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Thinking Outside the Box: A Misguided Idea

Published date: February 3, 2014 в 3:00 am

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Although studying creativity is considered a legitimate scientific discipline nowadays, it is still a very young one. In the early 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford was one of the first academic researchers who dared to conduct a study of creativity. One of Guilford’s most famous studies was the nine-dot puzzle, presented with its solution here. He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. Today many people are familiar with this puzzle and its solution. In the 1970s, however, very few were even aware of its existence, even though it had been around for almost a century.

If you have tried solving this puzzle, you can confirm that your first attempts usually involve sketching lines inside the imaginary square. The correct solution, however, requires you to draw lines that extend beyond the area defined by the dots.

At the first stages, all the participants in Guilford’s original study censored their own thinking by limiting the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square (even those who eventually solved the puzzle). Even though they weren’t instructed to restrain themselves from considering such a solution, they were unable to “see” the white space beyond the square’s boundaries. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the illusory confinement and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots.

The symmetry, the beautiful simplicity of the solution, and the fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford and the readers of his books to leap to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. The idea went viral (via 1970s-era media and word of mouth, of course). Overnight, it seemed that creativity gurus everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box.

Management consultants in the 1970s and 1980s even used this puzzle when making sales pitches to prospective clients. Because the solution is, in hindsight, deceptively simple, clients tended to admit they should have thought of it themselves. Because they hadn’t, they were obviously not as creative or smart as they had previously thought, and needed to call in creative experts. Or so their consultants would have them believe.

The nine-dot puzzle and the phrase “thinking outside the box” became metaphors for creativity and spread like wildfire in marketing, management, psychology, the creative arts, engineering, and personal improvement circles. There seemed to be no end to the insights that could be offered under the banner of thinking outside the box. Speakers, trainers, training program developers, organizational consultants, and university professors all had much to say about the vast benefits of outside-the-box thinking. It was an appealing and apparently convincing message.

Indeed, the concept enjoyed such strong popularity and intuitive appeal that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research teams—Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg—ran another experiment using the same puzzle but a different research procedure.

Both teams followed the same protocol of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box bordering the dot array. In other words, the “trick” was revealed in advance. Would you like to guess the percentage of the participants in the second group who solved the puzzle correctly? Most people assume that 60 percent to 90 percent of the group given the clue would solve the puzzle easily. In fact, only a meager 25 percent did.

What’s more, in statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement over the subjects of Guilford’s original study is insignificant. In other words, the difference could easily be due to what statisticians call sampling error.

Let’s look a little more closely at these surprising results. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and explicit instructions to think outside the box did not help.

That this advice is useless when actually trying to solve a problem involving a real box should effectively have killed off the much widely disseminated—and therefore, much more dangerous—metaphor that out-of-the-box thinking spurs creativity. After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link  between thinking outside the box and creativity was a myth.

Of course, in real life you won’t find boxes. But you will find numerous situations where a creative breakthrough is staring you in the face. They are much more common than you probably think.

*From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

Making the Most of Your Resources With Task Unification

Published date: January 27, 2014 в 3:00 am

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“We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think.”

—Sir Ernest Rutherford, Nobel Prize winner, 1908

John Doyle certainly knows theater. Over his thirty-year career, he’s staged more than two hundred professional productions throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, mostly in small, regional theater companies. In the early 1990s, while working at such a theater in rural England, the Scottish director came up with an innovative way to produce crowd-pleasing musicals on a tiny budget. Musicals are considerably more expensive to stage than traditional plays, due primarily to the cost of hiring musicians. But Doyle eliminated those excess costs by handing responsibility for musical accompaniment to his actors. The actors onstage doubled as instrumentalists.

This, of course, was classic Task Unification: taking an existing internal resource that is already part of the Closed World (in Doyle’s case, his actors) and giving it a new task (playing musical accompaniment) that had traditionally been performed by another internal resource (musicians).

Doyle quietly opened his production of Sweeney Todd in 2004 at the Watermill Theater in Newbury, England. But as word got out about his unique staging and casting, the show was quickly brought to London’s West End, and, eventually, Broadway.

At first, US audiences and critics were skeptical. Used to expensively produced, high-tech Broadway productions that boasted elaborate sets and twenty-five-piece orchestras, they were shocked when the curtain rose on a bare stage with just ten actors sitting on chairs—actors who doubled as their own accompanists. During intermission, theatergoers were overheard exclaiming to one another, “How dare they do this!”

