Tom Kelley: I think it is about injecting a little more creativity and a little more fun into the process of work, and as a result coming out with better ideas. The key elements of the art of innovation are treating life as an experimentthis idea that you need to continuously try things as opposed to just sticking to the knitting and brainstorming and prototyping and observations.

IO: We put the words creativity and innovation together, but they are not the same. Are they?

TK: I actually tend to shy away from the word creativity. I typically use the word "innovation" a lot more than the word "creativity" because creativity seems like an inherent trait. It is very easy for people, especially business people, to say, "I am not really very creative. I don't do that kind of thing."

Innovation sounds more like something that can be learned. I feel like that word is much less frightening, and people are more open to embracing it, more willing to give it a try.

IO: I think the other challenge around this is that people attach the adjective "innovative" to a lot of things

innovative food or innovative this or innovative thatand it seems like it is purely a buzzword with no meaning.

TK: People are starting to use the word "innovative" in the places they would have previously used the word "new." I think the distinction we should make is anything unusual that you do may be new, but innovative is new in a way that adds value. I think it is a fair question to ask whether a new product or service is truly innovative or whether it just has some new feature built on because somebody thought they could do it.

IO: What did you learn new about innovation doing this book?

TK: Writing the book was a gigantic project for me, and I learned all kinds of things about myself and about the company. In the beginning of the book project, I focused on IDEO's five-step methodologyunderstand; observe; visualize; evaluate and refine; and implement. Initially, I thought I might structure the book around those five steps in the process.

As I dug deeper, however, I realized the methodology is simply what we do. It is step one, step two, step three, etc., and there is not that much magic in the methodology per se. The magic is in what I would characterize as our work practicesthings like brainstorming approaches, a belief in quick prototyping, or an open-minded style of group problem solving. The spark of innovation is not in what we do, but in how we do it. I learned that the work practices were at least as important, probably more important for our teams, than the methodology itself.

IO: IDEO had an interesting experience with "Nightline" that you talk about in the book. What was that about?

TK: The crew from ABC News came in and said, "We want to see innovation happen." They gave us four days to reinvent a product category that turned out to be grocery-shopping carts.

We went through all the steps that we normally go through in a real project, but we did them incredibly quickly. So we went through the "understand" phasefiguring out what the current market isin the first day. We then went through the "observe" phase, which involved getting away from our desks, and getting out into the real world to watch people grocery shopping.

Then we went into the "visualize" phase, where we started prototyping. Some of those first prototype carts really looked pretty messy, and even a little ugly because they were all done in a day. We're talking about foamcore, and wire the cheapest, quickest materials we could find.

The next step was to evaluate and refine. We had a pretty broad range of prototypes. In the "refine" stage, we said, "Okay, let's narrow it down to the stuff that we think people are interested in." In the "implement" stage, we built a finished model good enough to clearly communicate the ideas of the new shopping cart.

We first showed it to the ABC News people. Then came the highest-risk portion of that whole show. They wheeled the new high-tech cart down the street to a local grocery store and showed it to customers and to store managers and said, "Hey, what do you think?" We were pretty vulnerable at that moment, butfortunately for usthey said nice things.

IO: If I am an information professional inside an organization and I am thinking about this idea of designing around the delivery of information or knowledge to my customers, what questions would you advise me to ask?

TK: There is a danger in them having a purist attitude of "Look, this is the way we do it. Information has to be organized in this way and you have to request it this way." In a corporate world, that approach can barely work.

So if I were the person you described, I would spend some time trying to figure out what it is that people really want or, even more important, what they need that they haven't articulated yet. If you can center your personal or professional services on what people really want, then you have a chance to make your client happier, even when they didn't know they were lacking it.

Back when I was a management consultant, we had a part-time librarian at the firm, who had these dusty old

business books that no one ever looked at. She sent out a memo one day promoting her librarian role. It said, "Our library of resources are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week." What she meant to say is those books are sitting on the shelves there all the time, always available but never actually touched.

She was, in my opinion, approaching the situation solely from her point of view, saying "I've got them all numbered and organized" and stuff like that. But it hadn't occurred to her that she had a service offering that did not fit in with the needs of who the customers were.

