Посты с тэгом: SIT

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.

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 Creative Versatility of the Task Unification Technique

Published date: May 25, 2015 в 2:16 pm

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It’s hard for me not to play favorites when it comes to the five creativity techniques of the SIT method. After all, they’re just like children – each is unique with their own potential and personality. But when it comes to versatility, the one that may do it the best is Task Unification. It tends to produce ideas that are both clever and resourceful, often harnessing resources in the immediate vicinity of the problem in a unique. These ideas tend to make you slap your forehead and say, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?”
Task Unification is defined as “assigning an additional job to an existing resource.” That resource could a component within the product or service, or something else nearby. Here are three very different examples, but each one clearly exhibits the Task Unification pattern.
The Aivvy Q is a pair of headphones that keeps your music within the unit itself. There’s no need to plug into an external player or smartphone. Here’s how it works:

The next is called Nerdalize. It works by taking heat from computer servers and using it to heat homes. Take a look at this short video.

And finally, here is Bioconcrete. It uses bacteria to heal itself in case it cracks. If that happens, the bacteria  germinate, multiply and feed on the lactate, and in doing so they combine the calcium with carbonate ions to form calcite, or limestone, which closes up the cracks. Take a look:

Now THAT is versatile!
Learn all five techniques at Lynda.com.
 
 
 
 

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?

Learn how all five techniques can help you innovate – on demand.

Innovation Sighting: The Cashless ATM Machine

Published date: April 13, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Who would use a cashless ATM? It seems like a ridiculous idea, because that’s the whole point of using an ATM – getting cash.
That will all change with the RTM (Retail-Teller-Machine). It works just like an ATM. Instead of dispensing cash, the RTM prints a secure ticket that is exchanged for cash. RTMs are located inside any store and provide a full range of Banking services.
Aravinda Korala, KAL’s CEO said: “RTMs are low-cost authorization-machines that are ideal for in-branch use. The customer can take his time to browse the bank’s services, read any available targeted messages, speak to a video teller and make a final transaction selection without pressure, and then commit his choice to a secure voucher. This voucher can then be fulfilled in a few seconds, either automatically at a Teller Cash Recycler/ATM or manually at a teller.”
It’s a perfect example of the Subtraction Technique, one of five in the innovation method, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). It’s also a great example of the Closed World Principle. Here’s how it works:

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?

Learn how all five techniques can help you innovate – on demand.

Innovation Sighting: Tales of Things

Published date: April 6, 2015 в 1:21 pm

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One way you can use the Task Unification Technique is to make an internal component take on the function of an external component in a Closed World. In effect, the internal component “steals” the external component’s function.
Five universities in the United Kingdom got together and created a way for people to add stories to their own treasured objects. The treasured objects have the additional task of relating their stories to others. Future generations will thus have a greater understanding of a family heirloom’s past. They can even track their heirlooms after they have passed them on to the next generation. These objects will also be able to update previous owners on their progress through a live Twitter feed.
This project was dubbed Tales of Things, and includes both a software application and an online service that allow you to share and follow the “life stories” of personal objects. Tales of Things adds value to people’s lives in two ways: First, people have a way to assign more significance to their own possessions. Second, as people place more importance on the objects that are already parts of their lives, family and friends may think twice before throwing away something, and instead try to find new uses for it.
Here’s how it works. By photographing an object and attaching a QR code to the object, you enable anyone to scan it using a smart phone or other mobile device, and immediately view its history; read stories, tips, or advice about it; and attach his or her own notes, photos, video, or audio to it.
What’s the point of this? Imagine that your grandfather gives you an antique hammer that has been in the family for generations. Your great-great grandparents used it to build their home. Your great grandfather used it to hammer nails into the frame of the four-poster bed in which your parents still sleep. You treasure the object—and, even more, the fact that with it your grandfather gave you a written history of the hammer, a history that family members had been carefully preserving for more than a hundred years. Time passes. You use the hammer to build your kids a playhouse, to construct a dog kennel for your beloved golden retriever, and for other projects. Like your ancestors, you take time to write down for your children all the special stories related to the hammer. Then you give it to your son. You also hand him the historical record—by this time, almost two hundred pages long—and request that he continue the tradition. Tales of Things makes this sort of legacy not only possible but also easy.
Tales of Things uses Task Unification: taking a task (recording and passing on family stories about the hammer) that was formerly performed by an external component (ancestors) and assigning it to an internal component (the hammer itself ). In effect, the internal component steals the task from the external component.
The founders of Tales of Things have big plans for the future. They are especially interested in getting businesses hooked on the idea. They believe that companies will be able to use the service to engage customers at a deeper level than is now possible. Consumers can share with one another opinions and tips about products. Industries with vibrant secondary markets—say, automobiles or industrial equipment—can document the life cycle of a given car or table drill.
 
