Innovation in Practice Blog
Are You More Innovative Than You Think?
DnaYou may be surprised to find many of your products and services conform to the five innovation patterns of Systematic Inventive Thinking. If so, it means your employees are predisposed to use innovation patterns when developing new products. Like many innovators, they are using patterns probably without realizing it. Given this predisposition to using innovation templates, a company can realize huge gains in innovation effectiveness by taking the next step.
Marketing Innovation: Sharks to the Extreme
Great television commercials convey the right message in a creative way. They are memorable. The longer customers remember your commercial, the more cost effective the campaign.
One way to make ads memorable is to make them funny and vivid. The Vividness Effect causes people to recall experiences and images that stand out in their minds. For example, sharks are scary, so they tend to be good choices to create vividness. But just showing sharks in a commercial is not enough. They have to be fused to the core marketing message – the value proposition. That is where you need a structured innovation process to channel the creativity process and regulate your thinking.
Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues describe eight such tools in their book, “Cracking the Ad Code,” and provide a step-by-step approach to using them. The tools are 1. Unification 2. Activation 3. Metaphor 4. Subtraction 5. Extreme Consequence 6. Absurd Alternative 7. Inversion and 8.Extreme Effort.
The Remaking of Blackberry
Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry, must reinvent its business model. Otherwise, it’s the end of the road as many market analysts are predicting. Here is a series of steps and techniques to do that.
Innovation: Make It Someone Else’s Problem
New research suggests that you are more likely to be creative when you imagine the problem is someone else’s instead of your own. Evan Polman and Kyle Emich describe their studies in their April 2011 article that support this conclusion.
In one study, 262 participants were instructed to draw an alien for a story that they would write, or alternatively for a story that someone else would write. As expected, drawing an alien for someone else produced a more creative alien. In another study, 137 students were instructed to picture either themselves or a stranger stuck in a tower and to think of a way to escape using only a rope that did not reach the ground. Of the students who imagined a stranger in the tower, 66 percent found the solution—divide the rope lengthwise and tie the pieces together—compared with 48 percent of those who pictured themselves in the tower.
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