Doyle explained in an interview that he didn’t set out to break the rules. “It was never meant to be about, ‘We want to get rid of an orchestra.’ It grew out of not being able to afford to have one,” he said. However, being constrained by a lack of money turned out to be a blessing: he realized that he had an opportunity to stretch the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief. “I mean, you don’t often sit with a drink in one hand and a double bass between your legs,” he said. “It doesn’t happen very much in real life. So it kind of asks the audience to take a journey that goes beyond their preconception of what real life is.” Given that Doyle had always been interested in exploring the relationship between actors and audiences, he said he was pleased to have created “an abstraction of reality” that delivered a unique experience to theatergoers.

Doyle made a creative breakthrough, and his “actor-musicianship” method of staging musicals sent shock waves through the international theater scene. Directors at other cash-strapped regional theaters realized that they could emulate his signature style to stage major musicals that were both budget friendly and edgy enough to thrill the most jaded audiences.

Doyle won a Tony Award for Best Director for his actor-musician production of Sweeney Todd in 2006, and one for Best Musical Revival in 2007 for his actor-musician production of Company. Widely hailed as the reinventor of the Broadway musical, Doyle believes that his actormusicianship method turned out to be much more than just an exercise in penny-pinching. “I will do stories that I want to tell, and I will tell them in the appropriate way at the time. What I won’t do is, I won’t use this technique only to make cheap theater,” he said.

 
From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

The Partial Subtraction Technique: Betty Crocker’s Egg

Published date: January 20, 2014 в 9:17 am

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In the 1950s, General Mills launched a line of cake mixes under the famous Betty Crocker brand. The cake mixes included all the dry ingredients in the package, plus milk and eggs in powdered form. All you needed was to add water, mix it all together, and stick the pan in the oven. For busy homemakers, it saved time and effort, and the recipe was virtually error free. General Mills had a sure winner on its hands.
Or so it thought. Despite the many benefits of the new product, it did not sell well. Even the iconic and trusted Betty Crocker brand could not convince homemakers to adopt the new product.
General Mills brought in a team of psychologists. Something unusual was going on. The company needed to make its next move very carefully if it was going to get this product off the ground.
Why were consumers resisting it? The short answer: guilt. The psychologists concluded that average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product.
General Mills had to act fast. Like most marketing-minded companies, it might have considered an advertising campaign to address the guilt issue head on, for example. Imagine a series of commercials explaining that saving time in the kitchen with instant cake mixes allowed housewives to do other valuable things for their families. The commercials would show how smart it was to use such an innovative product.
Against all marketing conventional wisdom, General Mills revised the product instead, making it less convenient. The housewife was charged with adding water and a real egg to the ingredients, creating the perception that the powdered egg had been subtracted. General Mills relaunched the new product with the slogan “Add an Egg.” Sales of Betty Crocker instant cake mix soared.
Why would such a simple thing have such a large effect? First, doing a little more work made women feel less guilty while still saving time. Also, the extra work meant that women had invested time and effort in the process, creating a sense of ownership. The simple act of replacing the powdered egg with a real egg made the creation of the cake more fulfilling and meaningful. You could even argue that an egg has connotations of life and birth, and that the housewife “gives birth” to her tasty creation. Okay, that may sound a bit far fetched. But you can’t argue that this new approach changed everything.
Betty Crocker’s egg teaches us a powerful lesson about consumer psychology. Many other companies sell goods and services that come prepackaged. They too might be able to innovate with the Subtraction technique by taking out a key component and adding back a little activity for the consumer.
 
From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

Systematic Innovation at the Consumer Electronics Show

Published date: January 13, 2014 в 3:00 am

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One way to develop your expertise in SIT techniques is with pattern spotting. A key premise of SIT is that for thousands of years, innovators have used patterns in their inventions, usually without even realizing it. Those patterns are now embedded into the products and services you see around you, almost like the DNA of a product. You want to develop your ability to see these patterns as a way to improve your use of them.

There’s probably no better place to practice pattern spotting than at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). In last week’s CES in Las Vegas, “manufacturers demonstrated a range of previously mundane but now smart, web-connected products destined to become part of daily domestic existence, from kitchen appliances to baby monitors to sports equipment,” as reported in The Independent.

