Innovation in Practice Blog
The LAB: Innovating the Book with S.I.T. (January 2011)
Book publishing faces turbulent times. While the market is growing, key parts of the business model are coming apart at the seams. Market segments are fragmenting, price points are changing, channel power is shifting, and barriers to entry are lowering. Even the definition of “a book” is in question. Is it the medium (printed pages between two pieces of cardboard, electronic, online)? Or is it the message (the story, the characters, the themes)? When an industry faces turmoil, there is only one thing to do – innovate!
For this month’s LAB, lets innovate the plain old, everyday book, an idea that goes back 5000 years. We will use the corporate innovation method, S.I.T.. It is based on five patterns. We use the patterns to create hypothetical, abstract “solutions.” Then we work backwards from the solution to try and identify potential problems that it solves. This works well because there is an asymmetry in people’s thought process effectiveness when it comes to creativity. People are more fluent and easier with searching for benefits for given configurations than finding the best configuration for a given benefit or function. The term for it is called Function Follows Form.
Academic Focus: The Live Well Collaborative
The Live Well Collaborative at the University of Cincinnati is an academic-industry innovation incubator for regionally, nationally and internationally prominent firms. The focus of LWC is the aging population. Firms partner with UC to address product or service needs for the 50+ market. The UC students and faculty conduct research and develop ideas incorporating expertise from fields including design, business, engineering, medicine and even anthropology.
Innovation and Humor
If you are like most people, you laugh at jokes at their very end, not the beginning. Why? Because jokes make sense only in hindsight after we hear the proverbial “punch line.” We have no context to start laughing at the start of the joke. But once we hear the final line, our mind works its way backwards to make sense of it. We laugh.
So it is with innovation. An abstract concept remains abstract until our mind works backwards to make sense of it. Only then do we see the value. Edward de Bono describes this phenomena in his new book, Think! Before It’s Too Late.
Drew Boyd on Innovation Management
InnovationManagement.se is an online magazine offering best practice and inspiration to innovation management practitioners. It sources and provides articles in collaboration with experts in the field of innovation management from leading business schools, companies and universities worldwide. The online magazine InnovationManagement has one goal: to be the best source of best practice for innovation management practitioners.
Here is the text of my recent interview with co-founder and chief editor, Karin Wall.
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