Innovation in Practice Blog

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification with Gifts

Task Unification is a hard working innovation tool. Task Unification assigns an additional task to an existing resource or component of the product or service. Here is a clever example from Springwise. It is a service called “Itizen.” It allows you to physically tag a special item such as a gift or heirloom that links to a website where the collective history of that gift or heirloom is recorded and kept forever. Suppose your grandfather gives your son a hammer, for example, that he used to build the Brooklyn Bridge. Suppose grandpa then records in his own words the complete story about that hammer, where he got it (from his grandfather), how it was used, what else it has been used to build…well you get the picture.

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Innovation Prosthetic

An innovation tool is a cognitive prosthetic that helps individuals and groups overcome their human limitations and innovate more capably. Just as an artificial limb or hearing aid compensates and augments a missing or impaired part of the body, a thinking tool does the same – it compensates and augments for a variety of cognitive deficiencies in all humans.
Yet there is an aversion to using a structured tool to be creative:

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Innovation Sighting: Cannes Lions 2010

Cannes Lions, the International Advertising Festival, is the world’s only truly global meeting place for professionals in the communications industry. It celebrates advertising winners each year in a variety of categories. The 57th festival was held last week.
The Young Lions Film Competition is held the same week. Two creatives have 48 hours to write, shoot and edit a 30-second commercial. At the beginning of the week, the teams receive a brief from a charity chosen by the Festival. Forty-eight hours later, the teams’ work is judged by the Film Lions jury. Here is a winning commercial from this year’s Young Lions Film Competition:

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