The word, “smart,” should tip you off right away. That’s a tell-tale for the Attribute Dependency Technique. It works by taking two attributes of a system and creating a correlation between them. As one thing changes, another thing changes. It tends to yield products that change or adapt to some changing need of the consumer. Hence, the product appears smart.

See if you can spot the Attribute Dependency Technique is these examples from CES:

  • Smart cars will become so smart they can drive themselves, avoiding congestion or collisions – even finding the closest parking space to your destination.
  • Smart refrigerators will let you know when the milk is on the turn, or when you need to buy more ketchup.
  • Smart toilets will monitor the frequency and consistency of your bowel movements, and tell you whether you ought to book an appointment with a dietitian – or worse, a clinician.
  • Smart ovens will manage mealtimes, cooking different dishes by different methods at the correct time.
  • Smart toothbrushes keep track of your brushing habits – not just the frequency of brushing, but also the technique. It then sends the dental data it has collected to your smartphone, with notes on how to brush better.
  • Smart “onesies” are not only a sleepsuit, but also a baby monitor. It tracks its infant wearer’s temperature, breathing rate, body position and activity level. It can even be paired with a bottle warmer, which starts heating milk when the Mimo senses the baby is about to wake up.
  • Smart tennis rackets record the power of each shot, the position of ball-on-racket, even the amount of spin. That data is then displayed on a smartphone or tablet, demonstrating the details of a player’s game and thus illuminating potential areas of improvement.
  • Smart beds track your heart rate, breathing, snoring, movements and surroundings, building a comprehensive picture of your sleep patterns which it then sends to your smartphone, offering suggestions for how to sleep better the following night.

With enough experience using SIT, you’ll use pattern spotting automatically. You will see some new product or service and instantly your mind will try to search which of the five techniques applies. When you get to that point, you have what we affectionately call the SIT “virus.” It means you are well on your way to mastering the method.

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification and CAPTCHA

Published date: January 6, 2014 в 10:16 am

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You’ve experienced this dozens, if not hundreds, of times. Before being allowed to enter a website, you must type words written in a bizarre, distorted script inside a box.

Dr. Luis von Ahn, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, estimates that people decipher script like this more than 200 million times a day. He should know. He invented the system. Captcha, as it is called, protects websites by demanding that visitors take a simple test that humans can pass but computers cannot. Captcha, in fact, is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It requires website visitors to interpret the text correctly and type the right letters before they can enter the site.

Captcha is not without its flaws. Its words are generated randomly,and occasionally one pops up that can be easily misinterpreted. One woman trying to sign up for the Yahoo! email service was given the word WAIT. She took it literally. Only after staring at the unchanging screen for twenty minutes did she send a message to the Yahoo! help desk asking for assistance. It could have been worse: captcha sent another web user the word RESTART.

Despite these minor inconveniences, captcha has proven infinitely useful to website owners and managers who want to prevent computer generated spam or computer viruses from invading their domains.

Take Ticketmaster. It sells millions of tickets to sporting, music, and arts events. Ticket scalpers would love to get their hands on the best seats in the house for headline shows and resell them at much higher prices for hefty profits. If they could, they’d storm the Ticketmaster website and buy thousands of tickets for popular events the instant they were available. Although Ticketmaster tried to prevent abuse by limiting the number of tickets that any one customer could purchase at a time, scalpers found a way around the rules by writing computer programs capable of posing as real people, logging on to the website, and purchasing tickets. With an automated method for transacting thousands of sales a minute, scalpers were scoring big at the expense of both Ticketmaster and ordinary consumers, who ended up with less desirable seats or had to pay more for good ones.

Captcha changed all that. Only humans can interpret the distorted letters—and gain entrance to the Ticketmaster website. Yes, it takes some effort and time—about ten seconds—for you to decipher the captcha letters and type them. But Ticketmaster, as well as webmasters for hundreds of thousands of other websites, is infinitely grateful to von Ahn for his invention. Few web users begrudge the ten seconds when they learn about the benefits they reap in the form of enhanced security and fair prices on high-demand items such as concert tickets.

Few people other than industry insiders know that von Ahn has good reason to be grateful to them as well. It is an open secret in the online world that von Ahn harnesses the hundreds of millions of daily captcha test responses to achieve a goal—one arguably more useful to society than thwarting ticket scalpers: scanning and digitizing every book in the world.

