It used to be that you deferred to the boss. Is it the boss is always going to have the best ideas? Not likely. Here nimble fingers alert minds and tireless machines. And it used to be in most companies that chaos was discouraged.
This is where the crazies live. This is where we do our work. It's different. Good morning.
Good morning. Used to be you were supposed to climb the corporate ladder. Good morning.
Status is who comes up with the best ideas, not who's the oldest, not who's been with the company longest, not who has that biggest title. If you go into a culture and there's a bunch of stiffs going around, I can guarantee you they're not likely to invent anything. You could stack yourself big as big as you want. That's great.
Thanks a lot. We had a great time today. Well, forget the way it used to be. Tonight, the deep dive. One company's secret weapon for innovation.
Music Not further along in this broadcast, near the end as a matter of fact, you will hear one of the central characters suggest that we look around. The only thing that's not designed by anybody, he will say, is nature. Actually, you could say the same thing by observing...
that the only designs that don't require constant modification are the ones we find in nature. But the point is well taken. From the buildings in which we live and work to the cars we drive or the knives and forks with which we eat, everything we use is a part of nature.
use was designed to create some sort of marriage between form and function. Does it work and can we make it look interesting or attractive? What is truly amazing is how long we tend to put up with things that may not work particularly well or may look especially unattractive simply because we're accustomed to them and because no one has ever suggested redesigning those things.
There's an interesting distinction between design and invention. Whoever came up with the idea of of dental floss for example was an inventor but the man or woman who put it inside that clever little plastic box that lets you tear off just the right length that was a designer now how does the process of designing a better product work and would it be interesting to watch that process when we first broadcast this program back in february we weren't at all sure what you would think but judging by the number of of you who ordered videocassettes of the program and the number of people who contacted the industrial product design firm that is featured in this program you liked it a lot here was the premise of the program we went to ID the product design folk and said take something old and familiar like say the shopping cart and completely redesign it for us in just five days ABC News correspondent Jack Smith tells us what happened next nine in the morning day one and these people have a deadline to meet so welcome to the kickoff of the shopping cart project this is Palo Alto California in the heart of Silicon Valley and these are designers at IDEO, probably the most influential product development firm in the world. Designers are the reason TVs have square screens, chairs four legs, and toothbrushes nowadays those squishy handles.
In fact, it was IDEO that designed those squishy handles. IDEO has designed everything from high-tech medical equipment to the 25-foot mechanical whale in the movie Free Willy and the first computer mouse for Apple. Smith ski goggles, Nike sunglasses, NEC computer screens. Hundreds of products we take for granted.
This is called the Neat Squeeze toothpaste tube. You invented that? The man who runs IDEO is Dave Kelly, a Stanford engineering professor with a Groucho Marx mustache, a dad of genius and an approach to innovation that usually works.
Oh, thank you, Fred. But not always. Thanks a lot. I can show you some products that failed. Came up with this idea called monster shoes, where you take these little monsters and lace them into your shoes like this.
And we built a bunch of them, and I didn't want those either. Mostly what IDEO designs, though, does work, and it works very well. Dave and his design teams create about 90 new products every year.
The point is that we're not actually experts at any given area. We're kind of experts on the process of how you design stuff. So we don't care if you give us a toothbrush, a toothpaste tube, a tractor, a space shuttle, a chair. It's all the same to us.
We want to figure out how to innovate. by using our process applying it. And so for the next five days the team will apply that process to bringing the supermarket shopping cart into the 21st century. I think first we should maybe all acknowledge that it's kind of insane to do an entire project in a week.
Project leader is Peter Skillman, a 35-year-old Stanford engineer. Project leader because he's good with groups, not because of seniority. He's only been at IDEO for six years.
The rest of the team is eclectic. But that's typical here. Whitney Mortimer, Harvard MBA.
Peter Coughlin, linguist. Tom Kelly, Dave's brother, marketing expert. Jane Fulton Suri, psychologist.