I am not saying that members of your association are like that, but in this real-life example, I was a member of the firm for five years and I never once made any use of this resource. If she had asked how I used the existing library, she would have learned that I didn't use it at all, and our follow-up conversation might have led to all kinds of opportunity for innovation.

I think you can turn yourself into a more highly valued person in the organization or turn your function into something that there is a buzz about.

For example, a Ph.D. researcher helped me with the book. Well, "Ph.D," and "research" sounds kind of dry in certain ways, but she was fabulous. I loved her work, and I talked about her so much that the professor who recommended her to me (who had never used her for research on his own work) was fighting me for her time. It was because she was so good, so focussed on exactly the type of information I was after.

Her research was an intrinsic part of the book effort, and it was really valuable.

On the other hand, we had another researcher who just "went through the motions," without generating any energy, any "buzz," any value. If you compare those two people, I would recommend her to any employer who is looking for a knowledge worker, while I wouldn't recommend the other researcher to anybody. In a certain way, she created an experience for me that was so compelling that I wanted to talk to everybody about it.

IO: In the Harvard Business review, they said: "Kelley's

book begs the fundamental question for today's organizations. How flexible are they prepared to be in their innovation efforts?" I guess the larger question is how much of this is technique and how much of it is organizational culture?

TK: It certainly is in large part cultural. The question then becomes how much can you shift organizational culture? I certainly believe you can mold a culture, but it takes more than words, more than just window dressing.

For example, Sears, during the peak dot-com era, created a space in the sears.com portion of the enterprise where they had a foosball table and a basketball court. But nobody used it because apparently the culture said it wasn't okay to be seen "fooling around." The culture said you were goofing off if you were over at the foosball table. It is not enough to just say you're "cool," to say you have an innovation program.

I think one of the real tests is what the boss says right after a failure. Because all of the window dressing in the world won't fix it, if every time somebody makes a misstep they get called on the carpet or fired. Actions speak louder than words, and that behavior says, "Never mind what I said about risk-taking."

IO: We hear more and more that the major factor of production is no longer land, labor, and capital. It is knowledge. In your view, how does the flow of knowledge really fit with the innovation process inside an organization? How do you see those two things connecting?

TK: I would link knowledge and innovation because it is the synthesis of the knowledge in the organization that allows you to innovate. In our client work, we do a bunch of interviews and a bunch of observations. Then we keep all the information in our head, and try to find to find a spark from that. In a very large company, the problem becomes how to hold all of that knowledge in your head. It is impossible for one human, right? So you have to develop organizational tools for capturing, storing, and disseminating knowledge in a way that can spark innovation.

I believe that all of the magic is at the intersection of disciplines now. You cannot win the game just by having better engineers or better marketers than the people down the street. So the magic is at the intersection between anthropology and engineering and marketing or where you cluster things in a different way. Then you can say, "Here is something people need that they haven't even articulated yet."

In the flow of knowledge through the organization, the idea is to find ways for these ideas to bump into each other.

In the book Corporate Creativity, authors Alan Robinson and Sam Stern, talk about encouraging serendipity in the organization. At IDEO, we do that with "show and tell." Basically, there is show and tell at every Monday morning meeting in the firm. Once a quarter, we get every member of the management team in the whole firmabout 30 peopletogether in one place. In some cases, we devote as much as 50 percent of that meeting to show and tell. We talk about work in process or work just completed. That is just one of our ways of disseminating knowledge through the firm.

IO: I am an information professional sitting at my desk on Monday morning and I have decided I want to try to nurture innovation inside my organization. What do I do? What steps would you advise me to take?

TK: We believe you should understand, observe, visualize, evaluate, and implement. If you follow that process as information professional, you should first understand what is out there and what people are using your services for.

In the example that I used before, the woman who is the "librarian" does not understand that nobody ever uses her current library. In an environment where everyone is searching third-party sources on-line every day, you need to probe a little deeper to find where the gaps are in finding useful, practical information from inside or outside the organization.

Then do observations by following people around a little bit. Inside real organizations, this involves asking for favors. Follow a piece of data or a piece of research through the process, either in real time or two weeks later. In some cases, you will probably find that some people acquire a bunch of information, and it doesn't get used at all.

