Посты с тэгом: innovation method

10 Valentine’s Day Surprises Created With S.I.T.

Published date: February 14, 2016 в 1:01 pm

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Today is Valentine’s Day, and to celebrate, here are ten creative ways to show how much you love your partner. I generated some of these for a TV interview yesterday on FOX19-WXIX morning news is Cincinnati. They wanted me to share how to use S.I.T. to be more creative on this special day. So here is my extended list:
1. Flowers are very common on Valentine’s Day, with the most common gift being a dozen long-stem red roses. So to be more creative, apply the Division Technique. Divide the 12 roses into single versions, each in their own vase. Place them throughout your home. That way, you get twelve little surprises instead of one big one.
2. Building on the first idea, place eleven of the roses throughout your home, but hide or hold on to the 12th rose (the Subtraction Technique). When your partner realizes there are only eleven, he or she will wonder where the 12th rose is. That’s the time to place it somewhere strategically (hint: pillow) or give it to your partner directly. Nice touch!
3. I love the Task Unification Technique for challenges like this. I like to pick a component in the home randomly and force it to take on an additional job. These ideas that leverage a resource in the immediate environment (Closed World) tend to create surprising, forehead-slapping ideas that make you utter, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?” For example, take the garage door. Imagine taking your traditional Valentine’s Day card and taping it to the bottom of the garage door so that when she opens it, the card will dangle invitingly from the bottom. Clever!
4. Here’s another example of Task Unification. Take shaving cream and draw a big heart with the words, “I love you” somewhere fun like the inside of your shower (make sure it’s on the inside or you’ll be in big trouble.)
5. Food is another way to inspire love. Instead of making a plain old salad, try taking tomato and mozzarella cheese slices and make a heart shape on the plate. Easy, cheap, and one of those little touches your partner will appreciate.
6. I found this idea on the Internet, but I love it anyway because it demonstrates the Multiplication Technique so well. Take a bunch of different size envelopes or perhaps boxes and place them inside one another (like Russian nested figures). In the last one, place your favorite love poem. Maybe corny, but it works!
7. We have a computer in our kitchen, and I love to use the screensaver function to surprise my wife with fun and loving things (especially if I’m in trouble from something!!). Try this by placing a big heart shape on the screen, perhaps with an image of the two of you together (wedding photo?). It’s a winner every time.
8. Building on that idea, change her screensaver or background photo on her smartphone to show an old, nostalgic photo of the two of you. (Be sure you have a way to get her previous image on there, though, or you’ll have a problem).
9. Attribute Dependency is a great pattern seen in the majority of innovative products and services. As one thing changes, another thing changes. Here’s how to use it. Create a special smartphone playlist of all love songs. Put it in her library (when she’s not looking). Show it to her after she gets out of the shower where you placed the big shaving cream heart shape. Play it for her. You’re gonna have a good day!
10. Perhaps because I use dry erase markers so often in my work (teaching, speaking, facilitating), that I just love them. You can use them to write on lots of surfaces, and they can be erased just like on a white board. So take a (red) marker, and place loving messages all around the house on glass surfaces – bathroom mirrors, microwave winder, car window – you get the idea.
Have fun and enjoy the day!

