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The LAB: Innovating a Corporate Training Program (July 2011)

Published date: July 25, 2011 в 3:00 am

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Corporate training is a $60 billion dollar industry and growing as the economy recovers.  As with any industry, significant changes are occurring.  Companies spend less on fixed internal resources and are outsourcing more.  Learners are changing in the way they learn, perhaps due to the generational shift.  And of course, technology has made the social side of learning more available and effective. Training executives, those who manage company training resources and programs, must continue to innovate to address these changes to stay relevant.

For this month’s LAB, we will apply the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to a training program.  Our goal is to find new-to-the-world concepts that improve a company’s training efforts.  The method works by applying one of five innovation patterns to components within the training environment.  The pattern has the effect of morphing the component into something that seems unrecognizable or ambiguous.  We take that “virtual product” and work backwards to uncover potential benefits or markets served, a process called “Function Follows Form.”

Begin by listing the major components of a corporate training program:

  1. Trainees
  2. Faculty
  3. Classrooms
  4. Curriculum
  5. Lesson Plans
  6. Technology
  7. Customers (of the firm)
  8. Products (services) of the firm
  9. Learning management system (keeps track of courses, enrollments, etc)

Here are five ideas, each using one of the five S.I.T. innovation patterns:

Innovation Sighting: The Great Sunflower Project

Published date: July 18, 2011 в 3:00 am

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On average, one of every three bites of food you put in your mouth depends on “animal pollination” – the movement of insects, particularly bees, between plants.  They play a crucial role in flowering plant reproduction and in the production of most fruits and vegetables. About 80% of all flowering plants and over three-quarters of the staple crop plants that feed humankind rely on animal pollinators like bees.

But bees are in trouble.  Scientific studies have suggested that both honey bee and native bee populations are declining. Scientists fear this will harm pollination of garden plants, crops and wild plants.  If they could collect simple data about their presence at certain times in certain locations, they can devise ways to conserve and improve the bee population.

How do you track something as small as bees on such a large scale?  By assigning the data collection task to an external resource – everyday gardeners.

Started in 2008, The Great Sunflower Project enlists 100,000 participants to count bees for 15 minutes and submit data online. It all happens on the same day, July 16th.  Researchers use the data to map areas that bees are doing well and where they need help.  San Francisco State University Professor Gretchen LeBuhn is founder and director of The Great Sunflower Project.

This is an example of the Task Unification technique, one of five techniques in the S.I.T. innovation method.  Task Unification works by assigning an additional task to an existing resource.  There are three versions of it (The Great Sunflower Project is version 3).

  1. Choose and internal component and make it do something extra, either a specific or non-specific internal task.
  2. Choose an internal component and make it do the function of an external component (it “steals” the external component’s function)
  3. Choose an external component and use it to perform a task within the product or service.

“Simply by taking that 15-minute step, you’ve made a contribution to saving bees,” she said. “It’s remarkable having all these different people willing to participate, willing to help and interested in making the world a better place.”

 

Innovation Sighting: Attribute Dependency in an Exercise Bike

Published date: July 11, 2011 в 3:00 am

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Pro-Form’s Le Tour de France Indoor Cycle lets users choose or create real-world routes, then adjusts the angle of the riding platform to replicate the experience of riding up and down those roads. This new product has three different features using the Attribute Dependency Tool of the corporate innovation method, SIT.

  • iFit Live:  With the iFit Live™ Technology Powered by Google Maps™ you can ride anywhere in the world! Choose from 24 pre-mapped courses or create your own. Ride over the Passage du Gois or climb the hills of Mont des Alouettes in France. Now you can experience these same trails and more on this Indoor Cycle. With iFit Live™ Technology you can ride where the Pro’s do. The world is at your fingertips. Map any route and enjoy the ride!
  • Incline/Decline:  Introducing incline and decline that matches the street! Now, you can experience any route around the world and Le Tour de France Indoor Cycle automatically adjusts the incline and decline to simulate the terrain! No matter the route, no matter the map, your bike moves to follow the road. So, you get a realistic workout-just as if you were outside-but without the traffic, potholes and weather. Now you can have the perfect day on your road bike every day of the year with Le Tour de France Indoor Cycle.
  • Intelligent Wind Resistance:  Any indoor bike can give you resistance-but only Le Tour de France Indoor Cycle can give you Intelligent Wind Resistance. Intelligent Wind Resistance automatically adjusts the resistance of your bike based on your wind profile. Our smart technology calculates your height and weight to apply the natural resistance you would get out on the road. A climb in your basement is exactly like a climb outside.

