IDEO started in 1991. Most of us associate the firm with Design Thinking. This design firm started with something that was quite unique at the time.
Their team was not only made out of designers, but they also built up a multidisciplinary team with people from crazily diverse fields like anthropology, business strategy, education, and healthcare. Remember Metadesign? The firm was co-founded by a bunch of very smart and by then already famous people: David M. Kelley, Bill Moggridge, and Mike Nuttall.
Since then, IDEO has had a huge impact on both Design Thinking and Service Design. They created several books on Design Thinking and published numerous tools and methods that are used today by service designers around the world.
Today, the company has offices in Cambridge, Chicago, London, Munich, New York City, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Tokyo, with about 600 employees.
So, IDEO is definitely the big player you should at least know about if you are in the field of Design.
Going further
This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.