Посты с тэгом: task unification

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification in Kitchenware

Published date: October 27, 2014 в 3:00 am

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Many “wearable tech” devices measure the calories you burn in a day. But weight watchers know that’s only half the equation. You also need an accurate count of calories consumed. Now a new device will do just that. It’s called Vessyl, a cup that will not only identify and track what you drink and how much of it, but also sense the liquid type. It will transform how we consume every ounce of liquid throughout the day.
As reported by CNET:

“Caffeine and sugar amounts, alongside calorie count and a proprietary metric for hydration called Pryme, are tracked through an app on your phone, and bits of that information are also displayed on a screen embedded within the cup itself. The display glimmers to life only when new liquids are poured in to notify you that, yes, you are drinking coffee — and here’s how much caffeine that particular brew will put into your system. A small pillar of light also tells you how drinking that particular amount of that particular liquid will hurt or help your level of hydration as well.”

It’s a great example of the Task Unification Technique, one of five in the innovation method, Systematic Inventive Thinking. Task Unification works by assigning as additional task to an existing resource.

Let’s extend the concept and imagine putting the technology in other kitchenware such as plates, knives, forks, and spoons. For example, what if your plate was divided into sections for different types of food (meats, vegetables, and so on). The plate could weigh and detect the quantity and type of food to measure calories. Perhaps it could recommend optimal amounts of food based on calories burned during the day. Or imagine a fork that sticks in food and measures the fat and calorie content. Now you’d have a way to truly balance your intake and outtake to reach those elusive weight goals.
To get the most out of the Task Unification technique, you follow five basic steps:
1. List all of the components, both internal and external, that are part of the Closed World of the product, service, or process.
2. Select a component from the list. Assign it an additional task, using one of three methods:

  • Choose an external component and use it to perform a task that the product accomplishes already
  • Choose an internal component and make it do something new or extra
  • Choose an internal component and make it perform the function of an external component, effectively “stealing” the external component’s function

3. Visualize the new (or changed) products or services.
4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge?
5. If you decide the 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 viable?

Innovation Through Task Unification

Published date: June 30, 2014 в 3:00 am

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The famous inventor, Thomas Edison, lived in a beautiful home. But something was unusual about the gate that led into his house. His visitors had to push the gate very hard to open it, and then again very hard to close it. It seemed odd that such a successful inventor like Thomas Edison wouldn’t fix his gate. Rumor has it that Thomas had attached a pump to his gate so that every time someone opened or closed it, they were pumping fresh water into the plumbing system of the house.

This is a great example of the innovation technique called Task Unification. Task Unification is defined as the assignment of additional tasks to an existing resource. That resource can be a component of a product or service. Or it can be something in the immediate vicinity of the product or service.

Think back to the story of Thomas’s gate. The gate has its primary job of letting visitors through, but it also has the additional job of pumping water. That’s not all to the story. The guests coming to visit Thomas are also a resource. They have their primary job of being friends of Thomas. But now they have the additional job of activating the gate to open and close it.

To use Task Unification, begin by listing the product’s internal components as well as the external components, the things right around where the product is being used. You select a component and assign it an additional task. That creates the virtual product. Using Function Follows Form, you look for potential benefits, and you modify or adapt the concept to improve it.

There are three ways to apply Task Unification:

One way is to have an internal component take a job of another internal component. Think of it as that component is stealing the function of the other component. Here is an example.

  • CmWhat you see here looks like an ordinary coffee maker. In fact, this product has a clever little innovation inside. The coffee maker’s filter has the additional job of measuring just the right amount of coffee to use given how much water was put in. It gives you the perfect brew every time.

You could also have an internal component take the job of an external component.

  • EasyfillNissan, the Japanese auto maker, has a nifty idea to make it easier to fill your tires with air. The car’s horn will beep to let you know when you’ve reached the right tire pressure. It’s called the Easy Fill Tire Alert. In this example, the car horn steals the job of the tire pressure gauge.

You could also have an external component steal the job of an internal component.