Wind Attribute Dependency differs from the other templates in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components.  Start with an attribute list, then construct a 2 x 2 matrix of these, pairing each against the others.  Each cell represents a potential dependency (or potential break in an existing dependency) that forms a Virtual Product.  Using Function Follows Form, we work backwards and envision a potential benefit or problem that this hypothetical solution solves.  The Tour de France Indoor Cycle creates dependencies between rider preference, bicycle route, road elevation, and wind profile.

What caught my eye is the similarity of these ideas with those of my graduate students in my “Innovation Tools” course.  Using Systematic Inventive Thinking, they have to take a product category and apply the method to create completely new-to-the-world innovations.  For example, a group in my last class tackled the exercise equipment category with a focus on treadmills (see The LAB May 2011).

Compare these student’s ideas for treadmills with Pro-Form’s Le Tour de France Indoor Cycle.  Well done!

Innovation Gone Wild

Published date: July 4, 2011 в 3:00 am

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AOL succumbed to the myth that creating an eclectic workspace makes employees suddenly more innovative.  The headline from USA Today reads: “It’s engineers gone wild at AOL: Quirky office space inspires app innovation.” 

Quirky?

“The space you work in is a reflection of the kind of company you are,” says Brad Garlinghouse, AOL’s president of the Application and Commerce Group.  “You get innovation,” he insists, from “working in a space that’s very open and doesn’t have offices…where people can work together and play together.”  Further, the company believes letting workers draw on the walls helps creativity.

AOL is in more trouble than I thought.  Simply putting people in a different workspace is not going to make them more creative.  A room full of beanbag chairs, Frisbees, and white boards does not change the cognitive pattern of how people generate ideas.  It may indeed hamper innovation.  For example, employees treat other’s ideas differently depending on where the ideas come from.  An idea from a peer rival is seen as “tainted,” whereas the exact same idea coming from an outside source is seen as “tempting.”  In essence, employees subvert great ideas from peers so peers do not get ahead.  Lumping people together in quirky innovation rooms triggers that phenomena as it signals the battle-of-the-brains has begun.

True, office design can indeed have a positive overall effect on employees’ work.  For example, a well-designed office can improve productivity, communication, and morale.  These are certainly beneficial for creativity.  But these are beneficial for every business process.  It is innovation, though, not productivity or otherwise, that is singled out and associated with quirky rooms.  This misguided hype gives innovation a bad name.

Instead of spending millions on 225,000 square feet of “innovation rooms,” AOL should invest in building something much more important: skills and competencies in the use of innovation tools and techniques.  With the right innovation training and practice, employees can innovate anywhere in any space.

The writing is on the wall for AOL.  Quarterly earnings were a mere $4.7 million versus $34.7 million a year ago.  It’ll take a lot more than quirky office space to cover that shortfall.

The LAB: Innovating Pharmaceuticals with S.I.T. (June 2011)

Published date: June 27, 2011 в 2:00 am

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 PharmaBrand Summit 2011 kicks off in Montreux, Switzerland this week.  It will bring together senior executives and brand marketers from Europe’s largest pharmaceutical organizations.  This year’s theme is: “The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” 

That is certainly an appropriate theme for many industries including pharmaceuticals.  These companies are in transition as many aspects of their business models are changing.  Of particular concern is the shrinking product pipeline.  The days of the billion-dollar blockbuster drugs seem to be gone.  So how will they create a new pipeline beyond traditional approaches and research methods?

Yoni Stern and Amnon Levav of S.I.T.  describe a unique approach using their innovation method to create new pharmaceuticals1.  The method is based on five patterns inherent in the majority of innovative products and services.  These patterns are like the DNA of products that can be extracted and applied systematically to create new products, including pharmaceuticals.  For this month’s LAB, here are two examples of their approach.

1.  Task Unification:  This technique takes one of the product’s components (or some object in the product’s immediate vicinity) and gives it an additional task without losing its original one.  Imagine you wanted to improve breast cancer testing.  One of the components in the vicinity of the problem is fatty acids.  Tumor cells accumulate fatty acids much more than noncancerous cells do.  To take advantage of this, a new drug product is conceived by chemically linking paclitaxel, a widely used anticancer agent, to DHA, a natural fatty acid present in breast milk.  The fatty acid is given the additional “job” of delivering the cancer fighting agent.  This approach delivers a more therapeutic concentration in tumor cells for longer periods of time than would be possible without the fatty acid. As often happens when using the task unification pattern, the same factor that was formerly assisting the cancer to proliferate is now contributing to its destruction.

2.  Division:  The Division technique works by dividing a product in one of three ways: physical, functional, or preserving (where each part preserves the characteristics of the whole).  Rochester, N.Y.-based Vaccinex developed a technology based on this technique.  They separated immunoglobulin heavy-chain genes from light-chain genes during the drug discovery process.  As the recombinant vector particles replicate, the chains are assembled into membrane antibody receptors. The antigen is then added to the culture and binds to the matching antibody receptors of a particular cell. The cell is selected, and the recombinant vector is extracted. This division approach of separating heavy chains from light chains allows researchers to rearrange them to produce new combinations.

Drug discovery How do you begin using the SIT method in a clinical environment?  Start by listing the components of a current drug or diagnostic used in a disease of interest.  Also list the surrounding clinical structures and components in the vicinity.  For example, a company that develops products to treat dermatological diseases such as acne might begin with a list of the current product’s ingredients: benzoyl peroxide, alcohol, glycerin, etc., as well its immediate environment (e.g., the acne): sebum, Propionibacterium acnes, porphyrins, hair, and skin.  Next, apply one of the SIT thinking tool such Task Unification and look for non-obvious combinations of tasks and components to create hypothetical drug “solutions.”  Work backwards from these solutions to identify any real or potential benefits that it might deliver in the clinical care or drug discovery process.

1Stern, Yoni, and Amnon Levav. “The DNA of Ideas”. BIO-IT WORLD April 2005: 56-57.

Marketing Innovation: Red Tape and The Inversion Tool

Published date: June 20, 2011 в 3:00 am

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"Red tape" is defined as the collection or sequence of forms and procedures required to gain bureaucratic approval for something, especially when oppressively complex and time-consuming.  That's how Southwest Airlines describes other airlines' frequent flyer programs versus its new Rapid Rewards program which has none of the traditional limitations like blackouts and point expiration.  In a series of highly innovative commercials, Southwest demonstrates not one but two of the eight advertising tools described by Professor Jacob Goldenberg in "Cracking the Ad Code."  These ads are flawlessly executed, funny, and memorable. 

Take a look:

The first pattern is the Inversion Tool.  It conveys what would happen if you didn’t have the product…in an extreme way.  It shows the benefits “lost”  by not using the product.  It is best used when the brand and its central benefits are well understood by the viewer. It is particularly useful when you want to emphasize a secondary benefit as Southwest has done by emphasizing their less restrictive loyalty program.  To use the Inversion Tool, start with the components of the brand promise.  Take each one away one at a time and envision in what ways the consumer would be affected…in an extreme way…if it did not have this aspect of the promise.

As Goldeberg notes, an important tactic of Inversion is to show unlimited generosity, understanding, and empathy for the poor consumer who does not use your product.  The idea is to convey your product as having great understanding for your dilemma and generously suggesting assistance.  The Southwest commercials do this perfectly by showing their employees rescuing travelers from being all wrapped (literally) in the competitor's red tape.

