According to the following article, do you think IDEO can accept the Visor project as it is on a severely dropped schedule?

Do you think they need to persuade Handspring's management to change its intensive launch schedule? Or do you think they need to just decline the project? Why?

The Handspring Project

In July 1998, both Hawkins and his business partner Donna Dubinsky, a Harvard MBA who had run the business side of Palm, resigned from 3Com on amicable terms to set up shop in Palo Alto. Part of the reason for the move was the desire for greater autonomy. Despite the success of the Palm line, 3Com as a whole was not doing well enough to reward personnel with stock. The goal of the new company was to come out with a fully compatible, slightly smaller, and less expensive clone of the palm-size computers. A technical motivation behind the new company was to address the Palm's inability to easily add functionality.

Hawkins had already scaled back to part-time work at Palm Computing to turn his attention to a long-time interest of his: writing a book on how the brain works. The temptation to interrupt the academic project to take another pass at building the perfect palm-size device was irresistible for someone universally hailed as the "father of a new industry." In quick order, Hawkins and Dubinsky were joined by the original Palm team of a dozen engineers. People enjoyed working with Hawkins, who, in Boyle's words was "by and large an even-keeled, predictable, normal person despite being a brilliant innovator."

Just a few weeks after starting up, Dubinsky and Hawkins, now chief product officer at Handspring, signed a licensing agreement with 3Com for the right to use the Palm operating system. This agreement would provide any product they developed compatibility with the myriad applications already available for Palm devices. Once again, Hawkins would turn to IDEO for designing a new product.

Hawkins felt that the proposed device should be able to easily link-up through so-called "ROM cards" for games, pagers, cell phones, Global Positioning System receivers, voice recorders (the product would have a tiny built-in microphone), wireless modems, MP3 music players, graphing calculators, digital cameras, and even cardiac monitors. A solution for how to do this came to Hawkins when he spotted his child's Nintendo Game Boy, which allowed for changing games simply by inserting interchangeable game cartridges. This led to the so-called "Springboard" slot on the back of the product, which would allow the user to plug in a variety of matchbook-size modules. Hawkins' ten-year-old daughter actually proposed the product name "Visor"short for "advisor."

The IDEO-Handspring team wanted the modules to be simple to use, with the device operating the moment a module was inserted. Some two dozen third-party developers expressed interest in developing add-on devices for the proposed Visor. Even without a concrete plan, funding flowed easily from venture capitalists eager to duplicate Palm's success with a device that could set a new trend in handheld computing. Publicity, too, would come easily, even in a field replete with new handheld devices. For the meantime, however, the media was kept guessing.

Apart from product features such as price, memory and colors, the Visor team saw little need for market research. According to Dubinsky, "We felt we understood the marketplace pretty well. After all, we invented the product and the category... You can't test the concept of a slot; it's too major."24 The new project, however, was launched at a time when skeptics noted that people used hand-held devices primarily for mundane tasks such as storing addresses and personal calendars, rather than for complex tasks such as accessing e-mail. "People don't want a combination device," according to Ken Dulaney, mobile computing market research specialist at the Gartner Group. "Every time you try to get a computer to do many things, it ends up doing none of them well."25

Hawkins and Dubinsky insisted that the Visor's cost be kept to $150a price far below the $300 commanded by the original Palm Pilot in 1996 and the $450 commanded by the Palm V at its market launch. This price was intended to attract a wider following and consistent with Handspring's strategy of getting a product with the new standard into many hands as quickly as possible. As a result, Hawkins and Dubinsky pushed for a product launch deadline of late 1999, just in time for the holiday gift-giving season and several months less than their already ambitious prior deadline of spring 2000. This would entail a product development cycle of about 10 months before handing off the product to production in March-April 1999.

Boyle was not worried about the challenging schedule because IDEO could meet difficult deadlines, even if at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute. Furthermore, the team under Boyle had already encountered and worked smoothly with most of the Handspring team through dozens of prior meetings and other encounters during the Palm V project. IDEO and Handspring shared in common a belief in quick prototyping and a consumer-centered mentality. In Hawkins' words, after all, "I'm not down on engineering, but I'm really down on technology for technology's sake. . . I don't say 'Put the biggest, meanest CPU in here.' I say, 'Make this work well for the consumer.'"26

The Handspring project would also require Boyle's team to keep the rest of IDEO, not to mention the rest of Silicon Valley, in the dark about the project. This would make for uncomfortable moments, especially during informal hallway conversations with colleagues, some of who were still working on the Palm V project.

What concerned Boyle much more, however, was sacrificing IDEO's emphasis on innovation and design in order to meet the client's goals. Because of the time and price pressures, Hawkins' proposal would imply running with only "tried-and-true" technology; IDEO would not be able to indulge in the early phases of its legendary innovation process that differentiated it from other product development firms. Visor would have to sacrifice style and settle on an inexpensive plastic housing, and on AAA batteries instead of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery found in the Palm V.

If they had twice the time, Boyle was confident that his team could help create a killer product that would match the Palm V in design excellence and capability. Should he and Kelley try to persuade Handspring to postpone the Visor launch, which would allow the team to follow all the steps of IDEO's innovation process? Or should they just accept the client's request for a very aggressive schedule that was shorter than half the time they had for the Palm V? Or perhaps it would be better to decline Handspring's request and help new clients on IDEO's waitlist. He wrestled with these thoughts as he finished his espresso and walked back to the studio to meet David Kelley.