  • SubwayHere’s an example from a grocery store in Korea. They placed billboards in train and subway stations that show their products on the shelves just the way you would see it in a store. Commuters use their smartphones to scan the products they need. That shopping list is sent to the grocery store so the commuter can stop by on the way home to pick up the groceries. In this example, they assigned the subway billboards the additional task of becoming the point-of-sale. Very convenient and it saves times.

PlaypumpHere’s another example of an external component being assigned the additional job of an internal component. It’s a concept called Play Pump. It’s a child’s merry-go-round, the kind you would see on a playground. They don’t know it, but as they play on it, they’re also turning a pump to pump fresh water out of a well and into a holding tank. It’s used in small villages in sub Sahara Africa where finding and pumping water is difficult. The kids of the village have the additional job of providing water to the community.

That almost sounds a lot like Thomas Edison and his water pumping gate! And that’s why Task Unification can lead you to some pretty clever ideas.

LEARN the entire S.I.T. Method at Lynda.com…

Creating New Opportunities in the Digital Space

Published date: June 9, 2014 в 4:42 am

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The SIT method is great for creating exciting new products and services. But you can also apply these techniques to digital assets.

For example, let’s apply the Attribute Dependency technique to a website. You start by listing the internal and external attributes of the site. You list the attributes, and you create a two dimensional matrix that pairs internal attributes to other internal and external attributes.
Next, select a cell on the matrix and imagine a relationship between the two attributes. For example, “location of visitor” and “graphics,” meaning how the information is displayed on your website. As the location of the visitor changes, the information and graphics that you display on your website changes. Why would that be valuable? In what situations would it make sense to have that relationship in place?
Think about it. Imagine if your customer is browsing your website right inside one of your retail stores. Perhaps you would change the kind of information and graphics you would use to show your products.
What if they were browsing your website from one of your competitor’s stores? Could that change how you display competitive pricing information?
What if your customer is browsing within a healthcare facility, or from an airport, or inside a restaurant? Would it change the products, the prices, or other service elements that you display? It just might.
Applying attribute dependency can make your website responsive and adaptable. It services your clients better by understanding more about them.
Let’s apply this same approach to a social media application. For this example, let’s use Facebook. List the internal and external attributes of a Facebook Page, and create your matrix. Let’s imagine a relationship between “likes” and “wall postings.”  There is no relationship there now, so let’s imagine one. For example, as the number of “likes” increases over a particular period of time, your wall postings change. Why would that be beneficial?
Perhaps you would put different products or special promotions there once you reach a certain level of likes. In other words, you change how you engage with your customers who visit your Facebook page based on how they engage. A relationship between these two attributes would give you a cue to know when it’s appropriate to do something different on your page.
Let’s go further with digital innovation and look at mobile apps and how to apply SIT techniques.
For these, I like to use the Task Unification technique. In that case, we took a component of a product or service and we assigned it the additional job of addressing a specific business issue.
You can do the same thing with mobile apps. We create a virtual product by saying: the App has the additional job of addressing this business issue. The trick is to pick an app that has absolutely nothing to do with the issue now. That’s where you find some surprising innovations.
Let’s do an example. Imagine your company makes a household product that helps get rid of odors in your home. It’s a spray product that you would use to get rid of odors from your cat or dog. Imagine you’re the marketing manager for this product and you want to find creative ways to promote its benefits.
First, find a list of mobile apps. You can find many on iTunes, or a site like this one: Gotoweb20.net.  Pick one of these randomly and plug it into the phrase: the app has the additional job of promoting my product.
Here is an app called Micello. Micello is a provider of comprehensive indoor venue mapping. It’s like Google maps only for in indoor spaces like shopping malls or airports. You imagine this app has the additional job of promoting your spray for pet odors. What would be the benefit? How it would work, and how would it increase brand awareness of your product?
Suppose this technology is used to create an internal map of your home. What if it could also track where your pet spends its time as it moves from room to room. Perhaps the app creates an odor heat map of where the pet has been so that you know exactly where to spray the product.  I love this idea because it’s both functional and it reinforces the brand promise.
Task Unification can help find new uses for existing apps, and it can help you create completely new apps.
Your digital assets are just as important as your products and services. Using the SIT Method will unlock more value for your customers and find new ways to engage them more effectively  through digital channels.

