Посты с тэгом: subtraction technique

Innovation Sighting: Subtraction in Email

Published date: October 20, 2014 в 3:00 am

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The only thing worse than having too many emails is getting very long ones. When I open an email and see a long-winded message followed by a chain of other emails that have to be read as well, I dread it. After all, brevity is a virtue, and I value those emails that are short and efficient.

Now there’s a new app that helps manage the problem, and it is a great example of the Subtraction Technique, one of five in the innovation method, Systematic Inventive Thinking. It’s called “MailTime.” MailTime re-formats and summarizes your mails into a messaging conversation view. It redesigns the way you assign tasks helps you to track information easier.

I downloaded the app, and I love it. Here’s how it works:

Email replies are annoyingly formatted as a series of redundant transcripts, while text messages are nicely displayed as simple back-and-forth conversations. But MailTime makes work and personal email on your smartphone as quick, easy, and fun as sending text messages. MailTime features include:

  • CHAT BUBBLE FORMATTING: Read your email messages in an attractive “chat view,” while also retaining the ability to see the original email thread if desired.
  • ONE CLICK TO-DOS: Quickly assign to-do items for yourself and for others directly from your inbox, plus easily track the status of each pending task.
  • ‘TOO LONG’ EMAIL ALERTS: Just like Twitter prevents you from writing more than 140 characters, MailTime warns you if your email message is too long to be effective (but you can still send it if you want).

To get the most out of the Subtraction technique, you follow five basic 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.

The Partial Subtraction Technique: Betty Crocker’s Egg

Published date: January 20, 2014 в 9:17 am

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In the 1950s, General Mills launched a line of cake mixes under the famous Betty Crocker brand. The cake mixes included all the dry ingredients in the package, plus milk and eggs in powdered form. All you needed was to add water, mix it all together, and stick the pan in the oven. For busy homemakers, it saved time and effort, and the recipe was virtually error free. General Mills had a sure winner on its hands.
Or so it thought. Despite the many benefits of the new product, it did not sell well. Even the iconic and trusted Betty Crocker brand could not convince homemakers to adopt the new product.
General Mills brought in a team of psychologists. Something unusual was going on. The company needed to make its next move very carefully if it was going to get this product off the ground.
Why were consumers resisting it? The short answer: guilt. The psychologists concluded that average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product.
General Mills had to act fast. Like most marketing-minded companies, it might have considered an advertising campaign to address the guilt issue head on, for example. Imagine a series of commercials explaining that saving time in the kitchen with instant cake mixes allowed housewives to do other valuable things for their families. The commercials would show how smart it was to use such an innovative product.
Against all marketing conventional wisdom, General Mills revised the product instead, making it less convenient. The housewife was charged with adding water and a real egg to the ingredients, creating the perception that the powdered egg had been subtracted. General Mills relaunched the new product with the slogan “Add an Egg.” Sales of Betty Crocker instant cake mix soared.
Why would such a simple thing have such a large effect? First, doing a little more work made women feel less guilty while still saving time. Also, the extra work meant that women had invested time and effort in the process, creating a sense of ownership. The simple act of replacing the powdered egg with a real egg made the creation of the cake more fulfilling and meaningful. You could even argue that an egg has connotations of life and birth, and that the housewife “gives birth” to her tasty creation. Okay, that may sound a bit far fetched. But you can’t argue that this new approach changed everything.
Betty Crocker’s egg teaches us a powerful lesson about consumer psychology. Many other companies sell goods and services that come prepackaged. They too might be able to innovate with the Subtraction technique by taking out a key component and adding back a little activity for the consumer.
 
From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

Inside the Box: “Oh, This Is Going to Be Addictive”

Published date: July 15, 2013 в 11:39 am

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When you use Subtraction, you don’t always have to eliminate the
component. There is also what we call “Partial Subtraction.” It is a valid
technique as long as the product or service that remains delivers a new
benefit. To deploy Partial Subtraction, you pick a component and then
eliminate a specific feature of that component. Consider the case of
Twitter, a microblogging application used by hundreds of millions of
people worldwide. By simply restricting each tweet to 140 characters,
Twitter has become a vast digital conversation about what individuals
around the globe are thinking and doing. A Partial Subtraction of
the traditional blog down to 140 characters dramatically increased the
volume of and participation in this Internet phenomenon. How did it
happen?

Twitter founders Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, and others knew that the
concept was right and that they had a potential hit on their hands. Their
intent was to create a service that allowed people to send text messages
to many friends at one time. Originally, Twitter was supposed to be only
a way for people to easily update their friends on their current status.

But when attempting to build a service with text messaging as
its foundation, the Twitter team ran into challenges. First, texts were
expensive. On top of that, phone companies imposed a limit on the
size of text messages. Any text message of more than 160 characters is
automatically split into two messages. So the first thing that the Twitter
founders did was to place a limit on the number of characters in a
short message service (SMS) text (now called a “tweet”). They Partially
Subtracted text messages by reducing the size to 140. That left room for the sender’s user name and the colon in front of the message. In February 2007, Dorsey wrote, “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

He was right. Today more than 100 million users subscribe to Twitter. The Twitter website gets more than 400 million unique visitors each month. It has become the global “listening post” when real-time events such as the March 2011 Japanese tsunami and the Egyptian revolution two months earlier are happening. Glass said in an interview, “You know what’s awesome about this thing? It makes you feel like you’re right with that person. It’s a whole emotional impact. You feel like you’re connected.”

Partial Subtraction can create just as much value as the full Subtraction Technique. Partial Subtractions have another advantage. Sometimes you can convince skeptics to do a Partial Subtraction rather than stripping out a component completely to get them on board.

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