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Bloomberg Business Week: Inside the Box

Published date: August 19, 2013 в 8:56 am

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Most people think innovation starts with a well-defined problem, and then you brainstorm a solution. Try the opposite: Work backwards by taking an abstract, conceptual solution and finding a problem it can solve. By constraining and channeling our brains, we can make them work both harder and smarter to find creative solutions—on demand.
Start by taking a product, concept, situation, service, or process and break it into components or attributes. Using one of the five techniques below, manipulate the components or attributes to create new concepts.
Subtraction: Remove a component, preferably an essential one. Royal Phillips Electronics (PHG) created the Slimline DVD player by removing the LCD panel and controls and placing them on the screen of the attached TV, allowing the unit to be shrunk dramatically.
Division: Divide a component or the product itself physically or functionally, then rearrange it. Google (GOOG) Circles was devised as a way to divide your friends into relevant groups, such as college friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers.
Task Unification: Assign a component an additional job, perhaps stealing the job of something around it. Samsonite made a college backpack with straps that also massage. The straps press into the wearer’s shoulders at strategically located shiatsu points to provide a soothing massage sensation. The heavier the books, the deeper the sensation and the more stress relief for the wearer.
Multiplication: Make a copy of a component, then change it in a significant way from the original. Procter & Gamble (PG) came up with the NOTICEable Air Fresher by doubling its spray capacity. The air freshner has two different scented sprays that pulse in a sequence, so your nose does not get used to one fragrance.
Attribute Dependency: Create a correlation (or break an existing one) between two attributes of the system and/or its environment. Apple (AAPL) has patented “smart shoes” that have embedded sensors to track your activity and tell you when you need a new pair. As the shoes wear down, an app will send a signal to buy new ones.
Creativity is not a gift that you either have or don’t have from birth. It is a skill that can be learned and mastered by anyone. In that way, creativity is not that different from other skills: The more you practice, the better you’ll be.
 
This article first appeared in Bloomberg Business Week blog August 12, 2013
 

Embrace the Shake: The Power of Limitations

Published date: July 29, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Phil Hansen suffered a career-threatening injury to his hand. Nerve damage caused his hand to shake uncontrollably. Most professions could deal with it. But as an artist, where a steady hand seems essential, it all but doomed Phil's career. 

That was until a neurologist suggested he “embrace the shake.” That piece of advice "tweaked Hansen’s point of view and sent him on a quest to invent different approaches to making art by embracing personal and universal limitations."

Watch his story on TED. I watched it and found three principles and four techniques of the innovation method, Systematic Inventive Thinking. Absolutely brilliant.

How many can you find?

Hansen has just started a new project via Kickstarter, inviting people to share their stories of overcoming limitations with him. Anyone who calls him at 651-321-4996 and tells him their story will become a part of the work, the creation of which is watchable on a live feed.

Strategy+Business: Thinking Inside the Box

Books about business innovation seem to arrive as quickly as ideas on a whiteboard in a brainstorming session. But Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results  (Simon & Schuster, 2013), by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg, jumps out for its counterintuitive take on creativity.

In the book, Boyd, assistant professor of marketing and innovation at the University of Cincinnati and former director of Johnson & Johnson’s Marketing Mastery program, and Goldenberg, professor of marketing at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Business Administration, assert that thinking inside the box enhances idea generation. Thus, they argue, innovation initiatives should be limited to resources close at hand, and function should follow form—that is, we should start with a solution and then consider the problem it addresses, rather than vice versa. When I asked the authors why thinking inside the box is a more productive, reliable way to pursue business innovation than thinking outside the box, here’s what they said:

“Thinking outside the box is a complete myth. It is based on flawed research from the 1970s. Subsequent research shows that simply telling people to think outside the box does not improve their creative output. It sends people on cognitive wild goose chases.
“Thinking inside the box constrains the brain’s options and regulates how it produces ideas. By constraining and channeling our brains, we make them work both harder and smarter to find creative solutions. Contrary to what most people believe, the best ideas are usually nearby. Thinking inside the box helps you find these novel and surprising innovations.
“Innovation usually results from a set of five simple patterns:
• Subtraction: removing a component that was previously thought essential to a product or service, such as the elimination of the record function in the Sony Walkman
• Task unification: combining tasks within a product or service, such as warmth and deodorizing in Odor-Eaters socks
• Multiplication: copying an existing component, such as “picture-in-picture” TVs
• Division: separating a component from the product, such as the remote control
• Attribute dependency: making two previously independent attributes dependent in a meaningful way, such as a baby bottle that changes color when the liquid inside reaches the proper temperature
“For thousands of years, people embedded these patterns in their inventions, usually without realizing it. In our method, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), the patterns have been structured into techniques that enable creativity on demand. SIT takes a product or service and breaks it down into components. Then, you use one or more of the techniques to manipulate the components and generate new-to-the-world ideas. This allows you to tap into the very rich world inside the box.”