Filtering Ideas to Find the Very Best Ones

Published date: May 26, 2014 в 9:46 am

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The SIT Method is designed to help you generate lots of ideas in a systematic way. But how do you select which ideas to pursue? Filtering ideas is an essential part of the creativity process. You want to make sure you spend your time only on those with the most potential.

First, put all your ideas in a standard format. That’ll make it a lot easier to evaluate them. I like to use a template like this:

  • Name of Idea:
  • Description of Idea:
  • Benefits:
  • Target Audience:
  • Challenges:

Every idea should have its own name, not just a number. Give it a name that will help people see what the idea is about. Use literal names, not vague or confusing ones.

Next, put every idea into one of three categories. The first category is for those ideas that are a bit far out, perhaps borderline crazy. They’re novel, but they may not be feasible.

The second category is for those ideas that are just the opposite. They’re not wild at all. They’re incremental improvements.

The third category is for ideas in the middle – not too far out and not too near in. They’re in a special zone we call the sweet spot. They’re viable and creative. It’s these ideas that people get excited about.

But we’re not done yet. Once you put the ideas in these categories, look at ways to get more of them into the sweet spot. Here is what I suggest you do. Start with the far out ideas. Is there a way to pull them back in, take out some of the weirdness of the idea to make it more feasible? What if you eliminated an exotic feature of the idea but still retained the essence of what the concept is trying to do? That might eliminate some of the riskiness of the idea.

For those incremental ideas, find a way to push them out and add some novelty. For example, what if you used Task Unification to have one of the components doing an additional task? Or what if you applied Attribute Dependency to the concept to make it smart and adaptive? That would certainly add some novelty and push it closer to the sweet spot.

After this exercise, you’re ready to start evaluating your list of ideas. There are two ways to do this. One is very simple and informal. You ask a group of people to vote on the ideas. You have probably seen the so-called dot method. Here’s how it works.

First, let the group read the entire list of ideas with all the benefits and challenges. Then, each participant is given a number of small, sticky colored dots. They’re instructed to place these dots on the ideas they think are best. I usually have participants place these right onto the paper with the list of ideas. This keeps the voting anonymous and makes it more objective. Then, collect all the votes and tally them up. While it may sound overly simple, the dot method of voting has a lot of benefits. Each individual has their own biases of what makes a great idea, and they vote accordingly. But voting as a group tends to neutralize those individual biases. Many times, the group vote will tell you which ideas the company will prefer.

The other method is more formal and quantitative. First, create a scorecard by listing the four or five most important criteria for judging good ideas. Criteria might include how novel the idea is, how useful it is for your customer, how viable the idea is to implement, and perhaps how risky the idea is. For each criterion, use a rating scale of 1 to 4 where a 4 is highest and 1 is lowest. Don’t use odd number scales like 1 to 5 because people may have a tendency to overuse the middle of the scale and rate too many ideas a 3. You want to force their ratings to be on one side or the other.

Ask people to use the scorecard and rate each idea. Then, using a tool like Excel, put the data in a spreadsheet so you can calculate the averages of all raters. Add up the final score for each idea.

  • Novelty 4
  • Usefulness 3
  • Viability 3
  • Risk 2
  • Final Score 12

The ideas with the highest scores are your best ideas assuming you selected the right criteria. This approach takes more time, but it gives you more precision especially when evaluating a large pool of ideas.

True innovators generate great ideas, but they also use the wisdom of others to help evaluate them.

Task Unification: The Essence of Citizen Science

Published date: March 17, 2014 в 3:00 am

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Back in 2008, biology professor Gretchen LeBuhn at San Francisco State University was growing exceedingly concerned. Her study of bee populations in Napa Valley, California, showed that the number of wild specialist bees (bees that specialize in pollinating certain species of flowers) was declining rapidly. She speculated that the decline might be due to the extensive vineyards in the area—Napa Valley is the heart of California’s wine region—but she needed more data to be certain. She was especially worried about the implications on a national level. Was this happening everywhere?

