Innovation in Practice Blog
Academic Focus: Columbia Business School on Marketing and Innovation
Columbia Business School is offering a three-day Executive Education program called Marketing and Innovation. The program will teach Systematic Inventive Thinking as well as other key innovation concepts.
The program will be held June 17-19 and November 18-20 in New York. The program is ideal for middle- to upper-level executives who are responsible for strategic innovation and new product development. It is especially good for organizations that wish to send a cross-functional team to work on a specific challenge or project together.
The Creativity Method of The Beatles
Fifty years ago on Feb. 9, 1964, the Beatles made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” A record 73 million people watched that night. And the rest, of course, is history.
The Beatles were innovators, and they did it systematically using templates. The Beatles were corporate innovators who created immense fortunes for their shareholders. They used structured methods, experimentation, and technology the same way Fortune 500 companies create new products and services.
Thinking Outside the Box: A Misguided Idea
Although studying creativity is considered a legitimate scientific discipline nowadays, it is still a very young one. In the early 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford was one of the first academic researchers who dared to conduct a study of creativity. One of Guilford’s most famous studies was the nine-dot puzzle, presented with its solution here. He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. Today many people are familiar with this puzzle and its solution. In the 1970s, however, very few were even aware of its existence, even though it had been around for almost a century.
Systematic Innovation at the Consumer Electronics Show
One way to develop your expertise in SIT techniques is with pattern spotting. A key premise of SIT is that for thousands of years, innovators have used patterns in their inventions, usually without even realizing it. Those patterns are now embedded into the products and services you see around you, almost like the DNA of a product. You want to develop your ability to see these patterns as a way to improve your use of them.
There’s probably no better place to practice pattern spotting than at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). In last week’s CES in Las Vegas, “manufacturers demonstrated a range of previously mundane but now smart, web-connected products destined to become part of daily domestic existence, from kitchen appliances to baby monitors to sports equipment,” as reported in The Independent.
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