Посты с тэгом: attribute dependency

The Livescribe Pulse Smart Pen – Never Miss an Idea

Published date: August 30, 2009 в 6:03 pm

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Innovating is mental, visual, and vocal.  Here is a new product to help capture…and coordinate…all three.  It is called the PulseTM by Livescribe.  The PulseTM is a smart pen that records and links audio to what your write, so you never miss a word…or an idea.

The PulseTM will become a great tool for conducting innovation workshops.  One of the more challenging issues in workshops is capturing ideas.  No matter how diligent the team is in collecting ideas, many subtle insights and concepts are missed.  Even if an innovation workshop is recorded on audio or video tape, it is nearly impossible to connect the spoken word to the drawings and notes taken by the participants.  The PulseTM SmartPen solves that.Here is how I will use the PulseTM in my workshops:
  •  Recording component lists
  • Recording Virtual Products
  • Recording “Function Follows Form” ideas
  • Drawing new product embodiments
  • Recording potential benefits of new ideas
  • Recording potential challenges and drawbacks of ideas
  • Scoring ideas
  • Creating Attribute Dependency matrices
  • Recording initial business cases to support new ideas
  • Recording names of participants and facilitators
I envision using the pen with teams of two or three people as they use a structured innovation method.  One team member will use the pen to keep track of ideas and draw physical representations while recording the actual discussion as it happens.  Each team member will sign the page while verbalizing their name.  Idea sessions upload automatically to a computer when the pen is attached to its charging cradle.  This approach captures the moment of innovation in audio and written form…forever.  It creates a permanent record of who innovated, how they innovated, and what they innovated.  We’ll never miss an idea again.
Potential benefits of this approach include:DSC00412
  • Better records and annotations for filing patents and protecting intellectual property
  • Better archiving for future workshops to refine and improve ideas
  • Better metrics of ideation programs
  • Easier sharing of ideas with R&D teams, consultants, and agencies
  • Better marketing strategy development

Congratulations to the team at Livescribe for the development and launch of this useful product.  For innovation practitioners, this is a must-have.

Innovation Sighting: Web Site Morphing with Attribute Dependency

Published date: August 14, 2009 в 12:00 pm

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Imagine a Web site that detects a visitor’s “thinking” style and “morphs” its look and feel to suit that visitor’s style.  Professor Glen Urban and his colleagues at M.I.T. describe an approach in the Sloan Management Review article, “Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales.”  They collaborated with BT Group, a UK telecom company, to create a Web site that learns whether a person is more analytical versus holistic, and whether the person is more visual versus verbal in how they process information.  Once the Web site learns this (based on a few preliminary clicks on the site), it adapts itself to present information in an optimal way:

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This is an excellent example of the Attribute Dependency Template, one of five templates in the Systematic Inventive Thinking method of innovation.  Attribute Dependency takes internal and external attributes of a product or service and combines them to create new dependencies (or break existing dependencies).  With Web site morphing, for example, the two attributes that have been linked are:

  • Web site appearance (an internal attribute)
  • Visitor’s Cognitive Style (an external attribute)

Dependencies can be passive, active, or adaptive.  Passive dependencies are static – they don’t change once they have been established.  Active dependencies are dynamic – an attribute changes only when another one changes.  Adaptive dependencies change the way they change.  In other words, they learn as they go.  Attribute Dependency is a great tool for creating “smart” products – those that know and adapt to user preferences or environmental conditions.

Does Web site morphing work?  The MIT researchers report that Web-originated purchase intentions for BT’s broadband service could increase 20% after morphing the site to match individual cognitive styles.

The LAB: Innovating a Computer Keyboard with Attribute Dependency (April 2009)

Published date: April 13, 2009 в 12:46 pm

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Zachary Campau is an MBA candidate at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan who I met last week while lecturing there.  He was intrigued by Systematic Inventive Thinking, and he emailed me with a proposition.  He noted that I preach a lot about the value of team innovation, but I don’t practice what I preach.  He noticed in my LAB series that I innovate alone, thus not taking advantage of the power of collaboration.  He was right.  So I accepted his offer to join me in my next LAB posting…this one.

