i-lab). It was a call to create a peer-to-peer sharing network, and served as a 48-hour-long interview for a summer internship in the Bits + Blocks Lab. Personally, I was in the throes of midterm season, staying up until 3AM every morning working through the tedium of practice tests. I almost didn’t go to the Make-a-thon, but made a split second decision to attend.

Few people have the fortitude to be enveloped by magic, and this was gold. The Make-a-thon was like an adrenaline shot that charged me up for the weekend and just kept going. Why? Because there was raw, unbundled creative energy in that room, the kind you find ferociously in the minds of five year-old imagineers, who are still raring to go change the world, believing that nothing can stand in their way.

It was an explosion of Post-Its and design thinking, but more importantly, creating things that previously didn’t exist in the world. It was pure genesis, the inception of a new idea that fueled a high lasting for weeks, a seedling concept that your mind fixed onto and evolved. At one point, I had asked one of the IDEO guides:

Wait, you do this every single day… for work? As a job? You get paid for this sort of thing?

Hooked. And so excited when I found out that I was selected to do this all summer long. So without further ado, here are seven lessons learned about the innovation process:

1. Don’t Get Ready, Get Started

As a lover of prep work and a firm believer that strict organization can solve most of your problems, my mother would be personally offended by this one. I agree and wish I had her personality traits, so this concept of getting started and doing a deep dive… terrifying. As most terrifying things are, it is also thrilling. This is the proactive part of the design process, to just get your hands on it, to do something, and get right down to the bare bones.

This is the ultimate mantra, to just get going, right now. Of course, there are some inherent problems doing something without previous legwork, and sometimes you fail, hard, but when creating new ventures, I think that it’s okay. Which brings us to the next point.

2. Fail Early and Often

I feel like I was paid to fail for nine weeks this summer, and then maybe failed a little less hard for the final product. In talking to some IDEO colleagues at the Boston studio, they said that they had been paid to fail everyday for something like five years, so I guess it’s okay.

This is a complete paradigm shift for someone who has been in formalized education for the last 18 years of her life. Why? Because in life we are trained to succeed, and in school we are taught that success is very narrowly defined as the concept of getting the “right” answer, the one that is already written in the teacher’s edition of the textbook. The question there shouldn’t really be why the only right answer is the one in the textbook, but rather that if a solution exists already, why is the question one still worth asking?

And so I suppose this ties back to the idea that you should just go ahead and do it. In failure, you learn so much more than if something works on the first try. And in venture design, there’s no binary measure for success. There are always iterations, there are always things to improve upon, and failure cannot be looked at as inadequacy, but rather as a safety feature letting you know that this is not the path you’re looking for.

3. Have the Creative Confidence to Design New Worlds

Two ideas worth discussing here:

1. Creative Confidence, by David and Tom Kelley, is an amazing read. Just do it.
2. It does not make you a crazy person to say that you are designing new worlds.

Number one is not a paid advertisement or plug: the hour or so you spend reading this book might change your life and the way you view the world.

Number two pushes you to barrel down preexisting notions and really believe that an idea can change the course of things today. Think back to Facebook, think back to Uber. In the early stages, they were nothing more than ideas, but they changed the fundamental ways we do things and interact with both the world and each other. It worked, because someone had the vision and the guts to just say “this is going to work, let’s do it.” It didn’t matter that this summer I was working with people more endowed with degrees and accomplishments, aged with experience and credentials.

In embarking on creative endeavors, it could perhaps be argued that there needs to be a sweet spot between having enough context from what you’ve seen, but to not have seen too much so as to be jaded by it. Because we are trying to make something that did not exist prior to today, experience is less valuable than creative confidence.

4. Innovation Loves Urgency

The innovation process loves urgency, and design loves time constraints. Every single college student can tell you that the structure of writing a 10 page paper means you’re probably going to write the last eight pages in the last two hours before it’s due.

We made so much stuff this summer because we timeboxed everything. It was really only in the end and in those crunched periods of time that we found pure focus.

5. KYC

Not the banking law, although incredibly relevant for this summer. KYC as an acronym for:

1. Know Your Customer
2. Know Your Community
3. Know Your Constraints

This is about having the whole context for what you’re designing for, stepping in and out of those restraints towards seeing a workable solution. To be honest, why would you ever have non-human-centered design? We make ventures to be either vitamins or painkillers in the world, to address problems directly, to alleviate pain points that exist, or to create new needs stemming from an inadequate solution. Context is everything here and empathy is so incredibly important.

6. Work with Your Friends

Our workplace culture was kind of like kindergarten… if kindergartners were all super into venture design. There were lots of snacks, we drew on walls all the time, sometimes we cried, occasionally we napped, and we were super creative. Five-year-old me would have been proud.
But seriously, the people I worked with this summer in the Bits + Blocks Lab became such good friends because we depended on each other to succeed, because nobody else quite understood the craziness that went on from the day to day, and because quite frankly, these 25 people kick ass and do cool things with their lives.

Most workplaces don’t encourage time spent on .gif wars, conversations about kale (apparently IDEO is a place that loves kale), getting lunch with people from Craigslist, watching movies, but these were all kind of prototypes, research in their own ways. It worked. Because we were working with friends and having so much fun it really didn’t feel like work. It was an incredible experience that didn’t stop whenever we left the office. The traditional 9-to-5 timesheet didn’t apply because for 24 hours a day, everyday, anything that was remotely related to what we were doing got excitedly Slacked to our team.

We were working with friends. We could’ve just called it hanging out.

7. Choose to be Inspired

Honestly, you can have inspiration boosts and be exposed to stimulating things, but unless you actively choose to be amazed and inspired, it probably won’t get your creative juices flowing.

The decision to be a five-year-old about everything and channel your energy into converting something in the real world into presently intangible potential is hard work and requires a lot of mental processes that are hard to find on a Monday morning before you’ve had coffee. But if you set it as your default mode, there is wonder in everything, even a simple commute to work. You start seeing the world as a playground of potential, every poster you walk by something worth snapping a pic of, in case the color palette is something you want to use in the future, a 4AM, bleary-eyed airport security experience something you can drastically fix, making you an eternal optimist in the sense that if anything is worth complaining about, it is worth changing.

It was an incredible summer of just being immersed in excitement and invention, of being exposed to huge, world changing ideas, of meeting impressive and hugely influential people and just being plugged into this ecosystem of adventuring out into unexplored space.

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photo credit: Erin Cuevas