Most people don’t realize it, but their captcha answers serve two purposes. In addition to proving to websites that they are not machines, users are deciphering difficult to-read words from old printed texts. When they type the words into the onscreen box, they are transforming printed content into digital form. It’s a perfect example of Task Unification, assigning a new task to an existing resource.

Digitizing old books is hard work even with today’s advanced scanning machines and powerful computers. Scanning accuracy remains poor, especially given the wide variety of fonts and poor print quality of many older publications. Von Ahn wrote a program, called reCaptcha, that feeds the words computer scanners can’t read into the captcha program, which, in turn, presents them to website visitors to crack. Major websites such as Yahoo! and Facebook use reCaptcha, and von Ahn gives the program away free to anyone who wants it.

Does it work? The results are, quite simply, astounding. Ordinary web surfers are helping to transcribe the equivalent of nearly 150,000 books a year—a job that would otherwise require 37,500 full-time workers. Among other accomplishments, reCaptcha helped digitize the complete printed archives of the New York Times dating back to 1851.

This is Task Unification at its best. Von Ahn came up with the idea after calculating how much human labor went into completing captcha tests. “I did a quick ‘backof- the-envelope’ estimate that people solve captchas about two hundred million times per day,” he explains. “So if it takes ten seconds to solve one captcha, that’s fifty thousand hours of work per day! I kept wondering what that work effort could be used for.”

Dr. von Ahn didn’t stop with reCaptcha. If he could, he says, he’d harvest more social, economic, and intellectual benefits from every moment in every life on the planet. “I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting human cycles that get wasted,” says von Ahn. And as more of humanity goes online, society has the potential to take advantage of what he calls “an extremely advanced, large-scale processing unit.”

The possibilities are tremendous, says von Ahn. For example, his latest venture, Duolingo, is an effort to translate the entire web into the world’s major languages. Today words on the web are written in hundreds of languages, but more than half of it is in English. That makes the web inaccessible to most people in the world, especially in fast developing regions such as China and Russia.

Once again, von Ahn’s solution involves Task Unification. A billion people worldwide are learning a foreign language. Millions of them use a computer. If they use Duolingo, people learn a foreign language while simultaneously translating text much as captcha and reCaptcha do: by assigning the additional job of translation to people while they are performing another task. Dr. von Ahn estimates that if one million people used Duolingo to learn Spanish, the entire Wikipedia could be translated into Spanish in just eighty hours.

Von Ahn is constantly thinking about how to “task-unify” the human race. “We’re still not thinking big enough,” he says. “But if we have that many people all doing some little part, we could do something insanely huge for humanity.”