We decided to innovate a computer keyboard using the Attribute Dependency tool.  But there is more to the story.  We did this all via phone while he was in Ann Arbor and I was in Naples, Florida on holiday.  In fact, I decided to multi-task by both innovating with Zach while doing one of my favorite pastimes: fishing.  My ultimate dream was to create a BIG innovation while simultaneously catching a BIG fish.  Of course, luck would determine the ultimate outcome.  The big innovation was something I could count on happening.  Fish, on the other hand, tend to be less cooperative.

The LAB: Monetizing Twitter with Attribute Dependency (February 2009)

Published date: February 15, 2009 в 3:10 pm

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Venture capitalists could increase the value of their investments by applying a corporate innovation method to those investments.  Take Twitter for example.  It just received its third round of funding – $35 million.  Yet it has no revenue, no business model…just the promise of such.  It is the perfect time to innovate.

I decided to take the challenge to create new concepts for the Twitter platform that have the potential to earn money.  Others are chasing this, too, including the Twitter management team.  It reminds me of the early days of Amazon when many (including me) wondered if the company would turn a profit.  The difference between Twitter and Amazon is an important one.  Amazon started with a business model in mind.  From there, it had to achieve economies of scale.  Twitter started with none.  Economies of scale do not matter until it can define a viable business model.

Let’s see how innovation can help.

I used the Attribute Dependency template of Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method of innovation that works like no other I have found.  Attribute Dependency (or AD for short) differs from the other templates in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components.  It is a powerful tool and more challenging than the others in some respects.  It yields amazing results.  You 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.  Innovation!

TiVoing Dead People

Published date: October 13, 2008 в 3:51 pm

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George Orwell died January 21, 1950 at the age of 46.  He is considered one of the great all-time fiction writers with works like Animal House and Nineteen Eighty Four.  What if he were alive today?  What would he say, and what would he write about?  What if he blogged?  What would the conversation be within the blogosphere?

Much to my surprise, George Orwell is blogging…sort of.  The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog.  Orwell’s domestic and political diaries from August 1938 until October 1942 are being posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.  The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them.

Why does it matter?  George Orwell has been time-shifted from the past to the present.  It is what the popular digital video recorder, TiVo, does with our favorite TV shows.  It means we can take any dead person’s diaries, writings, or speeches and re-introduce them as blogs.  We can take advantage of a medium that never existed until a few years ago and participate as though that person were alive.  George is dead, but his diaries spark a discussion in this completely new medium in a way that he could not have predicted.  Big Brother is with us again.

Imagine the blog commentary from other famous dead people like Albert Einstein, Jesus, Mother Teresa, or Adam Smith.  What new insight or innovation would emerge with a conversation in the blogosphere stimulated by these peoples’ blog posts?   “TiVoing the Dead” holds the same promise for the not-so-famous.  It means we can generate ideas and insights while living and have them stored for future reading and commentary.  We can be TiVo’d to a later point in time when our ideas will be embraced in a new way.

This revelation makes me wonder about the role of time and its use in innovation.  The variable, time, is used routinely with the Attribute Dependency template.  In the case of time shifting a person’s writings, we are “breaking a dependency” rather than creating one.  But I wonder if there is a much broader role for time when innovating.  Is there a way to harness some of the complex aspects of time such as…

  • duration
  • speed
  • stopping
  • quantity
  • sequence
  • direction
  • continuity

…as it relates to a product or service.  The approach would be to use these aspects to manipulate a product or service, thus creating a “virtual product/service,” then working backwards to see if it solves a problem in a useful way.  I plan to work with this rough idea over the next few months to see where it leads.  Perhaps it could form the basis of a new innovation template.  The test of a new template is its ability to generate, on command, novel ideas that would not have been generated otherwise – just as the other five templates do.