Your Loyal Customers Love Innovation. Give It to Them

Published date: November 9, 2015 в 3:00 am

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A great source of new sales growth is with your existing loyal customers. After all, they already understand the category, they trust your brand, and you have an existing relationship – meaning you’ve been given permission to interact with them. When I say loyal customer, I mean one that buys 100% of the product or service from you and no one else like your main competitors.
You have three ways to get growth from your loyal customers: increase quantity purchased, increase purchase frequency, or increase the price, assuming you have a valid reason to raise it. Let’s look at each one.
Increasing the quantity purchased means getting customers to buy more volume of product during each visit to the store, whether online or in person. There are a variety of ways to do this. One way is through product packaging. Costco, the membership warehouse club, sells everything in bulk quantities. When you buy paper towels, you don’t get one, or two, or even three. You have to buy one big package with twelve rolls of paper towels.
Another way to increase volume for each shopping visit is to cross promote your products. When the customer buys something, offer them something else that goes along with that product. Amazon does this the best. When you add an item to your shopping cart, Amazon displays this: Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought, etc, etc. And they show you a variety of products to consider. Very smart.
Another source of new growth is to get customers to shop more frequently. The more times they visit you, the more they’re likely they are to buy something. A simple way to do that is to offer special promotions and discounts for repeat visits. I buy a lot of my clothes online from a company in London. It never fails. Right after I make a purchase, they email a really juicy offer to get me back in there. Works every time!
And the third source of growth with existing, loyal customers is price. Raising price just a small amount has a huge impact on profitability. But you have to give your customers a good reason for the price increase, and that means offering them a new source of value. It could be from a new, innovative product feature or some new service that you offer as part of the overall relationship. LinkedIn for example offers their subscribers a base level of service for free, but then gives you the opportunity to upgrade to various premium levels giving you access to more features. Smart.
So take a close look at your 100% loyal customers and find ways of using all three approaches to sales growth. Hey, they already appreciate doing business with you. Given them a chance to be even better customers and you’ll love the outcome.
 

BD Named 2015 Outstanding Corporate Innovator Winner by Product Development and Management Association

Published date: October 12, 2015 в 3:00 am

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The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals, announced today that it has awarded the 2015 Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award to BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) (NYSE: BDX).
BD’s focus on innovation has provided a framework to integrate the business, make acquisitions and coordinate actions vertically, from the top through operating levels of the company.
The OCI Award is the only innovation award which recognizes sustained (five or more years) and quantifiable business results from new products and services. Including BD, there have been 52 organizations to be granted the OCI Award over the course of its 25 year history. Past winners have included, DuPont, Merck, FedEx, Harley Davidson, Starbucks and Xerox.
Dr. Ellen Strahlman, Executive Vice President of Research & Development, and Chief Medical Officer at BD will deliver a presentation outlining their processes for achieving their sustained innovation success at the PDMA 2015 Annual Conference, being held Nov. 7-11 in Anaheim, Calif.
“The OCI Committee believes that the corporate commitment to innovation at BD, its new product development practices and its results are worthy of PDMA’s highest form of recognition,” said Suzanne Thompson, Chair, OCI Selection Committee and Vice President R&D, Diversey Care at Sealed Air. “We were impressed by BD’s transformation journey and focus on creating a culture of innovation. BD has created unique practices and processes that others can learn from.”
“BD’s strategy is simply to apply technology and clinical knowledge to make healthcare more effective, efficient and safe; and our global innovation system is designed to support this strategy,” said Dr. Ellen Strahlman, Executive Vice President of Research & Development, and Chief Medical Officer at BD. “We are honored to receive this prestigious recognition that validates the relentless corporate commitment to innovation and the hard work of thousands of BD associates over many years in bringing new health innovations to the market. Our goal is to ensure that our innovations reach every patient around the world who needs them most, to save and improve their lives.”
The 2015 OCI Award will be presented to BD at the annual OCI Awards ceremony on Nov. 10 during the PDMA Annual Conference.
For more information about PDMA’s OCI Award, visit www.pdma.org/OCIaward.
About PDMA
Founded in 1976, the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals. Its mission is to improve the effectiveness of individuals and organizations involved in the integrated activities related to all areas of product development and management.
PDMA is the only organization that focuses on addressing this challenge by bringing together academics, professionals and solution providers in a community driven to accelerate the contribution innovation makes to the economic and professional growth of people, businesses and societies around the world. To learn more, visit www.pdma.org.
About BD
BD is a leading medical technology company that partners with customers and stakeholders to address many of the world’s most pressing and evolving health needs. Our innovative solutions are focused on improving medication management and patient safety; supporting infection prevention practices; equipping surgical and interventional procedures; improving drug delivery; aiding anesthesiology and respiratory care; advancing cellular research and applications; enhancing the diagnosis of infectious diseases and cancers; and supporting the management of diabetes. We are more than 45,000 associates in 50 countries who strive to fulfill our purpose of “Helping all people live healthy lives” by advancing the quality, accessibility, safety and affordability of healthcare around the world. In 2015, BD welcomed CareFusion and its products into the BD family of solutions. For more information on BD, please visit www.bd.com.

