Посты с тэгом: multiplication

Be Fruitful and Multiply: The Multiplication Technique

Published date: July 14, 2014 в 9:34 am

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A common problem in photography is the occurrence of red-eye, like you see here. Redeye happens when the flash of a camera goes into the eyeball. It hits the back of your eye which has a lot of tiny blood vessels. The light picks up the red color from the blood in these vessels, and then it bounces straight back into your camera lens. Your friends get that eerie, red-eye look.

But today’s cameras have a clever and simple way to defeat redeye. They have a dual flash. The first flash causes the person’s pupil to constrict enough so that very little light will get in. At that exact moment, the second flash goes off and lights up the subject matter. Voila! No redeye.
This innovation is a classic example of the multiplication technique. The Multiplication Technique is defined as copying an element already existing in the product or service but changing it in some counterintuitive way.
To use the technique, begin by listing the components of the product, process, or service. You pick one of those components, make a copy of it. You keep the original component as is, but the copied component is changed. That creates the virtual product. Using Function Follows Form, you look for potential benefits, and you modify or adapt the concept to improve it to yield an innovative idea.
NoticeableHere are some examples of multiplication. The consumer products company, Procter & Gamble, used the Multiplication Technique to create the Febreze Noticeable Air Freshener. It’s called Noticeable because it has a clever way to keep you smelling the scent. After a period of time, your nose becomes too accustomed to a smell, and the brain shuts it out. But this product gets around that. It has not one, but two different scents. The first scent pulses out into the room, but then stops right about the time your nose stops recognizing it. Just then, the second scent starts pulsing out into the room. Your nose picks up where the other one left off. Pretty clever.
Trac2Here’s another example. Gillette multiplied the razor blade of a straight edge razor to create the TRAC II Twin Blade Shaving System. The first blade gently lifts the whisker so that the second blade can cut off the whisker for a closer shave. The copied component is different in its location and function. By the way, you may have noticed Gillette and other companies have added even more blades to their razors. They have as many as five blades, but they don’t really do anything differently than the first one. I don’t consider that a creative idea, but rather just a way to improve performance.
Measuring cupLook at this measuring cup. It has two sets of measurements along the side. It has its original measurements, and a second set of measurements at an odd angle around the perimeter of the cup. Why would that be valuable? As you tilt the cup to pour liquid, the second set of measurements allows you to continue measuring the amount of liquid. That’s very convenient.
Multiplication accounts for many new products and services, and it’s straightforward to use. You want to make this powerful technique part of your innovation arsenal.

Innovation Sighting: SIT Patterns in the Next Wave in Digital Photography

Published date: October 8, 2012 в 9:29 am

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It might surprise you that a single innovation pattern, Multiplication, formed the premise of all photography.  The cameras you use today evolved from Multiplication.  The entire photography industry continues to benefit thanks to this powerful pattern.

Multiplication is one of five simple patterns innovators have used for thousands of years.  These patterns are the basis of Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method that channels your thinking and regulates the ideation process.  The method works by taking a product, service, or process and applying a pattern to it.  This changes the starting point.  It morphs the product into something weird, perhaps unrecognizable.  With this altered configuration (we call the Virtual Product), you work backwards to link it to a problem that it addresses or new benefit it delivers.  The process is called Function Follows Form.

The photography industry continues to evolve thanks to more of the SIT patterns.  At this years Photokina show in Cologne, Germany, camera makers unveiled their latest and greatest inventions.  Here is an example of the Subtraction pattern in the new wave of digital photography (as reported by CNET):

The mirrorless cameras leave out the reflex mirror of SLRs, which use it to bounce light into the viewfinder so a photographer can see through the camera’s lens. When it’s time to take a photo, the SLR mirror flips up out of the way, the shutter opens, the light hits the image sensor, then the mirror flips back down.With mirrorless cameras, the light just goes straight to the image sensor all the time. If there’s a viewfinder at all, it’s an electronic display, often an optional accessory. The design is simpler, smaller, and all the rage in the industry.