The consequences of wild specialist bees disappearing would be quite severe. One of every three bites of food you put into your mouth exists due to “animal pollination,” or the movement of insects— particularly bees—between plants. Animal pollinators play a crucial role in both flowering plant reproduction and the production of fruits and vegetables. Most plants require the assistance of pollinators to produce seeds and fruit. About 80 percent of all flowering plants and more than three-quarters of staple crop plants such as corn and wheat that feed humankind rely on animal pollinators like bees.
Scientific studies had been suggesting for some time that both honey bee and native bee populations were declining. Scientists like LeBuhn feared this would harm pollination of garden plants, crops, and wild plants. If scientists knew more about bee behavior—if they could collect enough data about bees across multiple time zones and geographic locations—they could perhaps devise ways to conserve and increase the size of the bee population.
But how could you track bees on such a large scale? Gretchen had a limited research budget—just $15,000—scavenged from various organizations and grants by her department. Although she sent a student back to Napa Valley to perform additional measurements and bee counts, even this proved too expensive and time consuming due to the distance between the San Francisco–based campus and Napa Valley. Then Gretchen had an idea. She’d gotten to know several of the Napa vineyard owners well over the course of her study. Perhaps they would collect data for her? She asked, and they agreed to perform the relatively simple task. They agreed so readily, in fact, that Gretchen got excited. If a busy vineyard owner could count bees, anyone could. An avid gardener herself, she wondered if she could recruit homeowners with gardens to join her mission.
First, Gretchen needed to come up with a simple, standardized protocol for collecting bee data that anyone could follow. “Sunflowers,” she thought. Sunflowers are easy to grow, are native to the continental forty-eight United States, and, best of all, have a large and relatively flat surface area. It’s easy to see bees on the face of a sunflower. Gretchen tested the idea on some friends at the local nature conservatory. She gave them sunflower seeds, asked them to plant and water them, and, when the flowers bloomed, to count bees for an hour at a specific time each day. Everyone objected immediately. Although willing to help, her friends were not going to gaze at sunflowers for an hour at a stretch. But even after cutting the time to fifteen minutes, Gretchen heard nothing from her volunteers. No one reported any data. She finally got on the phone and began making calls. What she heard shocked her. “I didn’t call you back because I didn’t see any bees,” her friends told her.
Alarmed, Gretchen decided to push on with the experiment, which she dubbed the Great Sunflower Project. She created a website and found volunteers by emailing a small number of master gardener coordinators in a few southern states. They, in turn, broadcast her request to their networks. Within twenty-four hours, Gretchen had 500 volunteers. By the end of the week, she had 15,000 offers to help. Eventually the website crashed due to the overwhelming response.
Gretchen’s Task Unification innovation—assigning an internal task (data collection) to an external resource (home gardeners)—had launched with a bang. Today the Great Sunflower Project has more than 100,000 volunteers who count bees and report their findings online. Gretchen uses the data to map pollinators; pollinator services use it to determine where bees are thriving and where they need help. Gretchen kept the structure of the experiment simple. Each year on a specific day in mid-July or August, volunteers go out to their gardens and watch for bees. For fifteen minutes, they count the number and types of bees that land on their sunflowers. Volunteers enter their observations online. And then they’re done for another year. But however small a role any individual volunteer plays, each bit of information adds up to a very large and rich pool of research data. With so many tens of thousands of people contributing from all over the country, researchers have created national maps of wild specialist bee populations that are helping them determine when and where to focus conservation efforts.
“Simply by taking that fifteen-minute step, these citizen scientists make a contribution to saving bees,” LeBuhn said. “It’s remarkable having all these different people willing to participate, willing to help, and interested in making the world a better place.”

From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

Innovation Sighting: Getting Your Competition to Promote You

Published date: February 24, 2014 в 3:00 am

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How do you get your competitor to promote your value proposition? By thinking inside the box, or, in this case, using the box.

DHL did just that in the highly competitive package delivery category. Shipping companies compete on the basis of speed, convenience, and reliability. So the race is on to prove to the market which company performs the best.

In this campaign, DHL spoofed its competitors like UPS to broadcast that it's faster. Can you guess how?

This clever campaign is an example of two of the five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking – Task Unification and Attribute Dependency.

The Task Unification Technique is defined as: the assignment of new tasks to an existing resource (i.e. any element of the product or its vicinity within the manufacturer’s control). In this example, the"competition" has been assigned the additional task of "promoting the DHL value proposition" about being faster.

