The LAB: Innovating Shredded Wheat with S.I.T. (July 2009)
“We put the ‘NO’ in innovation!” The good people at Post Cereal have a new twist on innovation…NOT innovating as a statement of the product’s ubiquity and staying power. “Some things just weren’t meant to be innovated.”
How could I resist? It was just too tempting to use systematic innovation on this simple product, especially in light of the perception that it should not be innovated. Though the ad campaign is a spoof, I wonder just how much the people at Post really believe this. What if shredded wheat could be innovated to create new growth potential for this 116 year old product?
Here is a brief history from Wikipedia:
Henry Perky invented shredded wheat cereal in 1893. The wheat is first cooked in water until its moisture content reaches about 50%. It is then tempered, allowing moisture to diffuse evenly into the grain. The grain then passes through a set of rollers with grooves in one side, yielding a web of shredded wheat strands. Many webs are stacked together, and this moist stack of strands is crimped at regular intervals to produce individual pieces of cereal with the strands attached at each end. These then go into an oven, where they are baked until their moisture content is reduced to 5%.
I’ll use all five templates of the Systematic Inventive Thinking method to see what new opportunities we can uncover.