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Innovation in Practice: Four Years Old!

Published date: December 12, 2011 в 3:00 am

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“oh this is going to be addictive”

That was tweet #38 from Twitter co-developer, Dom Sagolla on March 21, 2006, the date Twitter was officially launched as a web-based application.

Truer words were never spoken.  I started Innovation in Practice on December 2, 2007.  This month marks its four year anniversary.  The title of my first post was “Innovation is a Skill, Not a Gift.”

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 others.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

3rd gradeAt the beginning of 2011, I set a goal:  “Reach New Audiences.  I want to expose innovation methods to kids, seniors citizens,  people with disabilities…anyone who wants to make a difference with innovation.”  This year, I had the good fortune to teach innovation to third and fourth graders at the Wyoming School District in Ohio.  I was impressed with the many cool ideas they developed using S.I.T..  One of my favorites:  an umbrella with two handles, one at each end.  I asked third-grader, Sam, to tell me why it was useful.  He said, “Because if the wind blows your umbrella out, you can just turn it upside down and start using it!”

I also taught innovation to a group of special needs students at the Hughes High School in Cincinnati.  I had twenty five students, all with various issues such as autism and ADHD.  The result was the same.  One student used multiplication on a flashlight.  He made a copy of the on/off button.  I asked him to explain the benefit of having a second button.  He said, “The second button is used to change the brightness of the light.”  Not bad for a kid named Ryan with Down Syndrome.

For next year, I plan to continue blogging The LAB series.  This is my way of practicing with the method and exposing new uses to my readers.  In 2011, I used S.I.T. to innovate:  the pricing process, a light switch, new product launch, software, corporate training program, pharmaceuticals, a treadmill, cosmetics, Facebook, inflight services, and a book.

Speaking of book, that is another goal for next year: we plan to publish a book that teaches people how to use Systematic Inventive Thinking.  No firm date yet.

I want to thank Jacob Goldenberg, Amnon Levav, Yoni Stern, and the entire team at S.I.T..  Also, Christie Nordhielm and Marta Dapena-Baron at Big Picture Partners, Bob Cialdini at Influence at Work, Yury Boshyk at Global Executive Learning Network, the Washington Speakers Bureau, and my fellow faculty at the UC Lindner College of Business.

I thank all of you for reading this blog.  I wish you the best in 2012.

Drew

Marketing Innovation: Pants on Fire and the Metaphor Tool

Published date: December 5, 2011 в 3:00 am

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Insurance companies continue to battle it out as the industry emerges from the global financial crisis.  They are spending huge sums on national advertising to establish brand loyalty and earn trust.  But consumers have a hard time distinguishing between the many undifferentiated insurance products.  They tend to shop on price as a result.  So insurance advertisers have to walk a fine line acknowledging the importance of price while slipping in their value propositions around service and other features.

Here is an example from the long-running Progressive campaign featuring the lovable character, Flo.  It uses the metaphor tool.  The Metaphor is the most commonly used tool in marketing communications because it is a great way to attach meaning to a newly-launched product or brand. The Metaphor Tool takes a well-recognized and accepted cultural symbol and manipulates it to connect to the product, brand, or message.

The tool is one of eight patterns embedded in most innovative commercials.  Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues describe these simple, well-defined design structures in their book, “Cracking the Ad Code,” and provide a step-by-step approach to using them.  The tools are:

The Remaking of Netflix

Published date: November 28, 2011 в 3:00 am

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Netflix needs urgent change to stop the bleeding and rebuild its business model. It is running out of cash and losing support from customers and shareholders.  Management must re-establish its credibility with bold moves.  Here is a series of steps and techniques to do that.

1.  Reframing:  Use the Subtraction Tool to reframe and see new possibilities.  Make a list of the major components of the company (patents, products, brand, employees, customers, network, etc.).  Now imagine Netflix will merge with a company from another industry.  Create a phrase something like this: “Netflix cannot stream movies to customers, but it has all the other components.  What company has the ideal set of products that would best fit the remaining resources of Netflix?”   For example, would a company in the retail sector have products that would find new growth within the Netflix enterprise? Companies like Path Intelligence might be a good candidate.  Perhaps Netflix could merge with a brick and mortar movie theater company like AMC Entertainment and leverage the strengths of each.  Perhaps Netflix links up with Research in Motion to leverage its proprietary Blackberry network for streaming data.  Use this same approach for all the components, one at a time, to envision new possibilities.