To use Task Unification:
1. List all of the components, both internal and external, that are part of the Closed World of the product, service, or process.
2. Select a component from the list. Assign it an additional task. Consider ways to use each of the three Task Unification methods:

  • Choose an external component and use it to perform a task that the product already accomplishes
  • Choose an internal component and make it do something new or extra
  • Choose an internal component and make it do the function of an external component (effectively “stealing” the external component’s function)

3. If you decide that an idea is valuable, you move on to the next question: Is it feasible? Can you actually create this new product? Perform this new service? Why or why not? Is there any way to refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

The Attribute Dependency Technique is defined as: the creation/removal of symmetries or dependencies between existing product properties. As one thing changes, another thing changes. In this example, DHL created a dependency between "elapsed time" and the "visibility of the message."

To use Attribute Dependency, make two lists. The first is a list of internal attributes. The second is a list of external attributes – those factors that are not under your control, but that vary in the context of how the product or service is used. Then, create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis. The matrix creates combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate.  Take these virtual combinations and envision them in two ways. If no dependency exists between the attributes, create one. If a dependency exists, break it.  Using Function Follows Form, try to envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.

Making the Most of Your Resources With Task Unification

Published date: January 27, 2014 в 3:00 am

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“We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think.”

—Sir Ernest Rutherford, Nobel Prize winner, 1908

John Doyle certainly knows theater. Over his thirty-year career, he’s staged more than two hundred professional productions throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, mostly in small, regional theater companies. In the early 1990s, while working at such a theater in rural England, the Scottish director came up with an innovative way to produce crowd-pleasing musicals on a tiny budget. Musicals are considerably more expensive to stage than traditional plays, due primarily to the cost of hiring musicians. But Doyle eliminated those excess costs by handing responsibility for musical accompaniment to his actors. The actors onstage doubled as instrumentalists.

This, of course, was classic Task Unification: taking an existing internal resource that is already part of the Closed World (in Doyle’s case, his actors) and giving it a new task (playing musical accompaniment) that had traditionally been performed by another internal resource (musicians).

Doyle quietly opened his production of Sweeney Todd in 2004 at the Watermill Theater in Newbury, England. But as word got out about his unique staging and casting, the show was quickly brought to London’s West End, and, eventually, Broadway.

At first, US audiences and critics were skeptical. Used to expensively produced, high-tech Broadway productions that boasted elaborate sets and twenty-five-piece orchestras, they were shocked when the curtain rose on a bare stage with just ten actors sitting on chairs—actors who doubled as their own accompanists. During intermission, theatergoers were overheard exclaiming to one another, “How dare they do this!”

Doyle explained in an interview that he didn’t set out to break the rules. “It was never meant to be about, ‘We want to get rid of an orchestra.’ It grew out of not being able to afford to have one,” he said. However, being constrained by a lack of money turned out to be a blessing: he realized that he had an opportunity to stretch the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief. “I mean, you don’t often sit with a drink in one hand and a double bass between your legs,” he said. “It doesn’t happen very much in real life. So it kind of asks the audience to take a journey that goes beyond their preconception of what real life is.” Given that Doyle had always been interested in exploring the relationship between actors and audiences, he said he was pleased to have created “an abstraction of reality” that delivered a unique experience to theatergoers.

Doyle made a creative breakthrough, and his “actor-musicianship” method of staging musicals sent shock waves through the international theater scene. Directors at other cash-strapped regional theaters realized that they could emulate his signature style to stage major musicals that were both budget friendly and edgy enough to thrill the most jaded audiences.

Doyle won a Tony Award for Best Director for his actor-musician production of Sweeney Todd in 2006, and one for Best Musical Revival in 2007 for his actor-musician production of Company. Widely hailed as the reinventor of the Broadway musical, Doyle believes that his actormusicianship method turned out to be much more than just an exercise in penny-pinching. “I will do stories that I want to tell, and I will tell them in the appropriate way at the time. What I won’t do is, I won’t use this technique only to make cheap theater,” he said.