This article by Theodore Kinni first appeared in Strategy+Business, July 7, 2013.

Inside the Box: “Oh, This Is Going to Be Addictive”

Published date: July 15, 2013 в 11:39 am

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When you use Subtraction, you don’t always have to eliminate the
component. There is also what we call “Partial Subtraction.” It is a valid
technique as long as the product or service that remains delivers a new
benefit. To deploy Partial Subtraction, you pick a component and then
eliminate a specific feature of that component. Consider the case of
Twitter, a microblogging application used by hundreds of millions of
people worldwide. By simply restricting each tweet to 140 characters,
Twitter has become a vast digital conversation about what individuals
around the globe are thinking and doing. A Partial Subtraction of
the traditional blog down to 140 characters dramatically increased the
volume of and participation in this Internet phenomenon. How did it
happen?

Twitter founders Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, and others knew that the
concept was right and that they had a potential hit on their hands. Their
intent was to create a service that allowed people to send text messages
to many friends at one time. Originally, Twitter was supposed to be only
a way for people to easily update their friends on their current status.

But when attempting to build a service with text messaging as
its foundation, the Twitter team ran into challenges. First, texts were
expensive. On top of that, phone companies imposed a limit on the
size of text messages. Any text message of more than 160 characters is
automatically split into two messages. So the first thing that the Twitter
founders did was to place a limit on the number of characters in a
short message service (SMS) text (now called a “tweet”). They Partially
Subtracted text messages by reducing the size to 140. That left room for the sender’s user name and the colon in front of the message. In February 2007, Dorsey wrote, “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

He was right. Today more than 100 million users subscribe to Twitter. The Twitter website gets more than 400 million unique visitors each month. It has become the global “listening post” when real-time events such as the March 2011 Japanese tsunami and the Egyptian revolution two months earlier are happening. Glass said in an interview, “You know what’s awesome about this thing? It makes you feel like you’re right with that person. It’s a whole emotional impact. You feel like you’re connected.”

Partial Subtraction can create just as much value as the full Subtraction Technique. Partial Subtractions have another advantage. Sometimes you can convince skeptics to do a Partial Subtraction rather than stripping out a component completely to get them on board.

The Marker on the Board (Jacob’s Story)

Published date: July 4, 2013 в 2:17 pm

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The moment I walked into the classroom, I could see that something was different. The students were  excited, I could feel the anticipation in the air—and something about their faces made me think that they were planning something mischievous.
I understood their amusement as soon as I tried to erase the whiteboard, which was still covered with diagrams and equations from my previous class. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t erase the remnants of the previous lecture. Someone had apparently switched my markers last time, and I had unknowingly used an indelible marker.
Students were now leaning back in their chairs, openly smiling. As plainly as if spoken out loud, they were waiting for me to prove that my systematic creativity method really worked. If I had to describe the feeling in the classroom, I would have guessed it to be: “The professor isgoing down in flames!”
I decided to accept the challenge. “All right, class,” I said with determination. “The worst thing that can happen is that there is no creative solution to this situation. But if there is one, we should be able to find it with what we have learned in the previous classes.”
First, I asked them to define a good traditional but noncreative solution to the problem.
“Getting some liquid from the janitor to dissolve the indelible marker?” suggested one student. “Right,” I replied, beginning to feel more confident. Perhaps my students were with me now. “Remember the Closed World concept: let’s confine our searches for a creative solution to resources that are inside this classroom. If we find something, it should be more original, even if not necessarily more useful or efficient than going to the janitor.”
“Why would we go for a solution that was less useful than one we could easily find outside this room?” one student wanted to know.
“In this class, we are looking only for creative solutions,” I said. “Let’s leave the noncreative ones outside the Closed World—in this case, literally outside this room.”
Students started rummaging through their bags, pulling out nail polish remover, perfume bottles, and other alcohol-based liquid (including a can of cold beer). None of them would work as is, but everyone was amazed at what their classmates had brought into the room.
“You see?” I smiled. “There are more resources than you imagine if you search inside, rather than expanding your search outside. For some reason, a search inside yields ideas that we all tend to overlook.” (But what was he thinking bringing beer to my class?)
With growing confidence, I continued, “Now let’s see what else we can find if we look even closer to the Closed World of the problem. Let’s confine the space we are searching even more and include only the things that are at the very core of the problem: the whiteboardwriting world.”
Silence, of the blessed kind. The students were actually thinking.
“We could use an erasable marker to erase the indelible one,” whispered one student. “The erasable marker should have enough solvent to dissolve the markings on the board.” I tested the suggestion by using a regular marker to write over one of the lines on the board. When I then used an eraser to erase the line, it worked. Almost no sign of the indelible mark underneath remained. After the initial shock, the class became wildly enthusiastic. I tried to ignore the noise and began erasing the board.
But writing over every stroke of every letter and number from the last class was a long, slow process. I was beginning to wonder if I should attempt to complete the task, or assume that I had made my point and begin teaching. Just then, another student shouted out, “Hey! What if we can erase the board using the indelible marker itself?”
When I tried this, I found that the indelible marker—the very source of the problem—contained enough solvent to dissolve the marks on the whiteboard. After some trials, the students saw that the indelible marker was just as effective as a regular whiteboard marker. If they wrote over the marks on the board and erased them immediately before the liquid solvent evaporated, the old marks were erased by the solvent in the new marks drawn on top of them. The source of the problem became the solution.
Note that this is not a better solution than the previous one—it’s just as slow—but it is more original, more surprising, and more inside the Closed World. I turned back to the class, gratified but surprised that the exercise had gone so well. Keep in mind that this incident took place years ago, before we’d accumulated empirical evidence (evidence from observation or experimentation) about the richness of the Closed World.
“Okay, people, point made! The Closed World is not endless, but the resources inside it exceed our initial perceptions, and we should make it a habit to look inside, especially if our only options are contained
there.”
I triumphantly made my victory speech. “Sometimes traditional solutions do not fit, sometimes they do not exist. What if the janitor’s office were closed? Looking inside, to resources we usually overlook, might be challenging cognitively but effective when a creative solution is required.” With a sigh of relief, I added, “Now, could someone please go to the janitor and bring me something to clean the board?”
 