As camera-enabled smartphones have grown in popularity, consumers have learned to love the ability to photograph and then immediately share their photo over the Internet.  Now, traditional camera makers are responding to the threat in an interesting way.  Rather than compete head-to-head with smartphones, they are using the Task Unification pattern instead.  Task Unification works by “assigning an additional job to an existing resource within the Closed World (where the product or service is being consumed).  See if you can spot the Task Unification in this new crop of cameras:

Wireless networking in the camera industry in general has been conspicuous by its absence, isolating cameras from people’s in-the-moment sharing activities.  Curiously, though, the very smartphones that have put the camera industry so much on the defensive are proving to be its savior, too. Cameras now can connect directly to those smartphones, letting the two cooperate rather than compete. Canon’s new SLR, the EOS 6D announced at Photokina, has Wi-Fi built in; with the Canon EOS Remote app for iOS and Android, people can remotely operate the camera, review photos even while the camera is stashed away in luggage, and most importantly, transfer photos to a smartphone for quick sharing.  Another new Wi-Fi-enabled Canon camera is the PowerShot S110. For this model — and doubtless others to come — smartphone users can connect over Wi-Fi with the CameraWindow app for iOS or for Android. That lets people share their photos immediately using a phone.

Innovation Sighting: Multiplication in Photography

Published date: December 19, 2011 в 3:00 am

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Pick up a camera and see how many innovations you can find in it.  That shouldn’t be hard.  There are lots of them.  The camera, like all inventions, started with a core idea.  From there, it continued to evolve and improve though time.  It might surprise you that a single innovation pattern, Multiplication, formed the premise of all photography.  The cameras you use today evolved from multiplication.  The entire photography industry continues to benefit thanks to this powerful pattern.

Multiplication is one of five simple patterns innovators have used for thousands of years.  These patterns are the basis of Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method that channels your thinking and regulates the ideation process.  The method works by taking a product, service, or process and applying a pattern to it.  This changes the starting point.  It morphs the product into something weird, perhaps unrecognizable.  With this altered configuration (we call the Virtual Product), you work backwards to link it to a problem that it addresses or new benefit it delivers.  The process is called Function Follows Form.

Photography, in essence, is multiplying the subject onto a piece of paper.  Something unique happens when light from an object passes through a pinhole. A small image of that object will be projected on any surface on the other side of the pinhole – only upside down. This “pinhole effect” was discovered thousands of years ago. Aristotle noted in 4 BC that “sunlight travelling through small openings between the leaves of a tree, the holes of a sieve, the openings wickerwork, and even interlaced fingers will create circular patches of light on the ground.”  From that humble beginning, we have photography.  Hardly a day goes without looking at an image of something: a framed family photo, a magazine cover, an outdoor billboard.  Images are all around us.

Let’s get back to cameras.  Were you able to find these innovations?

  • Red Eye Reduction:  In 1993, the Vivitar Corporation patented a novel way to beat red eye. The solution: a camera with a dual flash.  The first flash constricts the subjects’ pupils. Then the camera shoots off a second, “multiplied,” flash that provides sufficient light for the actual photograph. Since the subjects’ pupils are slightly closed from the initial flash, no red eye appears in the final image.
  • View Finders:  Modern cameras have not only the traditional viewfinder to line up a shot, but also an LCD  version.  This allows you to compose your image while seeing more of what’s going on around you.
  • Aperture: Pull out your smart phone and you will see one camera aperture on the back and another on the front of the phone facing you.  Why?  It’s seems obvious in hindsight.  The second aperture allows you to photograph your favorite subject…you!
  • Stereoscopy:  Oliver Wendell Holmes invented the stereoscope viewer in 1861. It creates the illusion of depth in an image by presenting two offset images separately to the viewer’s left and right eyes.  Think about that next time you see a 3D movie.
  • Panorama: Thomas Sutton patented the first panoramic camera in 1859. By taking multiple photos of the same scene, he was able to merge them together to create a wide screen, panoramic view.
  • Film Negatives: Developing paper film creates a negative of the image – the colors are reversed.  When the negative film is developed again using the same process, images come out as “positives.”  The two-step process allow photographers to create multiple copies of the positive film.
  • Color Film: Taking three photos of an image but each with a different colored filter –  red,  green, and blue – allows them to be combined to yield a color image.
  • Lenses: Photographers use a variety of lenses depending on the particular effect they want to achieve: close up, far away, wide angle, and so on.
  • Movies:  In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge used 24 cameras to photograph a galloping horse.  Each camera captured the horse in a different state of motion. When he combined the images, the horse appeared to be galloping. Muybridge created the first “moving picture.” Multiplication launched not one, but two global industries.

