Innovation in Practice Blog
The LAB: Innovating Facebook with Attribute Dependency (March 2011)
Facebook innovated its way to become the dominate social network with 600 million users in just six years since launch. What will it do for an encore? More importantly, how will it continue to innovate? For this month’s LAB, we will apply the Attribute Dependency tool to demonstrate how Facebook might continue re-inventing itself.
To use Attribute Dependency, make two lists. The first is a list of internal attributes. The second is a list of external attributes – those factors that are not under your control, but that vary in the context of how the product or service is used. Then create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis. The matrix creates combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate. We take these virtual combinations and envision them in two ways. If no dependency exists between the attributes, we create one. If a dependency exists, we break it. Using Function Follows Form, we envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.
Here are attributes of the Facebook experience:
Academic Focus: The Rotman Business Design Challenge
The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto will host the Business Design Challenge from March 25-26, 2011. Teams of graduate students from business and designe schools in the US and Canada will work to solve a case study in the area of health and wellness. The case was developed by Doblin, a Chicago-based innovation strategy firm and the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation (CFI), who will incorporate the solutions developed into delivering improved health and wellness outcomes.
Learning outcomes include:
Business Model Innovation
Business model innovation was one of many hot topics at Innovation Suite 2011. The conference hosted thirty two invitees from nine countries and a variety of companies including GE, Bayer, Kraft, and SAP. On the minds of many was how to create new business models to transform a company and move to higher ground.
Business Model Innovation is defined as follows (from Wikipedia):
Business model innovation results in an entirely different type of company that competes not only on the value proposition of its offerings, but aligns its profit formula, resources and processes to enhance that value proposition, capture new market segments and alienate competitors.
Here are four ways to conceptualize a new business model:
The LAB: Innovating Inflight Services with S.I.T. (February 2011)
Airline service innovation seems like an oxymoron considering the industry’s reputation for low quality. But the industry is fighting back to improve its image. Companies that specialize in inflight entertainment as well as airframe manufacturers are accelerating the use of new technologies to deliver more value in the air. That’s good news for an industry that has focused way too long on cost-cutting. The next battle for supremacy will be won by airlines and aviation companies that innovate services across the experiential “journey” in a sustained way. For this month’s LAB, we will create new-to-the-world concepts for the inflight service experience using the S.I.T. tool set.
We begin by creating a list of the components of the product or service. We select a component and we further break it down to its sub-components or attributes that we can focus on. We then apply a tool to that component to change it in some way. Working backwards (“Function Follows Form”), we envision potential benefits of the modified service to both the customer and the company.
Here is a list of components:
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