lab Archives - Systematic Inventive Thinking

The LAB: Innovating Twitter with S.I.T. (February 2012)

Published date: February 27, 2012 в 3:00 am

Tags: apps,business model,corporate innovation method,lab,SIT,twitter

Twitter continues to evolve with some 220 million users tweeting collectively 250 million times a day. It is a vast social network that has become the world’s “listening post” for events happening everywhere. Major news organizations rely on Twitter to give early warning to breaking stories.

For this month’s LAB, we will apply all five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking to Twitter. Our goal will be to create new features and innovations with the main Twitter platform as well as to create completely new applications related to Twitter. Many “apps” tied to Twitter already exist, and you can find a thorough inventory here.

This is not the first time we have applied SIT to Twitter. See my March 2009 post about using the innovation method on how to monetize Twitter. Since then, not much has changed in their business model.

To use S.I.T., we start with the components of Twitter:
1.    Profile
2.    Photo
3.    People followed
4.    Followers
5.    Hashtags
6.    Tweets
7.    Re-tweets
8.    Groups
9.    Search
10. Feeds
11. Client
12. API

We apply each of the five templates of S.I.T. one at a time to create new configurations. We work backwards to identify potential benefits or new markets with that configuration. In each example below, I apply a template and then try identify whether an app already exists. This is a way to check the validity of the templates to create new value:

The LAB: Innovating a Fishing Pole with Multiplication (November 2008)

Published date: November 30, 2008 в 8:21 am

Written by: boydadmin

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: fishing,innovation method,lab,multiplication,pole,rod

Can you innovate a mature product? Consider the fishing pole which dates back to the ancient Egyptians – it certainly qualifies as a mature product. This month’s LAB will innovate it by using the systematic innovation method called Multiplication.

Fishing is the largest sporting activity in the U.S. with 40 million participants, far more than golf or tennis combined, the next two on the list. Recreational fishing generates more than $125 billion in economic output and more than one million American jobs. If sport fishing were a corporation, it would rank above Bank of America or IBM on the Fortune 100 list of largest American companies. The pathway to growth for any large, mature industry is: innovation!

We start by listing the components of the product. We then make a copy (or copies) of each component, one at a time. The new copies must be different in some way from the original component. We then use Function Follows Form and work backwards to envision what the “pre-inventive form” could be used for. We innovate by taking something that doesn’t make sense at first, then find a legitimate purpose for it. Here is what I came up with (about an hour’s worth of work):

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The LAB: Innovating Twitter with S.I.T. (February 2012)

The LAB: Innovating a Fishing Pole with Multiplication (November 2008)

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