A man full of ideas, and full of ideas about how to make money off them

The ideas interview: Tom Kelley
John Sutherland meets an American innovator behind many things that make life easier - from the laptop to the talking defibrillator (from the good old Guardian)

Tom Kelley's Ideo company has been marketing Innovation (very profitably) for 30 years. Kelley, with his elder brother David, is not merely one of the world's leading idea-entrepreneurs, but an evangelist for his cause. He writes inspirational books on the subject and, in his latest, he introduces a dream-team of 10 "personas" who together can deliver innovation at its most cutting edge. The team includes the Anthropologist (or "people person" - in which role Kelley modestly casts himself), the Experimenter, the Cross-pollinator, the Narrator, the Hurdler, Uncle Tom Cobley et al.

Ideo lays claim to 3,000 successful innovations. Among them are the modern form of the Apple mouse and the laptop computer (something they came up with originally for a firm called Grid Systems). Kelley throws off innovation as lesser men throw off dandruff. Coming through the barriers at Charles de Gaulle airport, his eye was caught by a passenger bottleneck caused by a badly designed turnstile. A moment or two's anthropological observation, and some cross-pollination (How do they do this at JFK?) solved the problem. Merci, Tom.

A couple of hours of similar observation people-watching at Heathrow could, Kelley suggests, innovate away some of the miseries currently being experienced there. If the British Airports Authority cares, Ideo's number is in the book.

Kelley's Ideology (the prefix was choses as "combination word") can be summed up by a slogan of Henry Ford's: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'."

"That's very much the way customers think about things," Kelley explains. "Give them movies on video, for example, and they'll say, 'We love them - but, you know what? rewinding is a real drag, why doesn't someone come up with a faster, easier, rewind function.' What customers won't say is 'You know what? I'd really like to throw my entire, much-loved, collection of video tapes and switch to silver discs where rewinding's irrelevant.' Sony did just that. They innovated the problem out of existence."

What is the difference between innovation and invention? Kelley has clearly been asked the question many times. "Anything that's intrinsically new," he explains, "can be called an invention. I'm not an inventor. But if I came up with an electric dog washer -that would qualify. Innovation adds serviceable value to that initial creative act."

Where, I ask, would Kelley put the digital super-heroes of the present day: Steve Jobs, of Apple, and Bill Gates, of Microsoft? "We know Steve Jobs quite well - he has been close to my brother, David, who founded Ideo. We do a lot of work for him. In terms of my 10 personas, Steve is a 'director'. Bill Gates (whom I don't know personally) is, I would say, more of a 'Cross-pollinator'. Steve recruits incredibly talented people and he finds a way (not, I have to say, always a kinder, gentler way) to get them to produce their best work. A lot of people leave Apple saying 'I can't work any more for that guy but he got me to do things I didn't know I could do.' To me, that's the mark of the Director.

"With Bill Gates, there's clearly more cross-pollinating going on. Steve, for example, would say to his team, 'Go away, brainstorm and bring me back something (or else!).' Bill, on the other hand, would say, 'Hey, let's all look around and see what the other guys are doing badly, or doing in a small way, and let's, here at Microsoft, do the same thing well, or in a big way'."

There's no Predator in Kelley's cast of 10. Why not? "Back-stabbing", he replies, "or getting ahead by doing down other members of the team is the enemy of innovation. As soon as I perceive the boss, or my team-mate, is going to steal my ideas and take credit for them, I'm not going to share. I'm going to turn off my flow of ideas or take them somewhere else."

I wonder which, of the 3,000 innovations that have flowed from the Ideo idea-lab, Kelley is proudest of. "I have a clear favourite. There's a firm called Heartstream which found a way of putting defibrillators (those things with the electric shock pads you see alongside the gurney in ER) into a small box. It was genius technology. The problem, though, is using the device outside hospitals. It's a lifesaver on planes, mid-flight - the problem is, if someone goes into cardiac arrest you have six minutes to save their life and three to save their brain function. Flight attendants typically have zero medical training. For them, when this emergency arises, it's probably the highest-stress situation in their career. They fumble. We came up with a set of punch buttons which talk you through it. Literally. Interestingly, we found that an English accent was most calming and most authoritative in this situation. So this English voice, when you start the process, says things like, 'Press the orange button NOW'. We went through hundreds of prototypes before we found one that eliminated the fumble factor. More than 100 lives have been saved, thanks to this innovation."

That is a good example, and one would be glad to have the Ideo-improved defibrillator aboard one's jumbo. But why is innovation so important generally?

"I grew up in Akron, Ohio, when it was the tyre capital of the world. My dad worked for Goodyear. Firestone and BF Goodrich were also major employers. Between them, they had 100% of the US market. Every tyre for the US passenger car was made within a 10-mile radius of our house. Because they had the market locked up these firms could coast for decades; they didn't have to innovate. Others came along and did, and Akron lost the market. Times have changed. If you don't innovate, you die".

(The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley is published by Profile Books.)