When You Show a Half-Baked Idea to an Important Client

Challenge

In 2001 IDEO began to work with Gyrus, a surgical tool company, to develop a new apparatus for operating on delicate nasal tissues.

Understand

Early on in the project the team from IDEO met with the company’s medical advisory board to discuss desired features for a new nasal surgery device. As the group described the not yet-invented product, there was a lot of gesturing and hand waving without much progress.

The “a-ha moment”

Then one of IDEO’s young engineers had a flash of inspiration and bolted from the room. Outside the conference room, seizing materials lying around the office, he picked up a whiteboard marker, a black plastic Kodak film canister, and an orange clothespin-like clip. He taped the canister to the whiteboard marker and attached the orange clip to the lid of the film canister. The result was an extremely crude model of the new surgical tool.

Five minutes after his mysterious departure, he returned to the meeting and handed his kindergarten-quality prototype to a respected surgeon. He asked, “Are you thinking of something like this?” To which the surgeon replied, “Yes, something like THIS!”

Solution

That initial crude prototype got the project rolling. Amazingly, the sophisticated Diego Surgical System — today used in thousands of operations annually- traces its origins to that initial model. There’s even a front rotating control ring reminiscent of the original marker cap.

Original article: The Ten Faces of Innovation: Ideo’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate & Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization