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Fixedness

Published date: December 21, 2009 в 10:07 am

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“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan

The most challenging aspect about innovating is rooted in a concept called fixedness.  Fixedness is the inability to realize that something known to have a particular use may also be used to perform other functions.  When one is faced with a new problem, fixedness blocks one’s ability to use old tools in novel ways.  Psychologist Karl Duncker coined the term functional fixedness for describing the difficulties in visual perception and problem solving that arise when one element of a whole situation has a (fixed) function which has to be changed for making the correct perception or for finding solutions.  In his famous “candle problem” the situation was defined by the objects: a box of candles, a box of thumb-tacks and a book of matches. The task was to fix the candles on the wall without any additional elements. The difficulty of this problem arises from the functional fixedness of the candle box. It is a container in the problem situation but must be used as a shelf in the solution situation.

Roni Horiwitz of S.I.T. puts it this way:  “It’s almost impossible for the human brain to produce a really fresh and unique thought. Every thought, opinion or idea is somehow connected to previous concepts stored in the brain.”   Because of this, we are often unable to see the solution to a problem although it stares us in the face.  We are too connected to what we knew previously. We not only can’t let it go, but we try very hard to anchor around it to explain what is going on.
Fixedness is insidious.  It affects how we think about and see virtually every part of our lives.  At work, we have fixedness about our products and services, out customers and competitors,  and our future opportunities.  The most damaging form of fixedness is when we are stuck on our current business model.  We cannot see past what is working today.  We stop challenging our assumptions.  We continue to believe what was once true is still true.  In the end, it is this perpetual blind spot that is most dangerous to our innovation potential.
Customers have fixedness, too.  Customers have a limited view of the future, they have well-entrenched notions of how the world works, and they suffer from the same blind spot we do.  Yet we continue to seek the “Voice of the Customer” as though a divine intervention will break through this fixedness so they can offer new ideas.
Fortunately, there is a way to address it.  The way to break fixedness is to use structured innovation tools and principles that make you see problems and opportunities in new ways.  Remember the classic Will Rogers quote:

“It’s not what you don’t know that will get you.  It’s what you know that ain’t so.”

Or was it Mark Twain?

 

Innovation in Practice: Two Years!

Published date: December 14, 2009 в 2:00 am

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I sincerely thank you for reading this blog.  Readership continues to grow, and this motivates me to contribute new ideas to the innovation community.  This month marks the two year point, and I wanted to share some thoughts about what happened this year and what to look forward to in 2010.
The themes of this blog are:
  • Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It 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.  How the corporate practitioner views the academic community, the consulting community, and the research community is where we will find best practices.  This is where truth is separated from hype.
2009 Highlights:
  • I am having a lot of fun with The Lab series of blog posts.  This is where I try to demonstrate innovation in real time by taking a category and applying structured innovation tools.  As far as I know, this is the only blog that actually demonstrates innovation with the intent of creating new ideas, and not just reporting on other people’s ideas. This year, I applied innovation to: the Kindle, Twitter, garage door opener, computer keyboard, surgical mask, credit cards, shredded wheat, health care, a hockey stick, social media, mobile products, and your wallet.
  • I started two new series:  Innovation Sightings is way to practice seeing the patterns that exist in products and services.  It is the patterns that led Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues to devise creativity templates that allow you to innovate over and over.  By spotting patterns, you strengthen your innovation skills.  I also started a series called Academic Focus.  This is a way to bring attention to those professors who excel at teaching and researching innovation for the corporate practitioner.
  • I had the good fortune of meeting up with some fellow innovators and bloggers including Andrea Meyer, Jim Todhunter, Jim Belifore, Mark Atkins, Sally Kay, and my “blog mentor,” Christopher Allen.
  • I have a new academic role in addition to my corporate role.  I split my time between Johnson & Johnson and the University of Cincinnati, and it is challenging me to find new leverage points and opportunities.
  • I am a guest blogger at Braden Kelley’s Blogging Innovation, and I like being a part of this group.
  • This blog has a new design, and I have added features to help people get the most out of it.  This includes Google Translate, a search function, a podcast on innovation methods, and links to  my other social media sights.
2010 Outlook:
  • More focus on skills: I want to give readers more detailed insight to help them learn and use methods of innovation.
  • More focus on strategy:  I want to uncover more about the intersection of strategy and innovation and how to put it in practice.
  • More focus on YOU, the reader.  I appreciate the emails and contacts from many of you this year, and I hope to hear from more of you in 2010.

Drew

The LAB: Innovating Your Wallet Using S.I.T. (December 2009)

Published date: December 7, 2009 в 2:00 am

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Innovation puts cash in your wallet.  But what about the wallet itself?  For this month’s LAB, we will apply the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to create new and useful concepts for the wallet.

Wallets are the most personal items we own.  They carry our money, credit cards, identification,  licenses, photographs, and other memorabilia.  Your wallet says a lot about you.  As with food, we try to stuff more inside while staying thin.  Wallets have been around a long time.  Today, the wallet industry is a multi-billion dollar market fueled by new designs and innovation.

Here are six unique wallet concepts invented using the five templates in the S.I.T. method.  They were created by graduate students at the University of Cincinnati as part of their course requirements in “Applied Marketing Innovation.”

Innovation Sighting: Social Innovation Using S.I.T.

Published date: November 30, 2009 в 2:00 am

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How do you get people to be more socially responsible?  Here is an example* that demonstrates the use of Task Unification, a template from the corporate innovation method called S.I.T.:

To use Task Unification, we assign an additional job to an existing resource. Then we work backwards to envision the potential benefits of such a scheme, how it would work, and how to adapt it to make it better. In the example above, we create a statement as follows: "The stairs have the additional job of making people want to use the stairs more." Then we innovate ways to make this happen.  Having the stairs play music as you walk in the form of a piano is novel, useful, and surprising.  It meets all three tests of innovativeness.

Let's turn this around a bit to make the point even more.  Let's create a new statement (our Virtual Product):  "The escalator has the job of making people want to use the stairs more."  Now let's imagine ways to make this happen.  Here is what I came up with:

  • The escalator slows down as more people use it.  As people approach the escalator and see others on it already, they will be less likely to use it.  Perhaps it makes a groaning sound as it slows down (thanks, Amnon!).
  • The escalator has a repeating taped message encouraging people to consider the health benefits of walking the stairs (perhaps by comparing the amount of calories burned by using the stairs instead of the escalator).
  • Put a handicapped sign on the escalator, or perhaps some other indicator that the escalator is for those who are not fully fit.
  • Make something happen at the top of the escalator that people typically want to avoid such as an unpleasant message or homeless person asking for spare change.

Here is another example:  (both of these are from TheFunTheory.com sponsored by Volkswagen):

* Special thanks to Gary Vince from Toronto for sending me these examples.

The LAB: Creating Mobile Products with the Division Template (November 2009)

Published date: November 23, 2009 в 2:00 am

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Mobility is a good thing.  As mobility increases, so does our standard of living.  Mobility expands job opportunities, enriches our personal life, and boosts prosperity.   For nations, mobility expands trade, creates wealth, and makes countries more competitive.  Mobility even helps us live longer.  For hundreds of years, life expectancies hovered around 40 years.  During the 1800s they began to shoot up when road transport improved.  Today life expectancies in many advanced societies approach 80 years thanks to improved mobility in transportation, communications, and network computing.

How can we use structured innovation to create more of it?  How can we make the products and services  we use every day more mobile?  For this month’s LAB, we will use the Division Template.  We begin by listing the product’s (or service’s) internal components.  Then we divide one or more of the components in one of three ways:

  • Functional (divide along functional roles)
  • Physical (cut the product or component on any physical aspect)
  • Preserving (each part preserves the characteristics of the whole)
Using Function Follows Form, we envision potential benefits of the new form and other ways to adapt the form to make it more useful.  The trick is to use each type of Division with the specific intent of increasing a person’s mobility.  Each type of Division results in a different type of mobility.  Here is how.