Innovation Sighting: The Task Unification Technique for Young and Old

Published date: September 28, 2015 в 3:00 am

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The Task Unification Technique is great because it generates novel ideas that tend to be novel and resourceful. It’s one of five techniques in the SIT Innovation Method.
Task Unification is defined as: assigning an additional task to an existing resource. That resource should be in the immediate vicinity of the problem, or what we call The Closed World. In essence, it’s taking something that is already around you and giving an additional job.
Here are two great examples, one about a very young person and the other about a new and nifty device for old people. I love both of them:


To get the most out of the Task Unification technique, you follow five basic steps:
1. List all of the components, both internal and external, that are part of the Closed World of the product, service, or process.
2. Select a component from the list. Assign it an additional task, using one of three methods:

  • Choose an external component and use it to perform a task that the product accomplishes already
  • Choose an internal component and make it do something new or extra
  • Choose an internal component and make it perform the function of an external component, effectively “stealing” the external component’s function

3. Visualize the new (or changed) products or services.
4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge?
5. If you decide the new product or service is valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create these new products? Perform these new services? Why or why not? Is there any way to refine or adapt the idea to make it viable?
 

Innovators: Beware the Hindsight Bias

Published date: August 31, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Imagine you’re testing a new innovation to see if it can work for your business. You’ve been told by experts that there’s only a 20% chance that it’ll work in your situation. But, something inside tells you it might work. You say, hey, it’s worth a try. Let’s go ahead.
Sure enough, it works! You’re thrilled, and you so say “I knew it all along!” This is good news, and you know that your boss is going to love it, too. So you rush in and sell the idea to the boss and the rest of the team.
Everyone’s excited about the roll out of the new concept. You’ve spent a lot of time and money, and today is the big day. Then, the unthinkable happens. It doesn’t work. How could that be. You try it again, no good. You keep trying it over and over. It works a few times, but for the most part, nothing.
When you look back at all your attempts to use the concept, you realize that it worked…only 20% of the time, exactly what the experts told you.
So what happened here? You were guilty of a bias that we all have called The Hindsight Bias. Hindsight bias, also known as the “knew-it-all-along effect”, is the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. Hindsight bias causes you to view events as more predictable than they really are. After an event, people often believe that they knew the outcome of the event before it actually happened.
Hindsight bias can cause memory distortion. Because the event happened like you thought it would, you go back and revise your memory of what you were thinking right before the event. You re-write history, so to speak, and revise the probability in hindsight. Going forward, you use that new, higher probability to make future decisions. When in fact, the probabilities haven’t changed at all. That leads to poor judgement.
Hindsight bias can make you overconfident. Because you think you predicted past events, you’re inclined to think you can see future events coming. You bet too much on the outcome being higher and you make decisions, often poor ones, based on this faulty level of confidence.
To avoid hindsight bias, keep these pointers in mind:

  • First, the future is not predictable. When you start to think you can predict it, remember, everyone else thinks they can too. Someone is always wrong.
  • Make decisions based on what the data says is likely to happen, not based on what you think is going to happen.
  • If you make a prediction, and that prediction comes true, don’t revise the odds because of the outcome. The probabilities haven’t changed.
  • Finally, always lay out a plan of action before you start any initiative. Include in that plan any data or expert advice about possible outcomes for the initiative. That’ll help keep you honest at those times when you think you have a magic crystal ball.

