Ideo Harvard Business Case

Corporations were drawn to IDEO because the company had a proven system of developing the best products by using their key ingredients for innovative strategy. In this case, I will analyze the founder’s main issues, development of the Palm V, Handspring, and my own managerial perspective of the process. Founder’s Main Issues The main issues of the case are in the hands of Dennis Boyle. He is faced with an interesting dilemma. Should Boyle: Sacrifice the steps in IDEO’s development process? Hold on to their development philosophy? Use the Visor to keep a large and prominent corporate client happy? Use the experience to learn about how to capitalize more efficiently on their own internal resources? Risk questioning the integrity of the company? (working with the competitor) Boyle needed to make a quick but well thought out decision. Palm V Issues The original idea with the Palm Pilot was figuring out how to scale down the functionality of a computer to something that can fit in the palm of your hand. Now the issue was how to keep ahead in the market and expand to include female customers. It was evident that females generally avoided Palms because of their “manly” appearance and dreary gray color scheme. The Palm V would need to be lighter, smaller, and available in different colors. IDEO quickly began to work on this project headed by Dennis Boyle. Boyle’s Team ran into several issues in the development process. These included: Understand Phase 10-12 weeks {text:list-item} In response, Boyle needed to purchase and distribute Palm’s to everyone to so they can make proper observations which included: {text:list-item} {text:list-item} {text:list-item} Phase I (visualize and realize) {text:list-item} {text:list-item} {text:list-item} {text:list-item} {text:list-item} Issues {text:list-item} {text:list-item} The result of this phase was a