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