Innovation in Practice Blog
The LAB: Innovation for Couch Potatoes (December 2011)
This month’s LAB features a former student of mine, Ryan Rosensweig. Ryan is the first business-design hybrid from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. He earned his master’s degree in design after completing his bachelor’s degree in marketing, sustainable urban engineering, and interdisciplinary design innovation. As the graduate assistant for Associate Dean Craig M. Vogel, of DAAP’s Center for Design Research and Innovation, Ryan researched educational models for interdisciplinary innovation, the interaction between design methodologies and business strategy, as well as product and service innovations for the over-age-50 population. Take a look at his portfolio here.
I had the pleasure of teaching Ryan how to use Systematic Inventive Thinking when he attended my Innovation Tools graduate course. The final exam required students to correctly apply all five techniques of S.I.T. to an item assigned to them randomly.
Here are selected examples from Ryan’s final exam – innovating a couch!
Innovation Sighting: Multiplication in Photography
Pick up a camera and see how many innovations you can find in it. That shouldn’t be hard. There are lots of them. The camera, like all inventions, started with a core idea. From there, it continued to evolve and improve though time. It might surprise you that a single innovation pattern, Multiplication, formed the premise of all photography. The cameras you use today evolved from multiplication. The entire photography industry continues to benefit thanks to this powerful pattern.
Multiplication is one of five simple patterns innovators have used for thousands of years. These patterns are the basis of Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method that channels your thinking and regulates the ideation process. The method works by taking a product, service, or process and applying a pattern to it. This changes the starting point. It morphs the product into something weird, perhaps unrecognizable. With this altered configuration (we call the Virtual Product), you work backwards to link it to a problem that it addresses or new benefit it delivers. The process is called Function Follows Form.
Marketing Innovation: Pants on Fire and the Metaphor Tool
Insurance companies continue to battle it out as the industry emerges from the global financial crisis. They are spending huge sums on national advertising to establish brand loyalty and earn trust. But consumers have a hard time distinguishing between the many undifferentiated insurance products. They tend to shop on price as a result. So insurance advertisers have to walk a fine line acknowledging the importance of price while slipping in their value propositions around service and other features.
Here is an example from the long-running Progressive campaign featuring the lovable character, Flo. It uses the metaphor tool. The Metaphor is the most commonly used tool in marketing communications because it is a great way to attach meaning to a newly-launched product or brand. The Metaphor Tool takes a well-recognized and accepted cultural symbol and manipulates it to connect to the product, brand, or message.
The Voice of the Brand
Most people are surprised to hear that five simple patterns explain the majority of innovative products and services. Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered this surprising insight. It is similar to the notion of TRIZ which is a set of patterns for solving problems. Innovative products share common patterns because their inventors unknowingly followed them when generating new product ideas. These patterns become the DNA of products. You can extract the DNA and implant it into other products and services to create new innovations. We call it The Voice of the Product.
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