The Top 10 Most Underappreciated Inventions

Published date: December 30, 2013 в 3:00 am

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The end of the year is a popular time to publish lists of all sorts. A quick glance at CNN, for example, revealed lists such as “75 Amazing Sports Moments,” “The 50 Best Android Apps,” “8 Very Old Sites in the New World,” and many more.
Here are The Top 10 Most Underappreciated Inventions. The criteria for making this list are: 1. the invention has to be of high value, 2. we take it for granted; we just expect it to be there, and 3. it would be hard to imagine life without it; the substitute for the invention would be unacceptable.
1. Eyeglasses: My favorite invention of all time is also the most underappreciated.  75% of the US population wears corrective lenses, and 90% have some form of vision impairment. Without this lowly little invention, our lives today would be dramatically different. Imagine what our society would be like without the ability to read. Without reading, learning would be much more difficult. A drop in overall learning would reduce advances in science and every other area. A world without glasses would also drop human mobility as we would be unable to drive safely or even ride a bicycle. See what I mean?
2. Hair color: This invention is a close second in my opinion because of the importance it has had on all societies through the ages. Women have been coloring their hair for thousands of years to make themselves look better in the eyes of men and, most importantly, themselves. The world is a much better place when women look good and feel good. I didn’t appreciate this invention until one of my clients, a global cosmetics firm, taught me the importance of hair color to all women in every society on earth. Just close your eyes and imagine what it would be like if virtually every woman over thirty had gray hair.
3. Brakes:  What part of your car is most important to be able to drive really, really fast? The engine is what most people would say. In fact, it is the brakes. Without brakes, humans could not rev it up in planes, trains, automobiles or any form of mechanical motion. To go, one must be able to stop. Humans are mobile creatures, and a world without brakes would keep us all very close to home.
4. The iPhone: I’ve never seen a new technology become so widely adopted, so fast, and so quickly taken for granted as the smartphone. The iPhone started it all, and competitors immediately copied it to make the smartphone a ubiquitous part of our lives. People treat a smartphone as though it has been around forever. Kids know no other world than one with little handheld devices that do just about everything. Yet, this versatile invention integrates so many aspects of our lives that we would be lost without it.
5. Currency: Brother, can you spare a dime? Money is one of the most efficiency-generating inventions of all time as it facilitates trade between anyone, for anything, anytime, anywhere. Life as we know it would be very different and difficult without currency. Money lubricates an economy, and it provides a way to save and invest. Money is so important that a new form of money has emerged to facilitate its exchange – the Bitcoin.
6.  Keys: People value their privacy and security. Imagine how you would feel if you couldn’t lock your door at night. What if you couldn’t lock up your possessions? Lots of people want to get at your stuff, including your government, so keys and locks, even digital ones, have earned an essential place in our lives.  The alternative? You could learn to hide your stuff like dogs burying their bones. Not likely.
7. Roads: People love their cars, but they never think about the roads that allow them to drive them. Roads have been around a very long time, since the first “beaten down pathways.” But a system of roads delivers tremendous value to individuals and societies. Roads connect economies, families, and business partners. A mobile species would be lost without them.
8. Calendars: Clocks are certainly important, but they are replaceable. People have a general feel for the amount of time that has lapsed in a day. But what about a month or a year or longer? Not possible, even with seasonal changes. Calendars allow efficient coordination of so many aspects of our lives, it would be hard to imagine life without them. The calendar system is one of the few things universally agreed upon.
9. Water towers: Next time you brush your teeth, say thanks to the people who built your local water tower. Though water towers speckle the landscape, they are “out of sight, out of mind.” We ignore them when we drive by. Unless you have a well, the alternatives to getting clean water (under pressure) are unacceptable. Watertowers are simple inventions. They hold water above the ground so that the tremendous weight of the water forces water through pipe and into your home.
10. Elevators: Elevators carry millions of people every day, yet we never think about the alternative to these old machines. They have been around since the ancient Romans, which may explain why Italy has the most elevators of any country – a whopping 900,000. We would all be living in a virtual flat land of low rise buildings, only tall enough to climb by stairs. And it’s not just people that use elevators. Freight, vehicles, raw material, aircraft..you name it. Most human made objects have been lifted up in the air with some form of elevator.

How to Target Your Innovation

Published date: December 23, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Companies get better results from innovation by targeting initiatives at the right places. Here are six areas to focus on:

1. Your Value Drivers:  What activities across your business model create the most value? Is it operational or commercial? Who is involved and what departments make it happen? Use a systematic innovation method like S.I.T. to reinvent the value driver as well as the resources that deliver it.

SensoryEffects, a food and beverage ingredient manufacturer, delivers customized products that help food companies compete in a more diverse market. It is moving away from commodity production and focusing on its potential in downstream emulsification powders – where the value lies.

2. Your Core Competency: What skill sets create strategic assets? Strategic assets are those that deliver a sustainable competitive advantage. By re-inventing these skills and how they are sourced and maintained, companies sustain their advantage.

AkzoNobel, a maker of specialty paint, has a unique ability to color match to near perfection thanks to their skills in chemistry and spectroscopy. Applying innovation methods to the color matching process would uncover new skills or complementary skills to fortify its strategic advantage.

3. Your Potential Acquisitions: Growth through acquisition is expensive and risky. Acquisition stifles innovation and distracts management as it focuses on integration. The answer is to use innovation methods ahead of the deal-making to clarify and enhance valuation.

Google’s acquisition of Boston Dynamics gives it another foothold in robotics. By applying a systematic innovation method to the target's core products before the offer would uncover new or hidden sources of deal value. Pre-deal innovation either makes the deal more valuable or creates intellectual property to leverage against other suitors if the deal falls through.

4. Your Customer's Processes: How does your customer use your product or service? Observe and map out the detailed steps of what customers do when they use it. Use innovation methods to re-invent the way consumers seek and derive value. This will lead to new product concepts that address these new customer behaviors.