Alex Kazaks, 26, a biology major, who's turned down... medical school three times because he's having too much fun at IDEO. Kids climbing up and doing this.
Safety emerges early as an important issue. injuries a year which is and so they're hospitalized injuries i mean there are many others reported in the store that's you actually have to go to the emergency room hospitalized right and theft it turns out a lot of carts are stolen you know what is the average life of a cart does it last two years five years ten years and and how big is this theft thing 10 a.m as the team works it becomes clear there are no titles here no permanent assignments the other side says it gives a lot of help says be safe. Everyone appears to be equal and they love to mock corporate America. I'll give you status.
I'll give you a big red ball on a post and that says you're a big guy. If you got a ball, you're a senior vice president. You know, what do I get? The desk, the red ball, it's all the same.
In a very innovative culture, you can't have a kind of hierarchy of here's the boss and the next person down, the next person down, the next person down, because it's impossible that the boss is the one. who's had the insightful experience with shopping carts. It's just not possible.
According to Kelly, even employees who merely listen to the boss don't add that much either. You gotta hire people who don't listen to you and that I don't think corporate America wants to hear that right yet. I think we ought to start making those lists about the kind of questions that we're gonna ask. The team splits into groups to find out firsthand what the people who use, make and repair shopping carts really think.
Okay go. The problem with the plastic cart is the wind. wind catches it. And these things have been clocked at 35 across the parking lot.
That's actually a pretty good point. The trick is to find these real experts so that you can learn much more quickly than you could by just kind of doing it the normal way and trying to learn about it yourself. From everything I read, these things aren't that safe either. So probably the seat itself is going to have to be redesigned. What you're seeing here is the kind of social science like anthropologists, you know, like you go and study tribes.
What is it that they do that we can learn from that will help us design a better cart? One of the interesting things for me is looking at how people really don't like to let go of the cart, except for the professional shopper, whose strategy is to leave the cart at various places. In corporate America, many bosses measure whether their people are the good people, or the people who are performing are the ones that they see at their desk all the time. That couldn't be further from the truth. The people who are really getting the information are out here talking to the buzzes of the world, going to meet other experts, much more useful than sitting at your desk.
3.30 in the afternoon and the group is back at IDEO. There is no let up. Each team is going to demonstrate and communicate and share everything that they've learned today. People went off into the four corners of the earth and are coming back with the golden keys to innovation. A shopping cart has been...
clocked at 35 miles an hour, traveling through a parking lot in the wind. We were in the store, what, two hours? And it was truly frightening just to see the kind of stuff going on.
You ought to designate some people to make damn sure that the store owner's point of view is represented. After nine straight hours, the team is tired. They call it a day.
Everybody cool? Well, that's great. Thanks a lot.
We had a great time today. Yeah. Yeah.
Thank you. I want to get together and start here. Day two at the start of IDEO's unique brand of brainstorming.
They call it a deep dive, a sort of total immersion in the problem at hand. IDEO's mantra for innovation is written everywhere. One conversation at a time. time stay focused encourage wild ideas defer judgment build on the ideas of others that's the hardest thing for people do is to restrain themselves from criticizing an idea so if anybody starts to nail an idea they get the bell you know the deep dive begins and for the next few hours the ideas pour out and are posted on the walls oh the blind The privacy plan, like when you're buying six cases of condoms, no one sees. Nesting is, it sort of has to nest.
If it doesn't nest, we don't have a solution. Velcro pants and Velcro seats for the kids, and you just drop them down on there. Like Velcro seats?
Velcro pants for kids? Yeah, see, you have to have some wild ideas. Then you build on those wild ideas, and they end up being better ideas than if you said, if everybody only came up with sane things, you know, kind of appropriate.
things. You never like have any points to take off to build a really innovative idea. It's organized chaos. Organized chaos? It's not organized.
What it is is it's focused chaos. By 11 a.m. the group begins narrowing down the hundreds of ideas written or drawn on the walls.
