In “What the Obama Administration Is Learning from Facebook, Google, and Ideo,” reporter Eliot Van Buskirk chronicles the recent efforts of John Berry, the head of the Office of Personnel Management for Barack Obama. Berry, tasked by the President to make government work “cool again,” visited IDEO and found what he called “phenomenal people, outside-the-box thinking, [and] creative approaches to how they manage people.”

By Jocelyn Wyatt

IDEO’s Jocelyn Wyatt writes for the Innovation in Evaluation blog this week. Her post “How Might We Put People at the Center of Evaluation?” discusses IDEO’s work with International Development Enterprises (IDE) in Ethiopia and VisionSpring in India.

By James Moed and Fran Samalionis

“Design’s Odd Couple” by IDEO’s James Moed and Fran Samalionis was recently published in Touchpoint, the new journal of the Service Design Network. In the article, Moed (a business strategist) and Samalionis (a service designer) explore their contrasting experiences with the people and places around them.

Download the PDF

On September 1, IDEO’s Sally Madsen will be presenting at the Social Capital Markets conference for a panel titled “Disruptive innovation: Three successful approaches to scaling impact.” She will be representing the Ripple Effect project with Acumen Fund.

Patrice Martin and Jocelyn Wyatt will lead a workshop with SustainAbility on the “Future of Corporate Capitalism: Connecting Money with Meaning and the Leadership Imperative of Corporations” at the BeDo Intrapreneurs event.

On September 2, Doug Solomon speaks on the panel “ICT4 Who? Helping Specific Groups Using Tech for Impact.” Aaron Sklar and Tatyana Mamut will lead a session titled “Human Centered Evaluation.”

The Design for Giving Contest is motivating schools across India to reimagine the act of giving. Taking place from August 15th to Oct 15th, the contest involves more than 30,000 schools across India. School children will design and implement solutions to help people in need. The goal of this movement is to help children realize that they can “be the change” they want to see in the world.


The Design for Giving Contest is part of the “Joy of Giving” week and is organized by the Riverside School, Ahmedabad and GiveIndia. Knowledge partners include Stanford’s d.school and IDEO.

By Doug Solomon

IDEO’s Doug Solomon writes on tackling some of the world’s biggest problems by applying design thinking to social impact issues in “Innovation in Evaluation: an Introduction.”

By Tom Hulme

IDEO’s Tom Hulme writes on the need for a networked and holistic approach to innovation for The Future of Innovation project. The project book will be published by Gower in November 2009.

Read the article here.

Print magazine is hosting a live webcast on Aug. 4 with Joshua Onysko, founder and CEO of Pangea Organics, as well as Josh Ivy, the skincare company’s lead designer.

Read about IDEO’s work with Pangea here.

In “Ripple Effect: Finding safe drinking water is one problem; distributing it is quite another,” Ernest Beck writes about IDEO’s Ripple Effect project.

Read the article here.