Johnson & Johnson’s medical device unit creates detailed heat maps of how surgeons perform complicated procedures. The maps reveal the amount of time for each step, the product used, the degree of difficulty and risk to the successful outcome. Innovation is targeted at the high difficulty/high risk aspects of the procedure where the most value will be created from breakthrough ideas.

5. Your Brand Reputation: What are you most known for in the industry and in the minds of your customer? Is it superior products, great service to your distributors, fabulous advertising, top people? Use innovation methods on how consumers perceive your brand to strengthen and reinforce brand loyalty.

L’Oreal’s professional products division leads its industry through servicing salons with product support, training, merchandising, and market insights. The use of structured innovation methods of how salons operate and service their customers would create new insights and product development opportunities. Innovating where L'Oreal is regarded as the best in the industry would reinforce its leadership status.

6. Your Strategic Capabilities: How does your company win in the marketplace? What is its "source of authority?" By innovating the way a company competes, it surprises and outmaneuvers the competition.

Barry Jaruzelski and Kevin Dehoff from Booz & Company describe three strategic orientations: Need Seekers, Market Readers and Technology Drivers.  “The most successful companies are those that focus on a particular, narrow set of common and distinct capabilities that enable them to better execute their chosen strategy.”  These strategic capabilities can be innovated using systematic methods of ideation.

 

*This article first appeard in Industy Week.

Innovation in Practice: Six Year Anniversary

Published date: December 16, 2013 в 3:00 am

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This month marks the six year anniversary of Innovation in Practice, and I want to thank my readers and supporters who follow it.

2013 was a special year for me. Jacob Goldenberg and I launched our book, Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (Simon & Schuster, June 2013). The book is nominated for Innovation Book of the Year in the U.K., and it is spreading throughout. We are very pleased with the outcome of this project as it is the first detailed description of Systematic Inventive Thinking, a creative process that works for everyone.

Writing has become a way of life for me. Not only do I write this blog every week, but I am also now a regular contributor to Psychology Today, Industry Week, and Coca-Cola Journey. I want to thank the editors at these sites for inviting me.

Teaching continues to be my number one passion. I just completed the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offered by the University of Cincinnati. The course, Innovation and Design Thinking, was the largest course ever taught at UC with over 2550 participants from 90 countries. I taught the SIT method along with my co-faculty, Jim Tappel who taught design thinking. It was fun experience.
I’ve become a teaching “author” at the online learning company, Lynda.com. I’ve produced a short course in facilitating creativity. Next month, I will be taping a full course called Business Innovation Fundamentals that teaches the SIT method.

My goal is to make this blog different from other innovation blogs and websites.  Instead of focusing on why innovation is important, I focus on how innovation happens.  The themes of this blog are:

  • Innovation can be learned like any other skill such as marketing, leadership, or playing the guitar.  To be an innovator, learn a method. Teach it to others.
  • Innovation must be linked to strategy.  Innovation for innovation’s sake doesn’t matter.  Innovation that is guided by strategy or helps guide strategy yields the most opportunity for corporate growth.
  • Innovation is a two-way phenomena. We can start with a problem and innovate solutions. Or we can generate hypothetical solutions and explore problems that they solve.  To be a great innovator, you need to be a two-way innovator.
  • The corporate perspective, where innovation is practiced day-to-day, is what must be understood and kept at the center of attention. This is where truth is separated from hype.

2014 will be a year of progress.  I plan to take this blog to the next level with a number of initiatives.  I plan to offer more resources for for teachers and professors who want to include the SIT method in their creativity courses.  I plan to highlight and recognize the practitioners who put SIT to work in their organizations.

I want to thank Jacob Goldenberg, Amnon Levav, Yoni Stern, and the entire team at SIT LLC. I thank Christie Nordhielm and Marta Dapena-Baron at Big Picture Partners, Bob Cialdini and the team at Influence at Work, Yury Boshyk at Global Executive Learning, the Washington Speakers Bureau, Jim Levine, Emilie D’Agostino, Shelley Bamburger, Deepak Mittal, the team at Innovation Excellence (Braden, Julie, Rowan), and my fellow faculty at the UC Lindner College of Business.

A special thanks to my family, especially my father who passed away earlier this year. He was a gentle gentleman, and I miss him.

Think Inside the Umbrella: The Five Techniques of S.I.T.

Published date: December 9, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Umbrellas have been around a very long time dating back to the time of the ancient Egyptians. Yet, little has changed to the basic concept…until recently. Here are five examples of innovative umbrellas that could have been invented with one of the techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking.