How? By voting for them. Vote with your post-it not with an idea that's cool but with an idea that's cool and buildable. If it's too far out there...
and it can't be built in a day, then I don't think we should vote on it. Why not have you be the judge? You're the boss. Because I'm going to be wrong.
It's the team that's able to really judge with the best ideas. Otherwise, the ideas wouldn't come out? That's right.
Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius. Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius. If anything sums up IDEO's approach, that is it. That and the focused chaos that seems to go with it. with it.
I take a point of view. I call it the sport utility vehicle cart. It is noon.
Worried that the team is drifting, what can only be called a group of self-appointed adults under Dave Kelly holds an informal side session. We don't want to tell them what to build or else we take away the benefit of the whole thing, right? What needs should they optimize their solution to?
Yes. The purpose is to refocus the deep dive. Maybe we arbitrarily say we do five teams. Four or five teams. Four or five.
Four or five teams. And we give each team a need area. Hey, can we grab everybody over to the wall here?
There has to be a command decision. It becomes very autocratic for a very short period of time in defining what things people are going to work on. Like it or not, the team is told it will split into groups to build mock-ups covering four areas of concern that have been identified. Shopping, safety, checkout, and finding what you're looking for. I noticed that toward the end of the process, the adults took over.
Yeah, that's because we have no choice but to stop that cycle. I mean, if you don't work under time constraints, you could never get anything done because it's a messy process that can go on forever. While the team starts building prototypes, Dave Kelly takes me on a tour of the rest of IDEO.
What's happening in here is, that's a client meeting, that's a first client meeting, that's the first time we've met with a client, so we haven't trained them yet. If we took them straight from there into a room where music was blaring and everybody was throwing Nerf darts at each other, that would be a little hard to take. So, we're warming them up. But this is where the crazies live.
This is where we do our work. It's different. You can tell whether a place is playful in about the first 15 minutes as you walk down the hall.
Being playful is of huge importance for being innovative. I mean, if you go into a culture and there's a bunch of stiffs going around, I can guarantee you they're not likely to invent anything. Invent anything like this futuristic-looking instrument for kids. So no matter what you do with that thing, you always sound great.
You always sound good. You have to make it so that this can happen. Whoa, it didn't break. No, it didn't break. There's a whole department at IDEO devoted to toys.
Turns out to be one of its most profitable areas. Fun, too. So we've got these little wings, and no matter what you do, if I get in trouble here, it's always a spiral.
At IDEO, they found that fresh ideas come faster in a fun place. Not only is the furniture on wheels to suit the needs of the moment, but people are encouraged actually to build their own work areas. They were designing this space and they said to me, you know, we'd like to have, you know, $4,000 extra in our budget for a DC-3 wing.
And I said, DC, do you have to have that? And they said, yeah, they have to have it. That's a DC-3 wing. Piece of a DC-3 wing, yeah.
And that's just decor. That's decor. That's, um... Ambience, you know, that says we're weird and we're proud of it.
Umbrellas on the ceiling to shade computer screens from direct sunlight. And bicycles on ropes to prevent clutter. The first guy who hung a bike up on a thing, he didn't come to me and ask me.
He didn't ask some facilities person if it was okay. He tried it and then, like, he waited and see if anybody complained. If nobody complained, another guy hung a bike up. And pretty soon everybody's got their bikes up and nobody's complained, right?
So it's that whole thing of try and stuff and ask forgiveness, you know, instead of asking permission. It's the way people come up with new ideas. IDEO has such a reputation for innovation that client companies are increasingly asking Dave not just for new products, but also to remake their corporate cultures.
You may be looking at the workplace of the future here. It's one thing to be able to do a product once in a while, but if you can build a culture and a process where you... routinely come up with great ideas that's what the company's really want okay Peter we're done back at the shop it is six o'clock the four mock-ups are ready for showing baskets also can be if you think you will have more volume baskets can be put in a modular shopping cart you pile hand baskets onto a high-tech cart that gets you through the traffic jam at checkout that you could mount a scanner on the shopping cart so that you as the customer as you pull it off shelf would scan each item. One that's built around child safety and another that let shoppers talk to the supermarket staff remotely.
