Посты с тэгом: inside the box

What Consumers Must Learn to Adopt New Innovations

Published date: August 24, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Think about the last time you bought a car or perhaps a computer. Now, think about the next time you’ll buy one of those items. Are you going to do it exactly the same way as before? If you’re like most consumers, the answer is probably not. That’s because you learned some things from the first experience that will improve your purchasing behavior on the next experience. That’s especially true with new, innovative products.
As a marketer, you need to understand how people learn about being a consumer and what they do with that knowledge once they learn it. Marketers can play a key role in helping consumers be better at it. After all, we’re not born to be consumers. Consumer behavior is something we have to learn if we ever want to buy products and services.
Let’s look at what consumers have to learn. First, they need to have at least general product knowledge before they’ll buy it. Think about buying a car. Most people have no idea how a car’s engine works, but they certainly know how to drive a car, what kinds of features they might expect, and how a car handles on the road. Over time, they gain more knowledge about cars and how they work, how to maintain them, and so on.
Consumers also need to have brand knowledge. The starting point for learning about brands is basic awareness. That means that you’ve heard of it and may recognize its logo, but you don’t know much about it. But over time, as you learn more about it, you begin to associate certain characteristics with it. Eventually, you know a lot about the brand and its core brand promise. Try this. Write down on a piece of paper all the brands of automobiles that you can recall. Now, beside each brand, write down what it stands for and write at least one characteristic about it. You should see pretty quickly that your knowledge of brands varies quite a bit. That’s typical of most consumers.
Next, consumers have to have purchasing knowledge. That means they have to know how to buy the product, where to buy, and what it’ll cost in terms of the pricing and other factors like financing. It may seem obvious, but the first time you buy something, you have to learn these factors. If I told you to go out and buy a piece of medical equipment for treating gall bladders, you’d have to do a lot of research unless you’re a medical professional now.
Once a consumer buys something, they have to have consumption knowledge. That means they have to learn how to use a product to get the full benefits from it. It also might include learning how to maintain the product or even dispose of it. Think about buying a new car. If you’re like me, it takes quite a while to learn all about the new features and benefits of today’s cars. With an owner’s manual this thick, I still don’t use many features of my new car. For marketers, this is important because it may lead the consumer to think they’re not getting their money’s worth if they’re not using a product to its fullest potential. You want your customers to be satisfied, so you have to make sure they learn the right way to consume your product.
Finally, consumers need to have self-knowledge. It may sound obvious, but the more a person knows about their personal tastes, their preferences, and their strengths and weakness, the more effective they’ll be at buying products and services that satisfy their needs.
As a marketer, you’re really an educator. And your students? Those are your customers. The more you can help them learn these factors, the more successful you’ll be at satisfying them.
 
 
 

Innovation Sighting: Adjustable Airline Seats

Published date: August 17, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Here’s a nice example of the Attribute Dependency Technique, one of five in the innovation method called Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). It’s a great tool to make products and services that are “smart.” They adjust and learn, then adapt their performance to suit the needs of the user. Attribute Dependency accounts for the majority of innovative products and services, according to research conducted by my co-author, Dr. Jacob Goldenberg.
From Fox News:

The airline legroom wars may finally be coming to an end.
Engineering firm B/E Aerospace has filed a patent for a “legroom adjustable” seat design that allows flight attendants to move a seat forward or back depending on the size of a passenger, reports the Telegraph.
The seats, which all have moveable wheels, sit on rail tracks lining the aircraft floor. If a taller man or woman is seated in front of a child, for example, the cabin crew will have the ability to move an occupant’s seat several inches back via smartphone or tablet, allowing for extra legroom.
“While passengers come in many sizes, children, adolescents, adults, men, women and with large height differentials within these categories, seat spacing in the main cabin of passenger aircraft is generally uniform except at exit rows,” the designers stated in their patent application, submitted in November.
“The one size fits all seating arrangement can cause discomfort for tall passengers, while a child or relatively small adult may be seated in an identical seat at the seat pitch, with more than ample leg room and in relative comfort.”
The legroom adjustable seat, however, leaves the final spatial arrangement to the discretion of crewmembers, not individual passengers.
“Even a relatively small incremental increase in seat spacing for the tall passengers can provide additional comfort with no loss of comfort to the much smaller passengers seated in front of the tall passengers,” B/E Aerospace said.

To get the most out of the Attribute Dependency Technique, follow these steps:
1. List internal/external variables.
2. Pair variables (using a 2 x 2 matrix)

  • Internal/internal
  • Internal/external

3. Create (or break) a dependency between the variables.
4. Visualize the resulting virtual product.
5. Identify potential user needs.
6. Modify the product to improve it.