Beware the Overconfident Innovator

Published date: August 3, 2015 в 3:00 am

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I want you to imagine that you’ve been working on a string of projects, and they’ve all gone very well. You’re talented, hardworking, and ambitious, and you’re on a roll.
Then, your next assignment comes along. It’s a big challenge like the ones before. You’ve got a tight deadline, a limited budget, and lots of pressure to make it a big success. Then, something bad happens. You were faced with a critical decision. You knew ahead of time that you didn’t have all the information, but you made a decision anyway…and it was dead wrong.
So what happened? Well, you may have been guilty of a cognitive bias called overconfidence.
Overconfidence is the unwarranted faith in one’s intuitive reasoning. We think we are much better at making decisions that we really are. Research has shown that we overestimate our predictive abilities and we overestimate the precision of information that we have about a situation. We’re poorly calibrated in estimating probabilities – we tend to believe something is much more likely to occur than it really is. That’s overconfidence.
Overconfidence happens for different reasons. One is that we oversimplify things. Situations that you face at work are usually much more complex than you realize. If did realize it, you’d be less likely to be so confident about a decision. Another reason is that we don’t account for the role that chance plays in our decisions. Every decision involves some degree of variability. We falsely assume that luck will always be on our side especially after a string of successes. We take excessive risks, and we roll the dice one more time.
Another big source of overconfidence is expertise. If we’re an expert in a particular field, that sense of expertise trickles into other areas of lives. In short, we think that we’re smarter and have better information than we actually do.
Overconfidence is a real problem. When you are too sure that you’ve got it right, you don’t try to improve your understanding of a situation. You don’t check your facts, or get more information. You may not prepare properly for a situation, and that could get you into a sticky situation that you’re is not equipped to handle.
For example, a person might think his sense of direction is much better than it actually is. He goes on a long trip without a map and refuses to ask for directions if he gets lost along the way. He’s suffering from the overconfidence bias.
It can affect you at work. You may think you’re invaluable to your company when in fact almost anyone could do your job. That could affect your work behavior and your attitude with co-workers. Overconfidence might cause you to cut corners or think you’re untouchable and not governed by rules and regulations. That could lead to real trouble.
To avoid the overconfidence bias, keep these pointers in mind:

  • Past success is no guarantee of future success. Treat each new decision as if it were your very first. Just because you had a string of correct decisions has no bearing on the one you face right now.
  • Expertise is no guarantee of future success. As the nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, said, “Overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. They will have to struggle to remind themselves that they may be in the grip of an illusion.”
  • Recheck your facts about a situation. Ask, why are we doing this in the first place? Suspend your initial judgment about a situation and check the validity of your assumptions.
  • Slow down! Look at multiple perspectives and think through the implications and consequences of a belief or an action.
  • Be confident, but not overconfident. The odds are not as good as you think they are, so roll back your sense of certainty.
  • We all have talent and experience, but we can improve our judgment a lot by having a more realistic sense of our cognitive abilities.

Innovating Out of Crisis

Published date: July 20, 2015 в 10:04 am

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In Innovating Out of Crisis, How Fujifilm Survived (and Thrived) As Its Core Business Was Vanishing, published by Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, Shigetaka Komori, FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation Chairman and CEO, recounts how he was inspired to lead Fujifilm’s journey from the brink of extinction to its current path of prosperity and growth – and a new direction.
In its recent fiscal year ending March 31, 2015, FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation reported a record profit, in spite of the loss of its core business several years ago, brought on by a rapid increase in the digitalization of photography as well as the world financial crisis in 2008. In the year 2000, photographic products made up sixty percent of Fujifilm’s sales and two–thirds of its profit.  Within ten years, however, the booming market for digital photography destroyed that business. In the midst of this, Mr. Komori guided the company through an historic transition from being a traditional photographic company into a leading global innovator.
In his book, Mr. Komori states, “The company’s core photographic film market was shrinking at a spectacular rate, and the situation was critical. Fujifilm had good management resources, first-rate technology, a sound financial footing, a reputable brand, and excellence in its diverse workforce. If all these assets could be effectively combined into a successful strategy and applied, I was sure that something could be done to save the day. The whole of Fujifilm was depending on my managerial skills to make it happen.  I was gripped by a strong sense of mission. ‘Maybe I was brought into this world to overcome this crisis,’ I thought at the time. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.”
Fujifilm is now a leading global company with business interests in a variety of industries, including:  healthcare, highly functional materials, document solutions, digital imaging, optical devices and graphic systems.  The company has been applying its unique core fundamental technologies, resulting from 80 years of research and development that began with the design and production of fine, quality photographic products.
In 2015, Fujifilm will celebrate 50 years in the United States.
Innovating Out of Crisis is now available through Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, in both hard copy and e-book.

