Vantaggi
The company runs projects much like any post-graduate design programs in academia. The designers are given full agency to experiment, explore and execute. Your understanding and capacity for design craft is tested to its limits, and you train yourself to be focused on delivering the final result, utilizing all resources you can find on top of your own design training. After IDEO, as a designer, I feel like I can do anything design-related because the value of design becomes a way of thinking instead of just a way of making something.
Svantaggi
Especially for business clients in China, for whom the general understanding of design thinking is quite low-level, there had to be a lot of hand-holding throughout any project. This actually adds a lot to the opportunity cost and time of a project, is often the hardest part instead of the design process itself. There wasn't really enough resources built in the company to help designers with dealing with clients on that front, and in my opinion, this specific reality sometimes deters designers from doing better work.