Inside IDEO Part 2. The Tube: IDEO Builds a Collaboration System That Inspires through Passion. Design Principles: IDEO's Knowledge Sharing Team synthesized their findings into five design principles that guided the creation of the Tube, and scale and adapt to inform similar efforts within other organizations. 1) Build Pointers to People: rather than trying to take all of the knowledge out of people’s heads and store it in a giant database, focus primarily on helping people to identify who they are -- their passion, experience, and expertise -- and connect people based on that information. 2) Build Rewarding Systems: a system that requires altruism is unlikely to be successful.
Similarly, systems that require users to participate (e.g. compliance-based design) rarely get anything more than participation at the lowest required level. Effective knowledge sharing systems must simultaneously meet the needs of the organization while motivating individual participation. The Tube has had a very positive impact on the way we work at IDEO. How to Kill a Bad Idea. Are you in the software business? I bet most of you would answer no. So let me put it another way: Do you have a website? If the answer is yes, you're in the software business. A website is software.