2.  Reverse Assumption:  This technique helps “break fixedness” about assumptions.  List the key business assumptions about Netflix and its industry.  For example:

  • Netflix streams content to customers
  • Consumers want more options
  • Netflix sends DVDs to customers

Reverse the assumptions one by one.  “Customers stream content to Netflix.”  Perhaps the new business model is to offer a service allowing customers to stream information to Netflix which is then re-streamed to others.  Perhaps Netflix uses its streaming skills to enter the business-to-business market, servicing banks or other companies that need to move digital content in a unique way.  Perhaps customers send DVDs to other customers instead of sending it back to Netflix, saving time and money.

The Voice of the Brand

Published date: November 21, 2011 в 3:00 am

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Most people are surprised to hear that five simple patterns explain the majority of innovative products and services.  Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered this surprising insight.  It is similar to the notion of TRIZ which is a set of patterns for solving problems.  Innovative products share common patterns because their inventors unknowingly followed them when generating new product ideas.  These patterns become the DNA of products.  You can extract the DNA and implant it into other products and services to create new innovations.  We call it The Voice of the Product.

Are there more than five patterns?  Most certainly.  Highly creative people like musicians and artists use templates in their creations.  Even products invented serendipitously have a pattern embedded in them.  Many products are invented accidentally.  Serendipity led to the microwave oven, corn flakes, Teflon®, penicillin, fireworks, Viagra®, chocolate chip cookies, and the most famous of all accidents…the Post-it® note.  The problem with serendipity is it’s not predictable.  It is not an innovation method one would count on for corporate growth.  But there is value in serendipity if you can unlock its hidden secrets.  Every serendipitous invention can be reduced to a heuristic and ultimately to an algorithm or pattern.  We call it The Voice of Serendipity.

What other voices are out there?  Take brands, for example.  A well-developed brand has a unique personality, sort of a code of attributes.  That code is a pattern that could be reapplied to products and services to help discover new benefits and opportunities.  Like the other voices, The Voice of the Brand can be leveraged for innovative thinking.

Consider the following brand attribute model:

The LAB: Innovating the Pricing Process (November 2011)

Published date: November 14, 2011 в 3:00 am

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Setting prices on new products and services is one of the most challenging roles in marketing. Pricing mistakes are costly, yet it’s one of the most tempting tools to use when trying to generate revenues.  Fortunately, methods like Value Based Pricing and frameworks like The Big Picture make the job easier.

What if you wanted to explore more innovative ways to set prices?  Applying the SIT innovation patterns would create new insights and options. The SIT patterns help break fixedness – the tendency to limit the way we see things to what we know.  These patterns are innate to all of us.  We just need to “extract” them from within and deploy them in a systematic way.

For this month’s LAB, we will apply SIT to pricing.  While there are many methods and schools of thought around pricing, the SIT templates should apply to any of them. I would do the following.

The Path of Most Resistance

Published date: November 7, 2011 в 3:00 am

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The best innovations arise by following the path of most resistance, not least resistance.  As Amnon Levav at SIT writes, “In nature, water cascading down a mountain follows the path of least resistance – the easiest route to arrive at its final destination.  In thinking, too, our minds tend to take the path of least resistance – those avenues that are familiar to us.  So doing, it is difficult to arrive at ideas that are new to us or to our competitors.”

Two principles of consumer behavior* account for this.  The Principle of Cognitive Efficiency says that individuals are unlikely to expend any more cognitive effort than necessary to attain the objective they are pursuing. Thus, they use the procedure or judgmental criterion that is easiest to apply.   The Principle of Knowledge Accessibility says that individuals typically use only a small subset of the relevant knowledge they have acquired as a basis for comprehending information, generally the knowledge that comes to mind most quickly and easily.

In other words, people stick to what they know and what’s easiest to process.  The good news is that people can be trained to recognize this phenomena and shift over to the path of most resistance – where the most exciting ideas are waiting to be imagined.

How do you recognize it?  Look for laughter.  When something is funny, it means two previously unrelated themes suddenly collided to create an absurdity.  For innovation practitioners, laughter during workshops is both a blessing and a curse.  It is a blessing because it signals a moment when participants have encountered a truly odd and unfamiliar configuration.  That means innovation is “right around the corner.”  But laughter derails innovation if not handled properly.   Here is a case in point.

The LAB: Innovating the Light Switch (October 2011)

Published date: October 31, 2011 в 3:00 am

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How do you know which SIT tool to use on your product?  That is one of the most common questions from my students and workshop participants.  One way to decide is to analyze the current products in the category.  You look for SIT patterns that tend to dominate how the product emerged and evolved over the years.  I look at recent innovations in the category to spot trends.  I also try to identify where the industry might have some “fixedness” about the products and how they are used.  The type of fixedness (functional, structural, or relational) can lend insight about which SIT tool to start with.

