På Kaospiloterna kom jag i kontakt med Palo Alto-baserade designfirman IDEO som var en viktig inspirationskälla för skolan. Här kan man lyssna på en intervju med grundaren av IDEO, David Kelley. Hans bror Tom Kelley har skrivit boken ”The art of innovation” där företaget och dess tankar och metoder beskrivs närmare. Fast Company uppmärksammar IDEO:s senaste succé som är ett smart sätt att underlätta social innovation. Några rader från artikeln:

But it was, perhaps, their ”Keep the Change” campaign for Bank of America that had the most dramatic and measurable impact. Based on ethnographic research that showed that target customers–boomer-age women with kids–tended to round up their financial transactions for both speed and convenience, IDEO developed a service that rounds up purchases made with a Bank of America Visa debit card to the nearest dollar, and then transfers the difference from the customer’s checking account to her savings account. That bit of financial wizardry also solved another problem: low savings rates among the members of the target demo. The campaign proved so popular that it drew more than 2.5 million customers in its first year, including 700,000 new checking accounts and one million new savings accounts for the bank. That’s no small change.