From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (Simon & Schuster)

Inside the Box Makes Front Page of The Wall Street Journal

Published date: June 17, 2013 в 3:00 am

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The Wall Street Journal featured our new book, Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (Simon & Schuster), on the front page of the weekend edition. Jacob and I contributed the feature article which is adapted from the book. Here are some excerpts.

When most CEOs hear the word “innovation,” they roll their eyes. It conjures up images of employees wasting hours, even days, sitting in beanbag chairs, tossing Frisbees and regurgitating ideas they had already considered. “Brainstorming” has become a byword for tedium and frustration.
Over the past decade, we have asked senior executives, on every continent and in every major industry, two key questions about innovation. The first: “On a scale of one to 10, how important is innovation to the success of your firm?” The second: “On a scale of one to 10, how satisfied are you with the level of innovation in your firm?”
Not surprisingly, they rate the importance of innovation very high: usually a nine or 10. None disputes that innovation is the No. 1 source of growth. Without fail, however, most senior executives give a low rating—below five—to their level of satisfaction with innovation.
How could business leaders rate innovation as so important yet feel so dissatisfied with their own organization’s performance? Because what they really want to know is how: How do you actually generate novel ideas and do so consistently, on demand.

Here is the premise of Inside the Box:

We
advocate a radically different approach: thinking inside the proverbial
box, not outside of it. People are at their most creative when they
focus on the internal aspects of a situation or problem—and when they
constrain their options rather than broaden them. By defining and then
closing the boundaries of a particular creative challenge, most of us
can be more consistently creative—and certainly more productive than we
are when playing word-association games in front of flip charts or
talking about grand abstractions at a company retreat.

Inventions can be extraordinary, but invention isn’t an extraordinary event or an activity for a specialized group. Nor is creativity reserved for the gifted and talented. It’s a skill that can be learned and mastered by anyone, if approached properly. Like so much else in life, the more it’s practiced, the more skillful at it we become.

For those of you who have ordered the book, we thank you. And thanks to the many emails, tweets, and comments of support during our first week.
Be sure to check out the rest of our website that has lots of resources and cool things about the book as well as our Facebook Page for regular updates about the project and the authors.
 
 

We Dedicate This Book…

Published date: June 11, 2013 в 3:19 pm

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“We dedicate this book

to all past and future

generations of innovators

making the world

a better place.”

 

Today, we released Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results.”  The premise of the book is that creativity can be systematic and predictable.
We dedicated the book to past generations of innovators for a simple reason. For thousands of years, inventors have embedded five simple patterns into their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are the “DNA” of products that can be extracted and applied to any product or service to create new-to-the-world innovations. These patterns form the basis of a method called Systematic Inventive Thinking, and we describe the method and how to use it in this book.

Our hope is that future generations can use this method to find new and creative ways to improve the world we live in.

We hope you’ll take the time to read it, and we encourage you to reach out to us if you have questions and ideas about it.

Drew and Jacob
 
 
 

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