Special thanks to Bryan Melmed, MBA student at Columbia Business School, for telling me about the Orwell blog.

The LAB: Innovating the iPhone with Attribute Dependency (September 2008)

Published date: September 28, 2008 в 12:28 pm

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Here are ten innovations for the iPhone that I would love to see.  I created these using the Attribute Dependency tool.  It is the most powerful of the five tools of Systematic Inventive Thinking, but also the most difficult to learn.

To use Attribute Dependency, we start by making two lists.  The first is a list of internal attributes of the iPhone.  The second is a list of external attributes – those factors that are not under the control of the manufacturer (Apple, in this case), but that vary in the context of how the product or service is used.  Then we create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis.  This matrix forces the combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate.

That’s the hard part.  Now the fun begins.  We take these virtual combinations and envision 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.

The matrix that you develop using this tool can become quite large.  To make it easier, you can download the one I used for this exercise and follow along with the innovations below.  I put the number corresponding to each idea in the appropriate cell of the matrix.  Here are the ideas along with the attribute dependencies that led to the idea:

1.  CARRIER-CONTEXT:  Allow users to switch wireless carriers depending on whether phone calls are business or personal.  Pre-select which phone numbers go through which carrier in the iPhone’s Contacts.  This makes it easier for people to keep track of phone expenses and allows enterprises to control and monitor costs more accurately.  Same could be done for email addresses.

2.  FUNCTION-CONTEXT:  iPhone apps re-arrange automatically on the desktop depending on the context of use (with friends, family, co-workers, or myself).  For example, with co-workers, the apps become more business related (conferencing, calculator, tools, timer, meeting planning, notes, etc).  Geo-sensing tells the phone who you are with, then changes appropriately.

3.  VOLUME-LOCATION:  The iPhone goes to silent mode automatically depending on where it is (in conference rooms, churches, the boss’s office, etc), or switches to a louder mode in places like the car, grocery store, or other noisy environments.

4.  JOB-FUNCTION:  The iPhone is customized with apps depending on job, profession, or job type.  A health care worker, for example, might have an iPhone that is optimized for a hospital setting (updated information about patient location, records, medications, potential cost savings, infection risks, etc).Iphone

5.  LOCATION-LINKAGES:  Wi-fi and other linkages (carrier, email client, SMS) change depending on location to optimize for the situation.  For example, wi-fi would turn off for certain networks that are password protected so the phone stays connected to the cellular network.  Saves time from having to switch back and forth manually.

6.  BATTERY LIFE-TIME:  The user can switch to a “battery conservation mode” that will power down features not needed (color screen goes to black and white, wi-fi off, vibration off).  Or, the iPhone does it automatically depending on time of day such as at nighttime.  For travelers who like to keep the phone on all night in their hotel room, this would save time and battery life.

7.  CAPACITY-RANGE:  Enable iPhone to “borrow” the optical disk space of a nearby Mac of PC much like the MacBook Air does.

8.  PHOTO QUALITY-BROWSER TYPE:  This is an odd one, but that is the beauty of this tool – it makes you put together combinations of attributes you would not think of.  In this case, the iPhone would allow you to vary the photo quality to load into different browser types or features.

9.  MUSIC SOURCE-LOCATION:  The iPhone would recognize when it is in an airplane, restaurant, store, concert, museum, or other venue, and it would pick up the music or broadcast that is streaming just within that venue.  It might include advertising or other useful information relevant to the venue (example: restaurant menu specials, airport flight delays, museum closing time, etc).

10.  FUNCTION-LOCATION:  The iPhone “shopping buddy” would tell you what items on your shopping list to get in a certain order to save the most time.  It would suggest items on sale as substitutes for what’s on your list.  It would tell you what checkout line is fastest, and it would know how much you are about to spend.  Perhaps it could link right to PayPal and complete the checkout process for you.

To learn this tool, consider taking a course such as the one being offered next month in Chicago.  I’ll be there!

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