 
From “Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results”
 
 

Innovation Training: The Leadership Elixer

Published date: March 23, 2015 в 12:02 pm

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Training programs, by design, are meant to provoke and cause changes. Changes can be in the skills, attitudes, behaviors, or knowledge of the participants. For leadership training programs, the ability to “think differently” seems to be at the top of many companies’ list of priorities.
So how do you think differently and creatively? By using cognitive thinking tools that re-pattern how you see situations and potential opportunities. It is the Holy Grail, the magic elixir that can transform a talented leader into a great one.
The good news is that humans follow patterns in many domains including creativity. Research by Dr. Jacob Goldenberg suggests that or thousands of years, inventors have embedded five simple patterns into their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are the “DNA” of products that can be extracted and applied to any product or service to create new-to-the-world innovations.
The five patterns are:

  • Subtraction: Innovative products and services tend to have had something removed, usually something that was previously thought to be essential to use the product or service. The original Sony Walkman had the recording function subtracted, defying all logic to the idea of a “recorder.” Even Sony’s chairman and inventor of the Walkman, Akio Morita, was surprised by the market’s enthusiastic response.
  • Task Unification: Innovative products and services tend to have had certain tasks brought together and “unified” within one component of the product or service, usually a component that was previously thought to be unrelated to that task. Crowdsourcing, for example, leverages large groups of people by tasking them to generate insights or tasks, sometimes without even realizing it.
  • Multiplication: Innovative products and services tend to have had a component copied but changed in some way, usually in a way that initially seemed unnecessary or redundant. Many innovations in cameras, including the basis of photography itself, are based on copying a component and then changing it. For example, a double flash when snapping a photo reduces the likelihood of “red-eye.”
  • Division: Innovative products and services tend to have had a component divided out of the product or service and placed back somewhere into the usage situation, usually in a way that initially seemed unproductive or unworkable. Dividing out the function of a refrigerator drawer and placing it somewhere else in the kitchen creates a cooling drawer.
  • Attribute Dependency: Innovative products and services tend to have had two attributes correlated with each other, usually attributes that previously seemed unrelated. As one attribute changes, another changes. Transition sunglasses, for example, get darker as the outside light gets brighter.

Using these patterns correctly relies on two key ideas. The first idea is that you have to re-train the way your brain thinks about problem solving. Most people think the way to innovate is by starting with a well-defined problem and then thinking of solutions. In our method, it is just the opposite. We start with an abstract, conceptual solution and then work back to the problem that it solves. Therefore, we have to learn how to reverse the usual way our brain works in innovation.
This process is called “Function Follows Form,” first reported in 1992 by psychologist Ronald Finke. He recognized that there are two directions of thinking: from the problem-to-the-solution and from the solution-to-the-problem. Finke discovered people are actually better at searching for benefits for given configurations (starting with a solution) than at finding the best configuration for a given benefit (starting with the problem).
The second key idea to using patterns is the starting point. It is an idea called The Closed World. We tend to be most surprised with those ideas “right under noses,” that are connected in some way to our current reality or view of the world. This is counterintuitive because most people think you need to get way outside their current domain to be innovative. Methods like brainstorming and SCAMPER use random stimulus to push you “outside the box” for new and inventive ideas. Just the opposite is true. The most surprising ideas (“Gee, I never would have thought of that!”) are right nearby.
We have a nickname for The Closed World…we call it Inside the Box.

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