Master the Method: Innovation Suite #18

Published date: August 11, 2015 в 3:13 am

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I invite you to join the upcoming Innovation Suite  in San Francisco, November 16-18, 2015.
Innovation Suite brings together executives from around the world to share their business innovation experiences and to learn how to embed a culture of innovation within their teams and organizations.
This time around, the event will have two specialized tracks: one for Innovation Users, and another for Innovation Architects. In the Innovation User track, participants will learn how to develop an innovative mindset and learn practical tools for approaching routine work differently.
In the Innovation Architect track, participants will learn how to set up the right structure, gather the right people, and develop the right processes and mechanisms in order to embed innovation in their team, department or whole organization.
Register before August 20 to receive a 10% discount Please contact SIT LLC with any questions.
 

Consumer Driven Innovation

Published date: July 27, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Innovation is all about creating products and services that make your company more competitive in the marketplace. Those actions typically include generating ideas, creating prototypes, building the business case, and getting alignment to launch. Marketers must develop a strategy to know where to focus their resources. They must segment, target, and position the offering. Finally, they have to execute their plan by developing a coordinated set of marketing tactics including what products and services to offer, pricing, distribution approaches, and marketing communications.
There’s a lot at stake. If you get it wrong, you might be wasting a lot of money that could have been spent on other things. Even worse, you could lose valuable revenues and the profits that go along with those revenues. Long term, you might start losing customer loyalty. As you can see, you’ve got to get this right, right from the start.
One very important way to sharpen the focus of your marketing initiatives is to apply the principles and concepts of consumer behavior – how people think, decide, and act when buying things. When you embrace consumer behavior, you’re putting the customer at the center of all your marketing activities.
Here’s an example. Consumers often buy products and services that help shape the image they have of themselves. If you understand that phenomena and develop your programs to help the customer associate your product with their self-image, you’ll be more successful.
The study of consumer behavior doesn’t apply to just individual consumers like you and me. In business-to-business industries, companies buy products too. If you’re in a B2B company, you’ll need well-thought out marketing programs to reach through to these more difficult clients.
Organizations are made up of people, and guess what? The concepts of consumer behavior apply to them too. Understanding consumer behavior will sharpen your B2B marketing campaigns and make them more effective.
Think of marketing as entire spectrum of activities and decisions. It starts with strategies on how to acquire and retain customers, followed by segmenting, targeting, and positioning your offering, and then implementing the right products, at the right price, through the right channels, and promoted with the right marketing message. You can improve what you do at every point along this spectrum by applying the principles of consumer behavior.
The best marketers are those that have the customer’s interest at heart when creating new products and services, and a solid understanding of consumer behavior can help you just that.

The Attribute Dependency Technique: Three Ways to Create Smart Products

Published date: June 15, 2015 в 11:03 am

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When using the Attribute Dependency technique, you’ll reach a point in the function follows form process where it’s time to make adaptations to your concept. That’s where you try to improve the concept and put more definition around it.
One way to make adaptations with Attribute Dependency is to change the type of dependency. There are three ways to do it: passive, active and automatic. Think of these as what has to happen within the product or service for the dependency to take place. Let’s look at each type.
Mixing bowlsPassive dependencies, just as the name implies, are passive. Nothing has to happen for the dependency to take place. There doesn’t need to be an intervening element to cause the dependency.
Look around and you will see that many products and services are examples of passive dependency. Here is a simple example of mixing bowls that come in different sizes.
Now you may ask, “Is this really an example of the attribute dependency pattern?” It certainly is. As one thing changes another thing changes. In this case, as the needs of the user change, the size of the bowl changes. It’s a passive dependency, though, because the bowls simply exist in various sizes and shapes. In fact, any product that comes in different sizes such as clothing, hardware items, even homes are examples of passive attribute dependency.
Happy hourBut some dependencies require an active, intervening element to cause them to occur.  A very simple example is Happy Hour, when the price of drinks in a bar is reduced. But for this to happen, somebody has to do something. That active element, of course, is the bartender. At the appointed happy hour, let’s say 5 o’clock, the bartender simply lowers the price of the drinks presumably for an hour. Then again at 6 o’clock, the bartender raises those prices back to their normal level. Because of the active intervention, we call this an active dependency.
And finally, we have automatic dependencies. These are unique because they happen, as the name implies, automatically. The product or service is designed so that as one thing changes, the product automatically changes by itself without some intervening third-party element to make that change.
Transition sunglasses are one of the best examples of an automatic dependency. As the brightness of the light changes, the lens automatically darkens in response to that change.
Products that have this type of dependency seem almost smart. They know when it’s appropriate to change in response to some other variable, either an internal or external. The consumer doesn’t have to do anything because the product does it all by itself.
How do you know which type of dependency to use? It depends on a lot of factors such as how much convenience you want to deliver to the customer. Is it technically feasible to create a particular dependency? For example, your engineers might be able to make a mixing bowl that automatically expands as you put more things in it. But that also adds a lot of cost and complexity. It’s probably a lot easier for the customer just to grab the right size bowl to make a cake.
It also depends on how much control you may need in a situation. Do you want the customer or another person making the change? Look back at the happy hour example. You could create a cash register that automatically adjusts the price of drinks based on the time of day. The bartender wouldn’t have to think about. You would have complete control over the prices throughout the day.
Passive, active, and automatic. That’s three ways to give your customers very cool products with the Attribute Dependency technique.
 

