Innovation in Practice Blog

The LAB: Innovating the Pricing Process (November 2011)

Setting prices on new products and services is one of the most challenging roles in marketing. Pricing mistakes are costly, yet it’s one of the most tempting tools to use when trying to generate revenues. Fortunately, methods like Value Based Pricing and frameworks like The Big Picture make the job easier.
What if you wanted to explore more innovative ways to set prices? Applying the SIT innovation patterns would create new insights and options. The SIT patterns help break fixedness – the tendency to limit the way we see things to what we know. These patterns are innate to all of us. We just need to “extract” them from within and deploy them in a systematic way.
For this month’s LAB, we will apply SIT to pricing. While there are many methods and schools of thought around pricing, the SIT templates should apply to any of them. I would do the following.

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The Path of Most Resistance

The best innovations arise by following the path of most resistance, not least resistance. As Amnon Levav at SIT writes, “In nature, water cascading down a mountain follows the path of least resistance – the easiest route to arrive at its final destination. In thinking, too, our minds tend to take the path of least resistance – those avenues that are familiar to us. So doing, it is difficult to arrive at ideas that are new to us or to our competitors.”

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The LAB: Innovating the Light Switch (October 2011)

How do you know which SIT tool to use on your product? That is one of the most common questions from my students and workshop participants. One way to decide is to analyze the current products in the category. You look for SIT patterns that tend to dominate how the product emerged and evolved over the years. I look at recent innovations in the category to spot trends. I also try to identify where the industry might have some “fixedness” about the products and how they are used. The type of fixedness (functional, structural, or relational) can lend insight about which SIT tool to start with.

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Academic Focus: John Hauser and the MIT Team

This month’s Academic Focus features Professor John Hauser and the highly-regarded team at MIT. Perhaps no other university in the world stands for innovation as much as this one. MIT is an innovation powerhouse because of the way the faculty looks at innovation through multiple lens and collaborative approaches. MIT is great blend of innovation research, technology research, and commercialization research.

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