Academic Focus: University of Michigan

Published date: November 16, 2009 в 2:00 am

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Once you develop the capability to generate ideas, you need a rigorous approach to managing innovation within the context of your company’s culture.  For that, Professor Jeff DeGraff’s Competing Values Framework (CVF) is the best-in-class approach.  CVF describes four organizational cultural styles of managing innovation: Collaborate, Create, Control, and Compete.  Management teams tend to gravitate towards one dominant style, the one that has served them well in the past.  To be a more effective, leaders need to be “ambidextrous.”  Leaders should become adroit at two conflicting values.  “They must develop the ability to oversee teams that work towards opposite goals, integrating them when the timing is right, so that each value can be developed successfully.”
CVF

Here is Jeff’s biography from the University of Michigan website:

“Jeff DeGraff teaches MBA and Executive Education courses on managing creativity, innovation and change. Jeff is also a core faculty member in the University of Michigan Center for Leadership, Change and Innovation. Jeff’s research and writing focuses on change and innovation strategy, organizational competencies and innovation practices, and creativity methods. He is co-author of the books Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen, Leading Innovation: How to Jump Start Your Organization’s Growth Engine and Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations. He is the Managing Director of Competing Values, a consulting practice that specializes in helping organizations make change and innovation happen.”
Jeff founded the Innovatrium, an innovation development community that is comprised of leading companies, government agencies, universities, trade associations, top faculty,researchers, students, and best in class growth and innovation experts.  Its mission:
Jeff DeGraff “The mission of Innovatrium is to be to the business practice of innovation what the Juilliard School is to music, bringing together master artists, teachers and students in a collaborative effort to create new ideas, skills and practices. Innovatrium integrates the best of consulting and teaching into action learning.”
I have had the pleasure of working with Jeff and seeing him in action.  I have read his books including “Leading Innovation: How to Jump Start Your Organization’s Growth Engine.”  It is one of the few innovation books that I recommend to colleagues.  Jeff has earned his nickname, The Dean of Innovation.

Innovation Sighting: Smart Floors Using Attribute Dependency

Published date: November 9, 2009 в 2:00 am

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In a world where gravity is ever present, floors are essential.  We spend most of our waking hours standing or walking on them.  But we tend to ignore them.  That is a pity given the nearly constant contact we have with them.  What if the floor could be innovated?  What could it do for us that it doesn’t do today?
Here is an innovative technology worth standing up for.  Future-Shape GmbH, a German technology  startup, has developed Sens-Floor, a layer of textile sensors that monitor human movement and can be installed underneath almost any type of flooring.  The product works by sending a small electrical charge through a conductive fabric containing integrated sensor plates and radio modules.  When someone walks over a sensor, a small change in charge capacity triggers the system.  The company offers a few suggested applications such as home security, activating room lights, and monitoring the elderly.
However, to reach its full potential, innovating with the Attribute Dependency template will link this technology to many more things that take place on a floor.  Imagine, for example, the floor can detect a specific person (through body weight, foot size, etc) to activate things in the room related to that person (lighting preferences, sounds, smells…anything with an “on” button).  Taking it further, imagine the floor can keep track of how many people are on the floor and what they are doing (standing, dancing, sitting, etc).  The floor can tell a party host when it’s time to serve dinner or to enliven the party with different music.  Think of the sports applications – score keeping in tennis, required elements in gymnastics, or basketball three second violations.  What about retail store applications?  The floor could keep track of customer movements – where they shop, where they stop, and how they go from product to product.  Perhaps the floor can detect when to raise prices on popular items or drop prices on a slow ones.
The company calls its core product, Smart Textiles, and this idea is embedded in its other products.  To make them truly smart, it will take a bit more work on the application side.  As an investment, Future-Shape might be an excellent “ground floor” opportunity.

