Innovation in Practice Blog
Targeting Your Innovation Efforts
Geo-targeting Companies get better results from innovation by targeting initiatives at the right places. Given limited time, money, and human resources, here are six areas to focus on:
Feature Creep
Companies that struggle with innovation often make up for it by adding features to existing products. They succumb to “feature creep” – the gradual and continuous addition of features and functions though nothing is truly new. While it may look improved, the added features make your product more complex, difficult to use, and more costly to produce. Over time, your core customers abandon you.
Here is an example – the Numi toilet by Kohler. At $6400, it is promoted as the top-of-the-line toilet with lots of high-tech bells and whistles:
The LAB: Innovating Cosmetics with S.I.T. (April 2011)
The cosmetic industry thrives on innovation and fashion design especially in the areas of product development and retail merchandising. It generates nearly US$200 billion worldwide and is growing. For this month’s LAB, we will use the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to create new innovations for lipstick, a product that dates back to the ancient Egyptians.
S.I.T. works by taking one of the five patterns (subtraction, task unification, division, multiplication, and attribute dependency) and applying it to an existing product or service. This morphs it into a “virtual product,” which is an abstract, ambiguous notion with no clear purpose. We then work backwards (Function Follows Form) to find new and useful benefits or markets for the virtual product.
Here are five innovations created by *students at the University of Cincinnati as part of the innovation tools course.
Marketing Innovation: The Metaphor Tool
The Metaphor is the most commonly used – and abused – tool in marketing communications, especially in western cultures. It is a great way to attach meaning to a newly-launched product or brand. But some approaches are more effective than others.
The tool is one of eight patterns embedded in most innovative commercials. Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues describe these simple, well-defined design structures in their book, “Cracking the Ad Code,” and provide a step-by-step approach to using them. The eight tools are:
1. Unification
2. Activation
3. Metaphor
4. Subtraction
5. Extreme Consequence
6. Absurd Alternative
7. Inversion
8. Extreme Effort
The Metaphor Tool takes a well-recognized and accepted cultural symbol and manipulates it to connect to the product, brand, or message. The trick is to do it in a non-obvious, clever way. The process is called fusion, and there are three versions of it: Metaphor fused to Product/Brand, Metaphor fused to Message, and Metaphor fused to both the Product/Brand and Message. Here is an example:
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