Where Does it Start? For IDEO, serial innovation starts by focusing on both aesthetics and engineering aspects in its projects.  David Kelly, continuously focuses on re-designing the organization to ensure maximum utility. The teams at IDEO are designed to be global, independent, purposely structured to be small, yet teams frequently communicate and leverage each other’s knowledge and talents.  IDEO offices are optimally designed based on employee surveys and interactions.  

Capabilities - Talent Management: IDEO onboards its resources through their internship programs (mainly Stanford) who get to work on multiple projects.  Project leads are selected based on their passion and high performing employees get to lead even more challenging projects.  Employees enjoy no dress codes, design their own work spaces, encouraged to walk around and call brainstorming sessions as needed.  
Capabilities - Process: Flexibility drives the process of innovation by generating mass pools of ideas in small team settings, while staying focused on the task.  If the project reaches a standstill, project leads can call for "deep-dives", where creative ideas are generated and top handful solutions are selected. These ideas are then converted to prototypes and with constant customer feedback, lead to a final product.  The customer feedback plays an integral role from ideation to production as it serves as lever in ensuring price and scope are understood by IDEO and customers alike. 

Create & Extract Value: IDEO drives value for its process, resources and customers by ensuring that successful projects are reviewed and best practices are assimilated into IDEO’s overall process.  Additionally, employees are encouraged to share their ideas and insights on an ongoing basis and failures are celebrated.  

Sustain Innovation: It is important to point out that IDEO to be and stay innovative, has to put all the building blocks together in a cohesive manner - organizational structure is supportive of new ideas, employees are encouraged to fail fast, hard work and passion is rewarded and by ensuring resources work on multiple cross-vertical projects, ideas are not conformed, which allows for value creation within IDEO and to its end customers.

Ref: Rao, Jay, and Joseph Weintraub. 2013. How Innovative is your Company’s Culture? MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2013.