The LAB: Innovating Social Media with Task Unification (October 2009)

Published date: October 31, 2009 в 8:30 pm

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Embracing social media and the myriad of Web 2.0 tools is more challenging than just setting up a Facebook account or adding a “Follow Me on Twitter” link.  Organizations struggle with how to take advantage of the power of Web 2.0.  Where do you start?  How do you tie these new tools in with your current website?  How do you make sure your current constituents are happy while moving the organization to a more networked world?

For this month’s LAB, we will use the innovation template called Task Unification, one of five templates of the corporate innovation method called S.I.T..  To use Task Unification, we take a component of a product, service, system, etc, and we assign an additional “job” to it.  For this exercise involving Social Media, here is how it works.  Imagine your company has a large base of employees in the field.  For example, suppose your company has a large sales force or an extensive network of delivery or service people.  Consider the U.S. Postal Service, for example, with an army of postal workers and letter carriers at over 32,000 post
offices.  A key question for these organizations like the USPS is: how do we get more value out of this fixed asset?  Let’s use Task
Unification.

I start by visiting a site that inventories all the social web tools: GO2WEB20.NET.  I randomly pick an application from this list.  Then I assign the internal field resources to “use” this application to increase revenue/profits for the company.  Using our example of the postal service, I create this statement: “Postal delivery staff have the additional ‘job’ of using XXXX (web application) to increase USPS performance.” This is our Virtual Product in the S.I.T. method.

The key is to use the non-obvious applications for creating new, innovative services. You have to literally force yourself to imagine the corporate resource using the inherent aspects of the Web 2.0 application to create revenue or cut costs.  Here are examples I created using Task Unification:

The Power to Innovate: Conference Report

Published date: October 24, 2009 в 2:06 pm

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Congratulations to the team at Invention Machine for hosting this week’s conference, Power to Innovate, at the Seaport Hotel in Boston.  The theme of the conference centered around the Innovation Intelligence EcosystemTM and how companies can boost performance by coordinating information, communities, and innovation activities.  Invention Machine’s premier product, Goldfire, is at the center of this ecosystem.

“Goldfire is a unique innovation software platform that transforms ideas into commercial products—generating and validating concepts and making innovation a sustainable process.  Designed with engineers, scientists and researchers in mind, Goldfire automates every day innovation tasks—from identifying a new market to developing a new product to improving existing product offerings—and empowering users with a repeatable process. Fusing proven innovation methods for generating ideas along with advanced technologies for accessing precise concepts from corporate and worldwide knowledge sources, Goldfire stimulates creative thinking and speeds inventive problem solving—helping product development engineers, scientists and researchers to quickly conceive and validate ideas thus fueling product pipelines.”

The latest release, 5.5, should greatly enhance usability of the product especially by groups outside of R&D such as marketing and M&A.  Jim Belfiore, Certified Innovation Master & Senior Director at Invention Machine, demonstrated how he researched the disease, lymphoma.  I was amazed at the depth and breadth of insights he created using Golfire 5.5.

The entire conference was followed on Twitter compliments of Andrea Meyer.  Check it out at #P2I09.  Here are some other highlights from the conference:

Reinventing the Newspaper

Published date: October 20, 2009 в 12:54 pm

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Newspapers are dying.  Their business model is burning to the ground.  They cannot fend off the Internet and other threats despite their virtual monopoly and economies of scale in printing and distribution.  Advertisers are moving on.  Yet while traditional newsrooms are shrinking, journalism is thriving and the consumption of news is skyrocketing.  Why are newspapers shutting down?  As Clay Shirky describes it:

“If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.”

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”

“Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.“

Perhaps it is not the newspaper model, per se, that needs replaced.  Perhaps it is the components of that model that need innovation: printing, distribution, and journalism.  Let’s examine how.

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