The Second Direction of Innovation

Published date: May 19, 2015 в 11:18 am

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Innovation is the process of taking an idea and putting it into practice. Creativity, on the other hand, is what you do in your head to generate the idea, an idea that meets three criteria: an innovative idea must be new, useful, and surprising. New means that no one else has done it before. Useful means that it delivers some new value for you or your customers. And surprising? It means that the market will be delighted with your latest innovation.
Most people think the way you create an idea is to start with a well-formed problem and then brainstorm a solution to it. What if you turned that around 180 degrees? It sounds counter-intuitive, but you really can innovate by starting with the solution and then work backwards to the problem.
In the Systematic Inventive Thinking method, we call it the Function Follows Form Principle. Here’s how it works. First, you start with an existing situation. That situation can be a product, it can be a service, or perhaps a process. You take that item, and you make a list of its components and attributes.
Then you apply one of the five thinking tools. They’re called subtraction, division, multiplication, task unification, and attribute dependency. I know some of these sound mathematical, but they’re really not, as you’ll see when you start applying them.
When you apply one of the five tools to the existing situation, you artificially change it. It morphs into something that, at first, might seem really weird or absurd. That’s perfectly normal. In fact, as you get more comfortable with this method, you’ll come to expect it. We consider the strange thing a virtual product. It doesn’t really exist except in one place, right up here in your mind.
This step is really important. Take your time. You have to mentally define and visualize the virtual product. I like to close my eyes and mentally see an image of the item once it’s been manipulated. As you practice the method more, this will get a lot easier.
At this stage, you ask yourself two questions, and you do it in this specific order. The first question is, “Should we do it?” Does this new configuration create any advantage or solve some problem? Is there a target audience who would find this beneficial? Does it deliver an unmet need? We call this step the market filter. It’s a filter because if you cannot identify even the tiniest benefit at this step, you throw the concept out the window. You don’t waste any more time on it. This is very different than other ideation techniques like brainstorming, where “there’s no bad idea.” Trust me, there are plenty of bad ideas, and if you realize one here, you eject it and go back and reapply the tool to generate a different concept.
If you do identify some benefit, then and only then do you ask yourself the second question, “Can we do it?” Do we have the technical know-how to make this concept? Is it feasible? Do we have the intellectual property? Are there regulatory or legal barriers? This step is the implementation filter because once again, if you have a great idea in theory but no way to make it, don’t waste any more time on it.
If you pass through both filters, you move on to the adaptation step, where you allow yourself some degree of freedom to modify the concept to make it even stronger and deliver even more value. You may have to iterate through these steps several times before you end up with what I would consider an idea.
To be a great innovator, you need to be a “two way” innovator. Learning the Function Follows Form process will help you do just that.

Which SIT Technique Should I Use?