The second pattern is the Metaphor Tool.  It takes a well-recognized and accepted cultural symbol and manipulates it to connect to the product, brand, or message.  The trick is to do it in a clever way.  The process is called fusion, and there are three versions:  Metaphor fused to Product/Brand, Metaphor fused to Message, and Metaphor fused to both the Product/Brand and Message.  In this example, the huge red tape ball represents the bureaucracy of other airlines' frequent flyer programs.  The commercial fuses the red tape metaphor against the competition's weak spot. 

Brilliant!

Innovation Resolution

Published date: June 13, 2011 в 3:00 am

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“The level of abstraction determines a group’s ability to move between strategies and tactics.  Too high, and the group becomes lost in the detail; too low, and the group is unable to effectively navigate.”

Stuart Morgan
Director of Industrial Design
Johnson & Johnson

My friend and former J&J colleague, Stuart Morgan, is one of those rare people who can flex between the highest level of abstraction and the smallest details of any particular problem.  He is a whiz, and it is hard to keep up with him.  For innovators and innovation managers, this is a skill worth developing and adding to your company’s innovation competency model.  Here’s why.

To be most successful at applying an innovation method, a team needs to determine the right level of granularity over the problem.  Selecting different levels of innovation resolution will yield completely different innovative opportunities.  Changing the resolution could yield interesting new adjacent market spaces.  The level you target will also affect how you use an innovation method like S.I.T..

Here is an example.  Suppose you designed and manufactured commercial aircraft.  The natural starting point would be to innovate an airplane.  At this level of resolution, our initial component list might be:

  1. cockpit
  2. fuselage
  3. wings
  4. fuel tanks
  5. rudder
  6. elevator
  7. landing gear
  8. etc…

Academic Focus: Drexel University’s MS in Creativity and Innovation

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

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Drexel University has launched a new Master of Science in Creativity and Innovation.  The 45 credit graduate program provides a strong foundation in creativity and innovation. There degree requires 33 credits of core courses and 12 credits of electives. From their website:

The Online Master’s in Creativity and Innovation is designed to develop student’s abilities to recognize problematic situations within various settings (e.g., corporate, educational, military, etc.), and generate a sufficient number of plausible, creative and innovative solutions to address them. Students will acquire the skills to conduct a methodical analysis of these creative solutions and devise and implement the best possible solution to problematic situations.
Upon successful completion of the Master’s in Creativity and Innovation program, students will:

  • Identify their own creative strengths and areas they wish to strengthen.
  • Generate a sufficient number of plausible and creative solutions to identified problems.
  • Select and implement the best possible solution to a given problematic situation, following methodical analysis of a menu of creative solutions.
  • Provide a translation of the latest research in creativity and innovation to academic and corporate settings.
  • Participate in research where emerging creativity scholars come together on site or virtually for sharing of ideas, for collaborating, and for seeking and receiving help in literature review, methodology, and grant writing.
  • Enable their worksite to develop in-house expertise to foster creative environments and identify creative problem solvers within their workforce.

What is most impressive about this program is the diversity of courses around the core theme of creativity and innovation.  Topics range from the essentials such as innovation skills to more advanced areas of creativity research and leadership.  My favorite course, if I could take only one, would be the History of Creativity: Pre-1500 to Present.  Anyone in the innovation space should take the time to read and learn the classic literature around creativity to fully understand where we are today.  Here is that course description:

Trends and interactions of creativity and innovation are examined from pre-1500 to present. Emphasis is placed on understanding how the notion of creativity has evolved overtime and its influence on modern workplace and educational environments.

Here is the full offering of courses:

  • Foundations in Creativity
  • Tools & Techniques in Creativity
  • Creativity in the Workplace
  • Creativity & Change Leadership
  • Research & Assess Creativity
  • Global Perspective on Creativity
  • History of Creativity: Pre-1500 to Present
  • Current trends in Creativity and Innovation
  • Problem Solving & Creativity

The program concludes with a two-course capstone program where students demonstrate achievement in their concentration and develop a creative portfolio.