 
From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification and CAPTCHA

Published date: January 6, 2014 в 10:16 am

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You’ve experienced this dozens, if not hundreds, of times. Before being allowed to enter a website, you must type words written in a bizarre, distorted script inside a box.

Dr. Luis von Ahn, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, estimates that people decipher script like this more than 200 million times a day. He should know. He invented the system. Captcha, as it is called, protects websites by demanding that visitors take a simple test that humans can pass but computers cannot. Captcha, in fact, is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It requires website visitors to interpret the text correctly and type the right letters before they can enter the site.

Captcha is not without its flaws. Its words are generated randomly,and occasionally one pops up that can be easily misinterpreted. One woman trying to sign up for the Yahoo! email service was given the word WAIT. She took it literally. Only after staring at the unchanging screen for twenty minutes did she send a message to the Yahoo! help desk asking for assistance. It could have been worse: captcha sent another web user the word RESTART.

Despite these minor inconveniences, captcha has proven infinitely useful to website owners and managers who want to prevent computer generated spam or computer viruses from invading their domains.

Take Ticketmaster. It sells millions of tickets to sporting, music, and arts events. Ticket scalpers would love to get their hands on the best seats in the house for headline shows and resell them at much higher prices for hefty profits. If they could, they’d storm the Ticketmaster website and buy thousands of tickets for popular events the instant they were available. Although Ticketmaster tried to prevent abuse by limiting the number of tickets that any one customer could purchase at a time, scalpers found a way around the rules by writing computer programs capable of posing as real people, logging on to the website, and purchasing tickets. With an automated method for transacting thousands of sales a minute, scalpers were scoring big at the expense of both Ticketmaster and ordinary consumers, who ended up with less desirable seats or had to pay more for good ones.

Captcha changed all that. Only humans can interpret the distorted letters—and gain entrance to the Ticketmaster website. Yes, it takes some effort and time—about ten seconds—for you to decipher the captcha letters and type them. But Ticketmaster, as well as webmasters for hundreds of thousands of other websites, is infinitely grateful to von Ahn for his invention. Few web users begrudge the ten seconds when they learn about the benefits they reap in the form of enhanced security and fair prices on high-demand items such as concert tickets.

Few people other than industry insiders know that von Ahn has good reason to be grateful to them as well. It is an open secret in the online world that von Ahn harnesses the hundreds of millions of daily captcha test responses to achieve a goal—one arguably more useful to society than thwarting ticket scalpers: scanning and digitizing every book in the world.

Most people don’t realize it, but their captcha answers serve two purposes. In addition to proving to websites that they are not machines, users are deciphering difficult to-read words from old printed texts. When they type the words into the onscreen box, they are transforming printed content into digital form. It’s a perfect example of Task Unification, assigning a new task to an existing resource.

Digitizing old books is hard work even with today’s advanced scanning machines and powerful computers. Scanning accuracy remains poor, especially given the wide variety of fonts and poor print quality of many older publications. Von Ahn wrote a program, called reCaptcha, that feeds the words computer scanners can’t read into the captcha program, which, in turn, presents them to website visitors to crack. Major websites such as Yahoo! and Facebook use reCaptcha, and von Ahn gives the program away free to anyone who wants it.

Does it work? The results are, quite simply, astounding. Ordinary web surfers are helping to transcribe the equivalent of nearly 150,000 books a year—a job that would otherwise require 37,500 full-time workers. Among other accomplishments, reCaptcha helped digitize the complete printed archives of the New York Times dating back to 1851.

This is Task Unification at its best. Von Ahn came up with the idea after calculating how much human labor went into completing captcha tests. “I did a quick ‘backof- the-envelope’ estimate that people solve captchas about two hundred million times per day,” he explains. “So if it takes ten seconds to solve one captcha, that’s fifty thousand hours of work per day! I kept wondering what that work effort could be used for.”

Dr. von Ahn didn’t stop with reCaptcha. If he could, he says, he’d harvest more social, economic, and intellectual benefits from every moment in every life on the planet. “I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting human cycles that get wasted,” says von Ahn. And as more of humanity goes online, society has the potential to take advantage of what he calls “an extremely advanced, large-scale processing unit.”