Yeah, where can I find the yogurt? But the adults again decide more work needs to be done before the mock-ups can be combined into one last prototype. Why don't we have all the carts come up here for a second?
I think you take a piece of each one of these ideas and kind of back it off a little bit and then put it in the design. design is still not there but there's another model what ideal fail often in order to succeed sooner and some of the team will be up half the night trying to put together a design that finally does work i'm so It is day five, and Dave Kelly has no idea what the final cart looks like. Only the team does.
If they kind of got their heads down and they don't look at me, I'm nervous. You know, if they say, wait till you see it, then I know we're in good shape. So I'm getting wait until you see it.
I think it's... that'll be good. There it is!
There it is! So we took the best elements out of each prototype, designed this entire cart in a day, and then this cart was fabricated. in the day with an amazing team of people in our machine shop pulling this off, working in shifts throughout the night.
Wow, I'm impressed. So are we. The cart, which is designed to cost about the same as today's cart, is different in every other way.
Hand baskets that stack in a metal frame and major improvements for all. You just lift the handle up, you drop the, put the children in, and then you can close the, that's it. the handle right over them and they instantly have some little bit of a work surface that they can play with. What do you think? Well, I'm very proud of the team.
I think it's great. Does this work for you? Works for me great.
It's also beautiful. I mean, let's, you know, take it over to a local supermarket and see what they say. Yeah, it works really well. The cart's wheels turn 90 degrees so it can move sideways.
No more lifting up the rear in a tight spot. And you shop in a totally different way. Rather than taking your car...
cart everywhere you go in the store through a crowded store like this much more efficient to take a small basket rush around to where the particular shelves are and come back and put them back put them here and treat this as like a center for your shopping and with a high-tech scanner so that in the future you skip the checkout traffic jam here's how you would scan an item you reach over and pick up anything like uh like the salad dressing and i would i would scan it and if i want to accept that item i would just press plus and then drop it in my basket Because stores don't yet have those high-tech scanners the team designed, checking out today means doing it the old-fashioned way. But the bags are hung on hooks on the carts frame. Remember there is no basket here. Why get rid of the big basket? The basket is tyranny.
The basket is tyranny because it's not really needed. If all your stuff ends up in bags, why need the basket in the first place? Talk to me about theft. There's no value in this cart without...
the basket because you can't carry anything in it. It's useless to anybody. You can't use it as a barbecue. So it's not going to get stolen. That's right.
So this ought to appeal to store owners. Yes. I love it.
I think it looks great. At first I was a little shocked but I think it's You have some fantastic ideas here. It needs a little refining, but I think that it's great. I mean, we would want them.
It makes us feel great. And she also gave us some really good comments about how we can make this thing better. Just wherever you are, look around.
The only thing that's not designed by somebody you like is nature, so the trees are not designed by us. But everything you see, everything you see, every light fitting, every flower vase, every scale, every stand for fruit, everything is designed. It has to go through this kind of process.
And they can do it. can do a better or a better or worse job of innovating or improving but everything is designed it has to go through this process it wasn't this effortless oh my god so that's how it works thing that i saw there it was actually hard work it's a lot of hard work um we all love it so it doesn't look like it's hard work but it's a lot of hours a lot of hours also an open mind a boss who demands fresh ideas be quirky and clash with his a belief that chaos can be constructed constructive and teamwork, a great deal of teamwork. And these are the recipe for how innovation takes place. This is Jack Smith for Nightline in Palo Alto, California.
I'll be back with a brief update on our story in just a moment. Incidentally, the Nightline shopping cart won a silver award in the Industrial Design Excellence Awards, and there's talk now of developing it commercially. That's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Washington.
For all of us here at ABC News, good night.