The LAB: Innovating the Treadmill with S.I.T. (May 2011)

Published date: May 30, 2011 в 3:00 am

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 In 1817, Sir William Cubitt innovated the treadmill as a method of reforming prison convicts who got out of line.  Today, that “torture” continues.  According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, fifty million Americans use a treadmill.  Sales of treadmills are $1 billion annually of the total $4 billion fitness equipment industry.  For this month’s LAB, we will use the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to create new-to-the-world concepts for the ubiquitous treadmill.

S.I.T. works by taking one of five patterns (subtraction, task unification, division, multiplication, and attribute dependency) and applying it to an existing product or service.  This morphs it into a “virtual product,” which is an abstract, ambiguous notion with no clear purpose.  We then work backwards (Function Follows Form) to find new and useful benefits or markets for the virtual product.

Here are four innovations created by students at the University of Cincinnati as part of the innovation tools course.  They articulated these ideas in a dream catalog, a hypothetical, futuristic catalog that merges marketing insight with innovative design.  You can download it here.

Treadmill 1.  Extreme Runner:  The Extreme Runner provides the ultimate workout for the  athlete or experienced runner who loves a challenge. This special treadmill can provide an intense and unique training session or it can be used for extreme competitions.

  • Alternating Elevation Width Belt- instead of the tread staying the same width throughout the course of a workout, this treadmill challenges the walker or runner by correlating the width of the tread to the height of the treadmill. By starting out wide when flat, then getting smaller when the user decides to elevate the machine, this treadmill gives the feel of a rock climb or mountain hike in a matter of minutes.
  • SIT Tools Used: Attribute Dependency – creating a dependency between the width of the belt and the elevation of the machine; the belt speed and the price of the machine; and the time on the track and the position of the runner on the machine.

Innovation Sighting: Street Art Without the Paint

Published date: May 23, 2011 в 3:00 am

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Here is a nice example of the Subtraction tool of the corporate innovation method, S.I.T..  Imagine painting a picture without the paint. From PSFK:

From metal to billboards, Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils is regarded for his work across a variety of mediums. However, his “Scratching the Surface” style (which we first noticed here) is particularly remarkable. Using decrepit city walls as his canvas, the artist carved faces from the concrete, unmasking the beauty inherent to even the most neglected spaces.

To use Subtraction, start by listing the components of the situation, product, service, process, etc.  (The method works with just about anything that can be conceptualized into components).  In this case, the innovator (artist) would create a list like this:

  1. canvas
  2. paint
  3. pallet
  4. brush
  5. subject
  6. model

Alexandre-Farto-aka-Vhils-Wall-Mural-575x430-525x392 The next step is to subtract a component, preferably something that seems to be essential to the original item.  In this case, removing the paint creates our “virtual product” – an abstract, ambiguous configuration that results from applying one of the five S.I.T. patterns.  Then we imagine the benefits, potential customers, and needs addressed by the virtual product.

The Subtraction tool is a great starting point for innovation sessions because it helps confront the fixedness we all have about the world around us.  A painting without paint certainly fits that description.

To extend the idea, try using the other patterns.  For example, Task Unification assigns an additional job to an existing resource.  To use Task Unification, list both the internal and external components within the Closed World (an imaginary space and time around the situation).  Then select a component randomly and give it a “job” related to your paining.  In the works by Vihils, for example, we might take a component of the building and use it as a part of the facial features.  Or, we might give people on the street the additional “job” of adding details to the picture.

To use Attribute Dependency, we imagine creating a correlation between internal attributes of the painting with external attributes of the environment around the painting.  Simply said, as one thing changes, another thing changes.  For example, when it rains, imagine how the Vihils painting might change.  Perhaps it changes color, or shape, or theme.  Perhaps the change is related to moisture such as wet tears flowing from the subject’s eyes.  It is these additional innovations, especially ones that draw from the Closed World, that create that extra element of surprise – “Gee, I never would have thought of that!”

 

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