The possibilities are tremendous, says von Ahn. For example, his latest venture, Duolingo, is an effort to translate the entire web into the world’s major languages. Today words on the web are written in hundreds of languages, but more than half of it is in English. That makes the web inaccessible to most people in the world, especially in fast developing regions such as China and Russia.

Once again, von Ahn’s solution involves Task Unification. A billion people worldwide are learning a foreign language. Millions of them use a computer. If they use Duolingo, people learn a foreign language while simultaneously translating text much as captcha and reCaptcha do: by assigning the additional job of translation to people while they are performing another task. Dr. von Ahn estimates that if one million people used Duolingo to learn Spanish, the entire Wikipedia could be translated into Spanish in just eighty hours.

Von Ahn is constantly thinking about how to “task-unify” the human race. “We’re still not thinking big enough,” he says. “But if we have that many people all doing some little part, we could do something insanely huge for humanity.”

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification Saves Lives and Money

Published date: December 2, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Philips North America announced Fosmo Med, developer of the Maji Intravenous (IV) saline bag, as the grand prize winner of the first-ever Philips Innovation Fellows competition, revealing the technology as the next big, meaningful innovation in health and well-being. The new IV solution technology has the potential to save millions of lives worldwide from dehydration-related diseases, such as cholera.

Maji is a revolutionary field hydration system for IV use that is shipped without water. Once on site, forward osmosis technology converts local water — even if it’s not clean — to a sterile solution without requiring any electrical power. An estimated 16 Maji bags can be shipped for the same cost as one traditional IV saline bag, saving up to $500 for every 14 units shipped.

Maji is an example of the Task Unification Technique, one of five in the SIT innovation method. Task Unification works by assigning an additional task to an existing resource. In this example, the Maji bag has the additional job of filtering water.

“We’re very excited to be named the winner of the Philips Innovation Fellows Competition,” said Ben Park, chief executive officer and founder of Fosmo Med. “Maji will enable many more IV bags to be shipped for the same cost, stored safely and transported to remote sites. The potential life savings could be in the millions annually.”

“We are thrilled to name Fosmo Med as the grand prize winner and to support them as they work to take Maji to the market,” said Greg Sebasky, chairman of Philips North America. “As a company committed to meaningful innovation, it is gratifying to find a social enterprise that has the potential to revolutionize the medical device industry with a simple, forward-thinking solution.”

Philips practices what it preaches. It is featured in Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results for its use of the Subtraction Technique in creating the Slimline DVD player.

“Maji shows Fosmo Med’s commitment to providing affordable healthcare and well-being above all else,” added Sebasky.
Fosmo Med was selected from among hundreds of entries to the Innovation Fellows Competition. The company secured funding from the public through the crowd funding portion of the competition on Indiegogo, global web-based crowd funding site, and, once named a finalist, the Maji IV saline bag was named the “most meaningful” innovation by Philips employees. In addition to $60,000 in prize money, Fosmo Med will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Philips’ USA headquarters to meet with Philips leadership for mentor and whiteboard sessions to support development of the Maji IV.

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification in a Parking Lot

Published date: September 2, 2013 в 11:49 am

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The Task Unification Technique is one of five in the innovation method called Systematic Inventive Thinking. It is defined as "assiging an additional task to an existing resource." It is such a powerful technique because it often leads to Closed World solutions, or what we like to call "thinking inside the box." It yields innovations that tend to leverage some resource in the immediate vicinity in a clever way. It also tends to yield innovations that have a characteristic known as Ideality – the solution to a problem only appears when needed.  When the problem arises, the solution is also there.

Here is a perfect example. It comes from an oil company in Seoul, Korea that wanted to reduce the wasted driving time looking for open parking slots:

To use Task Unification:

1. List all of the components, both internal and external, that are part of the Closed World of the product, service, or process.

2. Select a component from the list. Assign it an additional task. Consider ways to use each of the three Task Unification methods:

  • Choose an external component and use it to perform a task that the product already accomplishes
  • Choose an internal component and make it do something new or extra
  • Choose an internal component and make it do the function of an external component (effectively “stealing” the external component’s function)

3. If you decide that an idea is valuable, you move on to the next question: Is it feasible? Can you actually create this new product? Perform this new service? Why or why not? Is there any way to refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

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