 

Innovation Sighting: The Multiplication Template and Virtual Reality

Published date: December 28, 2009 в 2:00 am

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People are fascinated with the idea of human cloning after researchers cloned a sheep in 1997.  The debate about the risks and benefits of human cloning rages on.  What if you could clone yourself in a virtual sense?  Even better, imagine cloning yourself into another person’s body?  What would you feel?  What would you learn?  How would your life be better?

Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist from Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has pioneered a method of allowing us to get out of our bodies and into the body of someone else…virtually…so that you sense whatever the other person senses.
We “clone” ourselves everyday with simple technologies like a mirror or camera. But this is different.  This technique clones you into another form so you can experience life from that point-of-view.  From CNN:

This is an example of the innovation template, Multiplication.
It works by taking a component of a product or service, then creating copies of it that are different in some way.  Using SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM innovation, we imagine potential benefits of the hypothetical solution.  Dr. Ehrsson believes this technique could help us improve our self-esteem.  It might help amputees put a sense of feeling into a prosthetic limb.  Or it might help us identify with other cultural, racial, or gender groups by “living” in their bodies.

This last idea is particularly intriguing.  Imagine you had the ability to mandate when someone else uses the technique to become YOU.  You would use this is critical situations when it is essential the other person understands your point-of-view: spouse, lawyer, negotiating partner, customer, boss, etc.  The ultimate cloning experience is not making another copy of yourself, but rather having others clone to become you.

Innovation Sighting: Multiplication at Taylor Guitars

Published date: July 19, 2009 в 8:30 am

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Here is an example of the Multiplication Template, one of five in the corporate innovation method called S.I.T..  It is from the Taylor Guitars, one of the leading companies in the category and one of the most innovative.  The Multiplication Template makes copies of components but changes the copies in some way from the original.  Taylor has multiplied the pickguard of their electric guitar series, but changed the configuration with different styles of magnetic pickups (the part that translates the sound from the strings).  It is a clever idea because guitar owners can re-configure their guitar for different playing situations.  It helps Taylor Guitar extend their product reach into the aftermarket for guitar parts and maintain a more loyal following of customers.

 

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

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

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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):

The LAB: Multiplication (August 2008)

Published date: August 31, 2008 в 10:05 am

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The Multiplication tool is one of the five powerful thinking tools taught to me by the folks at Systematic Inventive Thinking. I like this tool because it is simple and yields great results.  Even children can learn it.

Multiplication works by taking a component of the product, service, strategy, etc, and then making one or several copies of it.  But the copy must be changed in some way from the original component.  The original component is still intact, unchanged.  Now using Function Follows Form, we work backwards to take this hypothetical solution and find a problem that it solves.

One of our blog readers, Jim Doherty of the Grabbit Tool Company, agreed to let me use their main product, the EZ Grabbit Tarp Holder, for this month’s LAB.  I bought a set at Ace Hardware last night, and used the Multiplication tool just now to create some new product ideas.  Here is a demonstration of the EZ Grabbit:


We start Multiplication by making a list of the components:

  1. Sleeve
  2. Dogbone
  3. Chord
  4. Grip
  5. Lock

Make a copy or several copies of each component, one at a time, and change something about it.  What would be the benefit or potential use of the product with this new, changed component?  Here are some ideas:

  1. Two sleeves, but the second sleeve is attached, back-to-back, to the original sleeve.  This would allow a second tarp to be attached to another one (with its own dogbone).  There could be three or perhaps even four sleeves, arranged in quadrant style (with the openings facing out), so multiple tarps could be attached.  The copied sleeve could be longer than the original, allowing different tarp configurations.
  2. Multiple dogbones, but each is optimized for different types of material (tarp, plastic, terry cloth, cotton, denim, etc) to prevent damage, improve grip, etc.
  3. Multiple chords, each coming out of the same dogbone with its own hole, to allow different attachment points.
  4. Two grips, the second one attaches to the first one to allow it to be hung from a hook.
  5. Two locking mechanisms, the second one used to attach to the fabric temporarily so it does not get lost or slide around during placement.

Once we have raw ideas like these, it’s a good idea to get early customer feedback and perhaps build some working prototypes to let customers envision using the new product.  The ideas above are incremental innovations to the product’s original category, so it can be valuable to get customer feedback about potential uses of the new embodiments outside the category to find breakthrough ideas as well.

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