Many times, business life has moved on to something else once a request is made and completed. So it would be good to know what happened. This is what total quality systems and "voice of the customer" programs are, and you don't have to disrupt people's lives to get a little feedback.

Then, trying out some ideas, build some very rough prototypes. I think it is relatively important at the visualize phase to not give your customers or clients in the organization just one thing to choose from. Don't say, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing a weekly report in which I tell you all the new patents we have in the organization."

All you are giving them is a chance to say "yes" or "no." Instead of that, say, "I'd like to make a bigger impact on the organization. Here are five things in new information services I am considering. Which one of these would be the most valuable to you?"

You can't always take their answer literally. You have to read between the lines because it is not just what they select. It is the enthusiasm with which they embrace a particular idea. Maybe if you give them five examples, the right answer is not any of the five. It may be a combination of two different ones or something that sparks the idea further out in one direction. My point is to not get your ego attached to one solution or one approach too early on. Let your clients tell you what they actually think they would like. Then evaluate and refine with drafts. Once you narrow it down to the things they're genuinely interested in, then you're ready to implement.

IO: You mentioned earlier that you are a reader. What is it that you find interesting or compelling?

TK: A lot of my reading is in the innovation space. So I try to at least skim most innovation books, but what else am I currently reading? I am usually working on several different books at a time, kind of grazing as I go. Up in the hotel room, I have Donald Norman's book, The Invisible Computer, which is quite profound. It is all about information appliances and how computers as distinct objects are going to more or less go away or become less important. But you will have these invisible computersembedded chips inside everythingthat will do lots of individual tasks for you.

I am also currently reading Herb Kelleher's book called Nuts. I think it has been out for a few years, but he is a model of a CEO who didn't take himself too seriously during his tenure at Southwest Airlines. I am working on another book called Cracking Creativity from Mike Michalko that I have really just gotten into. The book quotes Einstein describing the differences in his approach to the world. He says, "When searching for a needle in a haystack, other people quit when they find the needle. I look for what other needles might be in the haystack." I really like that quoteit's one that I had not heard before. The only other book I am working on is a bound galley of a book coming out from Stanford professor Bob Sutton, Weird Ideas that Work. It is very fun and still useful.

I really believe in reading. I have a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old, and I believe that reading is the most fundamental building block of their intellectual curiosity. A love of reading is one of the most important things I want to pass on to my kids.

When my son was five, he was reading all of the Harry Potter books. At six, he started to read the Hardy Boys books. There are 58 Hardy Boys books and he is on number 37. I didn't start reading the Hardy Boys until I was 10 years old. He will have read the whole collection by then.

I am just so happy that both of the kids are readers. I find it hard to imagine people can enjoy life without reading.

IO: What is it about libraries that you love?

TK: Libraries, whether they are in the physical form or the electronic form, give you the ability to explore a kind of a sideline ideasomething you're even just vaguely curious about. Browsing through a library can satisfy your curiosity on some subjects and, at the same time, spark interest in others. For the same reason, I love the Internet because it is so much easier to find any piece of data, even though you sometimes have to question the data you find there.

For example, I love the movies. I probably see too many films, something like a hundred a year. I was on a flight coming back from Prague recently, where they had 17 movies to choose from, and I had seen every movie on the list. So I love the fact that I can go to a site like IMDB, Internet Movie Database, after seeing a movie and I can see who all the actors were. Then I look for new films based on a particular actor that I like. A film leads to an actor, which leads to yet another film.

Prior to the emergence of the Internet, I used to rely on hardcover reference books about the movies. I still have several of those reference texts, but it is really hard to look things up randomly using paper-based systems. Most of those books are alphabetic by film or by actor and very few of them show an actor's whole filmography. On the Internet, I can just bounce around to my heart's content, skimming along the surface, or diving deep into a topic when I develop a sudden interest in it.

That makes me think of a story Tom Peters told me. He used to have a big unabridged dictionary high on the shelf in his home office, and he said would look up a word once every couple of months. One day he went out and bought one of those stands like they have in libraries, which allow you to keep a large book open at a convenient level for reading. Now he says he looks up a word two or three times a day.

Tom Peters' story demonstrates that simply by changing accessibility, you can turn an information resource from something that is mostly just gathering dust to something incredibly productive that you use every day. I think that's a lesson we all could take to heart.