Ideo Product Development Harvard Business Case
IDEO Product Development:
Case Analysis
The FAB 5
February 28, 2013
Adedeji Akindele-Alo
Lexi Artrip
Elizabeth Lowder
Morrell Turner Jessica Wright
PROBLEM DEFINITION The ideas of IDEO and Handspring were different from one another in terms of development and time frame. Additionally, IDEO was working on products directly competitive to one another with the projects assigned by 3com and Handspring. The primary issue in the IDEO Product Development case is the question of whether Boyle and Kelley should persuade Handspring to postpone the launch of “Visor.” The option of postponement would allow the team to follow all of the steps of IDEO’s legendary innovation process (see Appendix for a flow chart of this process). The other option, accepting the client’s request for a very aggressive and immediate schedule, would allow the team to create a product quickly enough to enter the market during the busy holiday season, and avoid entering the market too late. A secondary problem is the conflict of interest between the IDEO team working on the Palm V and Visor at the same time. IDEO’s Product Development Problems include the following: * Ignoring client wishes and continuing on with IDEO’s long innovation process could lead to Handspring’s potential release of partnership with IDEO. Handspring wants a product that can be produced within a quick time frame, while IDEO places emphasis on using flexible timeframes in order to fully explore the design process. The two ideas do not work well together. * A time constraint would order IDEO’s team to bypass some of the early development stages, which means that the product may not, or will not, be as good as if it were analyzed under each phase accordingly, thus compromising IDEO’s reputation for the most innovative problems possible. * After the developers of Palm V left to start up the Handspring project, they created a conflict of interest among IDEO developers
Case Analysis
The FAB 5
February 28, 2013
Adedeji Akindele-Alo
Lexi Artrip
Elizabeth Lowder
Morrell Turner Jessica Wright
PROBLEM DEFINITION The ideas of IDEO and Handspring were different from one another in terms of development and time frame. Additionally, IDEO was working on products directly competitive to one another with the projects assigned by 3com and Handspring. The primary issue in the IDEO Product Development case is the question of whether Boyle and Kelley should persuade Handspring to postpone the launch of “Visor.” The option of postponement would allow the team to follow all of the steps of IDEO’s legendary innovation process (see Appendix for a flow chart of this process). The other option, accepting the client’s request for a very aggressive and immediate schedule, would allow the team to create a product quickly enough to enter the market during the busy holiday season, and avoid entering the market too late. A secondary problem is the conflict of interest between the IDEO team working on the Palm V and Visor at the same time. IDEO’s Product Development Problems include the following: * Ignoring client wishes and continuing on with IDEO’s long innovation process could lead to Handspring’s potential release of partnership with IDEO. Handspring wants a product that can be produced within a quick time frame, while IDEO places emphasis on using flexible timeframes in order to fully explore the design process. The two ideas do not work well together. * A time constraint would order IDEO’s team to bypass some of the early development stages, which means that the product may not, or will not, be as good as if it were analyzed under each phase accordingly, thus compromising IDEO’s reputation for the most innovative problems possible. * After the developers of Palm V left to start up the Handspring project, they created a conflict of interest among IDEO developers