Partial sub1. Subtraction: The Subtraction Technique is defined as: the elimination of core components rather than an addition of new systems and functions. Here is an example of a partial subtraction. A part of the umbrella is transparent to allow the user to see where they are going.

  UC SIT W11 - a2. Multiplication: The Multiplication Technique is defined as: a multiplication of elements already existing in the product along with a required change. Here is an example where the cover has been multiplied and changed in its location – an umbrella for two.

Shacklie-umbrella-lock13. Task Unification: The Task Unification Technique is defined as: the assignment of new tasks to an existing resource (i.e. any element of the product or its vicinity within the manufacturer’s control). In this example, the handle has been given the additional job of providing theft protection. The handle acts like a hand cuff. It closes and locks around something to prevent the umbrella from being stolen.

4. Division: The Division Technique is defined as: dividing a product and/or its components functionally or physically and then rearranging them in space or time. Here is a clever innovation from designer, Hiroshi Kajimoto. He calls it the Unbrella. The stretchers that support the cover have been divided out and placed on top. The new location delivers a whole host of benefits as described here:

5. Attribute Dependency: The Attribute Dependency Technique is defined as: the creation/removal of symmetries or dependencies between existing product properties. Here is an example of the Senz umbrella that “breaks symmetry” by having a different shape to provide new benefits, as described here:

But my favorite umbrella innovation of all time comes from fourth grader named Sam. I taught Sam and his schoolmates the SIT method a few years ago. Sam followed my instructions to the letter. I had given him my bright red University of Cincinnati umbrella and asked him to apply the Multiplication Technique. Dutifully, he created an umbrella with two handles: one in the usual place, and one on top of the umbrella, at the tip . As the standard part of the SIT methodology, I asked Sam, “Now, who in the world would want an umbrella with a handle at the bottom and another handle at the top? Why would that be beneficial?”

He thought about it for a minute. Then he jutted his arm into the air, screaming wildly, “Ooh, Ooh, I know! I know exactly why you would want it!”

I held my breath.

Sam said, “If the wind blows your umbrella inside out, all you have to do is turn it around, grab the other handle, and start using it again!”

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification Saves Lives and Money

Published date: December 2, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Philips North America announced Fosmo Med, developer of the Maji Intravenous (IV) saline bag, as the grand prize winner of the first-ever Philips Innovation Fellows competition, revealing the technology as the next big, meaningful innovation in health and well-being. The new IV solution technology has the potential to save millions of lives worldwide from dehydration-related diseases, such as cholera.

Maji is a revolutionary field hydration system for IV use that is shipped without water. Once on site, forward osmosis technology converts local water — even if it’s not clean — to a sterile solution without requiring any electrical power. An estimated 16 Maji bags can be shipped for the same cost as one traditional IV saline bag, saving up to $500 for every 14 units shipped.

Maji is an example of the Task Unification Technique, one of five in the SIT innovation method. Task Unification works by assigning an additional task to an existing resource. In this example, the Maji bag has the additional job of filtering water.

“We’re very excited to be named the winner of the Philips Innovation Fellows Competition,” said Ben Park, chief executive officer and founder of Fosmo Med. “Maji will enable many more IV bags to be shipped for the same cost, stored safely and transported to remote sites. The potential life savings could be in the millions annually.”

“We are thrilled to name Fosmo Med as the grand prize winner and to support them as they work to take Maji to the market,” said Greg Sebasky, chairman of Philips North America. “As a company committed to meaningful innovation, it is gratifying to find a social enterprise that has the potential to revolutionize the medical device industry with a simple, forward-thinking solution.”

Philips practices what it preaches. It is featured in Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results for its use of the Subtraction Technique in creating the Slimline DVD player.

“Maji shows Fosmo Med’s commitment to providing affordable healthcare and well-being above all else,” added Sebasky.
Fosmo Med was selected from among hundreds of entries to the Innovation Fellows Competition. The company secured funding from the public through the crowd funding portion of the competition on Indiegogo, global web-based crowd funding site, and, once named a finalist, the Maji IV saline bag was named the “most meaningful” innovation by Philips employees. In addition to $60,000 in prize money, Fosmo Med will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Philips’ USA headquarters to meet with Philips leadership for mentor and whiteboard sessions to support development of the Maji IV.

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