Listen, Watch, Ask, and Involve Your Customers

Published date: June 8, 2015 в 7:54 am

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When describing the SIT method, I sometimes say it’s like using the voice of the product. That’s because SIT is based on patterns that are embedded into the products and services you see around you. If products could talk to you, they would describe the five patterns of SIT.
But there’s another important voice in business innovation: the voice of the customer. After all, that’s why you do innovation – to create new value, directly or indirectly, for your customers. A good innovator understands their needs and wants.
One of the first things you should do is listen to what customers are saying about a particular product or brand. It’s especially important to hear what customers say to other customers. That’s when they’re the most truthful and objective, even when talking to complete strangers. If you had a way to eavesdrop on a conversation between two customers, you’ll get new insights about their attitudes.
A great way to do that is to use social media. Applications like Twitter and Facebook let you hear what’s being discussed, almost as if you were standing right there with them. It’s inexpensive and it’s easy.
When you listen to customers on social media, pay close attention to the specific words or phrases they use. What emotions do they express? What beliefs do they have about a product and how it works? Whether those beliefs are true or untrue, you need to know what they’re thinking so you can design your products accordingly.
Another way to learn about your customers is to watch them. Using field research, you go into the customer’s natural setting where they use the product or service. You observe their behaviors as they do routine, ordinary activities. If you watch carefully, you’ll see things they could never have described for you in words. They’re not even aware they are doing them.
By watching them, you might learn about a new step in how they use the product. That could affect how you use the Division Technique. Or, you might become aware of a new component in their Closed World, and that might affect how you apply the Task Unification technique. Pay close attention to who else is involved, what information are they using or not using, how they prepare the product for use, and perhaps how they store it or maintain it.
A third way to get customer insights is to ask them. You’re probably familiar with marketing research tools like surveys and focus groups as a way to collect voice of the customer data. But there are two simple techniques you always want to be able to use at a moment’s notice in case you engage a customer.
The first is to use open-ended questions. An example of an open-ended question is: “What’s most important to you when using this feature of our product?”  A closed-ended question would be: “Do you like this feature of our product?” The open-ended question encourages a full, meaningful response as opposed to a closed-ended question, which encourages a short or single-word answer. You’ll get deeper insights with open-ended questions.
The second technique when talking to customers is to use laddering. Laddering means asking a series of questions, one after another, but you base the next question on the answer you received from the last one. Like climbing the rungs of a ladder, you first ask about the functional aspects of your product, then ladder up to the values the customers sees in those features.
Finally, a great way to learn about your customer’s needs is to involve them in the innovation process. Once you’ve created the virtual product using one of the five SIT techniques, you ask two specific questions. The first is should we do it? Does the new configuration deliver some new benefit? Who would want this? I can’t think of anyone better to help you answer these than your customers. After all, they stand the most to gain by a new innovation. When they see something they like, they’ll tell you or they’ll tell you how to modify the concept to make it even better.
Customers might also have new insights about the second question: Can we do it? Do we have the know how or the right material or the right processes to make this? Are there barriers that might prevent us from making this? Your customers might have some critical insight or skills about how to remove barriers or make the concept more feasible.
Listen, watch, ask, and involve. The Voice of the Customer, used along with the SIT Method, will help you become a more effective innovator.

INNOVATE! – The App That Facilitates S.I.T.

Published date: June 1, 2015 в 7:11 am

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The Innovate! Inside the Box app for iPad facilitates the use of Systematic Inventive Thinking. It explains each of the five techniques and allows users to generate creative ideas and innovations on demand.
To Use the App:
Go to How to Use the App on the Homepage to read about Systematic Inventive Thinking.
You can review how each technique works by going to Learn a Technique.
Then, go to My Innospace and look at the sample project, Refrigerator, under Current Projects. Review the Ideas List for examples of ideas generated with each technique.
You may recognize some of these from this course.
App4Go to New Innospace and create a new project. Enter the Name of product or service you want to innovate. Enter a Description of the project and hit Enter.
Next, enter the Components and Attributes of the product or service.
Select one of the five techniques to apply to the new project. You can select a technique, or select the “I’m Feeling Lucky” option.
Then step through the two buttons shown here to read each of the Virtual Products that the app creates. Use Function Follows Form to identify potential innovations. Capture new ideas discovered.
App7Enter a name of the idea. Enter a description of the idea. List the benefits. Add notes if needed, then hit Done
You can share your ideas via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
Of course, it’s always a good idea to backup your projects by going to the More link.
The innovate app is a great way to help you stay organized when you’re applying Systematic Inventive Thinking.

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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