Take light switches, for example.  The first light switch was invented in 1884.  The dominant design since then continues to be the “up” or “down” toggle switch. In North America, the “up” position switches the appliance to “on,” whereas in other countries such as the UK, the reverse is true.  In Japan, switches are positioned sideways to prevent the switch from inadvertently being turned on or off by falling objects during an earthquake.

Hooks-keys-410x264Many innovations have emerged over the years including dimmer switches, rockers, multi-way, and touch pad. Recent innovations reveal the use of several SIT patterns including Task Unification and Division.  Yet the most dominant theme in control switching seems to be “variability.”  The dimmer switch and the motion sensor switch are the most obvious examples.  If you wanted to create more innovations along this theme, Attribute Dependency is the tool to use.

To use Attribute Dependency, make two lists.  The first is a list of internal attributes.  The second is a list of external attributes – those factors that are not under your control, but that vary in the context of how the product is used.  Then create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis.  The matrix creates combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate.  We take these virtual combinations and vidualize them in two ways.  If no dependency exists between the attributes, we create one.  If a dependency exists, we break it.  Using Function Follows Form, we envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.

For example:

Coin switchInternal Attributes:

  1. Type
  2. Number of switches
  3. Size
  4. What is controls
  5. Color
  6. Voltage
  7. State (on/off)

External Attributes:

  1. User
  2. Location
  3. Time
  4. Price
  5. Temperature
  6. Other appliances
  7. Room factors

Imagine creating a dependency between Internal Attribute 4 (what the switch controls) and External Attribute 3 (Time).  The Virtual Product becomes a switch that controls different lights depending on the time of day (or time of year).  For example, from midnight to noon, the switch controls a set of lights, but from noon to midnight, the switch changes and controls a different set of lights.  Why would that be useful?  Perhaps in situations where the person using the switch has no way of knowing what lights will come on, the switch determines it for them based on time of day.  This idea breaks the functional fixedness around one switch controlling one appliance.

Academic Focus: John Hauser and the MIT Team

Published date: October 24, 2011 в 3:00 am

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This month’s Academic Focus features Professor John Hauser and the highly-regarded team at MIT.  Perhaps no other university in the world stands for innovation as much as this one.  MIT is an innovation powerhouse because of the way the faculty looks at innovation through multiple lens and collaborative approaches.  MIT is a great blend of innovation research, technology research, and commercialization research.

From his online biography:

Are You More Innovative Than You Think?

Published date: October 17, 2011 в 3:00 am

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You may be surprised to find many of your products and services conform to the five innovation patterns of Systematic Inventive Thinking.  If so, it means your employees are predisposed to use innovation patterns when developing new  products.  Like many innovators, they are using patterns probably without realizing it. Given this predisposition to using innovation templates, a company can realize huge gains in innovation effectiveness by taking the next step.

Take the case of a large industrial company in the energy sector.  It leads the industry producing a product that is relatively simple in design but incredibly challenging to produce.  Despite its strong reputation and market success, the company worries it is not innovative.  Yet when I reviewed its project pipeline, I spotted concepts with each of the five patterns of S.I.T. (Subtraction, Task Unification, Multiplication, Attribute Dependency, and Division).  The teams did not use S.I.T. in the classic way (apply templates and work backwards using “Function Follows Form” to find a potential benefit).  Instead, they used trial and error, experimentation, and good old fashioned tinkering.  Their innovations embody the templates nevertheless.

These teams are more innovative than they think.  They are one short step away from applying S.I.T..  They already have these patterns inside them, so now it’s just a matter of extracting them and putting them to use in a more disciplined way.  Using S.I.T. on their products and processes will force new combinations and concepts that they would not have thought of otherwise.  The method will “bootstrap” their innovation performance to a new high level.

If your company is predisposed to innovation, take these steps to ramp up performance:

Social Enterprise Innovation

Congratulations to the Columbia Business School for hosting the 2011 Social Enterprise Conference.  Six hundred enlightened attendees witnessed a unique lineup of keynote speakers and breakout sessions. Social enterprises are challenged to create new business models to capture social, economic and environmental value.  The conference focused on supporting innovation, promoting sustainability, advancing technology, and building communities.

Key takeaways from my breakout session, “Designing a Better Social Enterprise,” (download slides here):

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