Published date: May 6, 2015 в 8:54 am

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SIT is a collection of five techniques and a set of principles to help generate quality ideas on demand. One of the challenges you can have is deciding which technique to use. So here are some rules of thumb to get you started.
At the start of any project, I generally recommend using the Subtraction technique. It helps people get comfortable with the SIT method because it challenges their assumption about creativity and it exposes their fixedness. Subtraction is very useful when your starting point is well understood or the product or service is well established. It’s also great when you’re dealing with a complex product or service. As you subtract components out of complex products, it helps clarify what the component does and how it performs it’s role.
After you’ve applied one of the other techniques, I recommend turning to Task Unification. That’s because it tends to strengthen ideas by adding substance to them. This is especially true of Subtraction. With Subtraction, you can replace the subtracted component with something from the closed world.
This in a sense is using Task Unification. When you apply Task Unification by itself though, it will force you to consider non-obvious components for an additional role. It’s also a great technique when you have many tight constraints to deal with. It forces you to do more with less.
If you’re innovating a work process, I like to use Multiplication. It’s an excellent tool to help you see redundancies or opportunities to improve a process. It’s also great when you’re list of components is a bit short. Multiplication is a great tool for problem solving. But when you apply it to a problem situation, be sure to take the component that seems to be causing the problem and make a copy of it. That seems counter-intuitive but you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what it can produce.
Division is the technique of choice when dealing with a process or service. It’s great for innovating a manufacturing process, for example. But don’t think division is only for processes or services. It can be quite powerful in new product innovation as well. Also be sure to use Division when you suspect strong structural fixedness at play. That usually happens when you’re dealing with rigorous standards or well entrenched structures in your products and services. Applying the Division technique will expose that fixedness and help you and your colleagues break it.
Finally, use Attribute Dependency when you have a relatively new product or when you want to create smart adaptable products. It’s a great tool when you want to create extensions to your product line. The technique forces you to consider new connections between two unrelated components within the same product. And many times, this yields some very clever features that your customers would love.
People often ask me, which of the five techniques is my personal favorite. That’s like asking someone, which of their children is their favorite. To be honest just, like children, the techniques of the SIT method are all unique and they all have tremendous potential. I suggest you take advantage of them all.

Innovation Sighting: Buttons That Lie and the Subtraction Technique

Published date: April 20, 2015 в 10:30 am

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Think about how often you push buttons during the normal course of a day, at home, in our car, and elsewhere – elevators, crosswalks, and so on.
Did you ever stop to wonder how many of those buttons you push don’t actually work? It’s called a placebo button – it seems to have functionality, but actually has no effect when pressed.
It’s a perfect example of the Subtraction Technique, one of five in the innovation method, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). Subtraction works by removing an element of the system that seemed essentially to identity some new value or benefit.
So what’s the benefit of a button that doesn’t work? Psychologists say that it gives people the illusion of control, defined as the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events; for example, it occurs when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence. We push a button, something happens, so we think, post hoc, that we caused it. Many people argue that we actually benefit from the illusion that we are in control of something – even when, from the observer’s point of view, we’re not.

The beauty of the Subtraction Technique is that you can also replace the missing element with something from the Closed World, an invisible boundary around the problem. As reported by BBC, here are some interesting examples of Subtraction with Replacement:

“The truth is that technology has long been deceiving us. Sometimes this is ethically questionable, but in other cases the user benefits from a sense of control and reassurance that the system is working as it should. Computer scientist Eytan Adar at the University of Michigan has described a series of fascinating “benevolent deceptions” in a paper co-written with two Microsoft researchers. Take the 1960s 1ESS telephone system for instance. After dialling, a caller’s connection would sometimes fail to go through properly. Instead of a dead tone or error noise, the system would instead simply route the call to a completely different person. “The caller, thinking that she had simply misdialled, would hang up and try again: disruption decreased and the illusion of an infallible phone system preserved,” notes the paper.”

To get the most out of the Subtraction Technique, you follow five steps:

  1. List the product’s or service’s internal components.
  2. Select an essential component and imagine removing it. There are two ways: a. Full Subtraction. The entire component is removed. b. Partial Subtraction. Take one of the features or functions of the component away or diminish it in some way.
  3. Visualize the resulting concept (no matter how strange it seems).
  4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this new product or service, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge? After you’ve considered the concept “as is” (without that essential component), try replacing the function with something from the Closed World (but not with the original component). You can replace the component with either an internal or external component. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values of the revised concept?
  5. If you decide that this new product or service is valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create these new products? Perform these new services? Why or why not? Is there any way to refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

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