Innovation in Practice Blog
SIT Webinar: Business Model Innovation
In this webinar, we invite you to hear more about Business Model Innovation and learn a systematic and pragmatic approach. This can help you re-imagine your business model in exciting and sometimes even radical ways.
Innovation and the Base Rate
Suppose you’re told that three out of four car accidents happen within 25 miles of your home. Are you safer driving away from home? Based on this statistic alone, most people would assume they are safer. But the picture changes when you consider an important part of this scenario called the base rate. In probability and statistics, the base rate is the underlying probability unconditioned by prior events. Failing to consider the base rate leads to wrong conclusions, known as the base-rate fallacy. In this example, the base rate is the total percentage of driving that happens within 25 miles of your home. Let’s assume it is 90%. Given the odds of an accident are only 75% in an area you spend 90% of your time, driving close to home is clearly safer.
Why does this matter in innovation? Understanding the base rate with a product’s performance can lead to hidden insights and opportunities.
Innovation and Organizational Savviness
Navigating complex organizations takes skill and savviness, or what some call office politics. It is such an important skill that world class companies like GE and Johnson & Johnson teach it to their employees and reward them for using it. We may not like it, but for good ideas and people to survive, we must build organizational savviness and influence skills.
Succeeding at innovation takes that same organizational savviness. Here are eight tips to improve your innovation savviness:
Innovation Sighting: Nissan’s Intelligent Car Horn
Nissan’s latest innovation takes the lowly car horn and elevates it to the status of “smart.” The 2013 Altima has a new feature that’s likely to surprise buyers. It’s called Easy-Fill Tire Alert. The car’s tire pressure monitoring system informs drivers when a tire is low on air and then uses the sedan’s horn and hazard lights to confirm that the tire has been filled adequately.
This is a classic use of the Task Unification Technique, one of five in the innovation method called SIT. Task Unification works by taking a component and assigning it an additional job. That component can be an internal resource (in this case, something on or in the car) or an external resource, something in the vicinity of the car, but not within the manufacturer’s control (a passenger, for example). The additional job can be “stolen” from another component or it can be assigned something new.
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