About The Book

Tom is an original founder, past owner, and current CEO of Kablooe Design, a creative product design and development agency. He has an undergraduate degree in Industrial Design from MCAD, and professional certificates in cardiac health and product management from Stanford University and Northwestern University, respectively.

 

His quest in innovation started less than a year out of college when he quit his full time job to start Kablooe with a partner. He had a brand new mortgage and a one-year-old daughter at the time. Tom and his partner rented a small shed with some prototyping tools and started with a single customer the very next Monday after leaving his job. During lunch on that very first day, the news came on the radio announcing that their only customer had just declared bankruptcy.

 

Determined to survive, Tom set out to find more customers that needed creative product design services, and after many years of long nights and weekends they began to develop a unique customer base. After falling in love with medical devices Tom decided to focus more heavily on that industry and picked up his training at Stanford.

 

Thirty one years later Kablooe now serves medical device companies as 80% of their customer base, of which 60% are small startup companies and entrepreneurs. Tom loves the energy of the startup world and the excitement that comes with creating new inventions to solve problems.

 

This book became a summary of what Tom saw as the most important drivers to creativity and creative problem solving that lead to successful, innovative products. Innovate The Way You Were Designed To is an eye-opening look into the world of design and innovation from the perspective of first understanding how our human cognitive powers work when it comes to creative thought. Filled with anecdotes from 30 years of past experience, this book gives concrete examples of experiences from the design and development world. Learning about the author’s path from art to medical device design puts a perspective around the basis for the book, and creates a strong connection between the intentional use of both sides of our brains and successful innovative outcomes in our design engineering innovation attempts. Utilizing our brain’s inherent ability to create by understanding how it operates is the key thesis to the practical, step by step, process laid out in the book. The process is broken down into practical phases that act as a simple framework for any development project, with safeguards, best practices, and tested methodologies that will set the readers up for successful innovation projects of their own. The encouragement from this book is to get out there and use your inherent abilities to innovate and contribute to making this world a better place in your own unique way.