Innovation in Practice Blog
The LAB: Innovating the Wedding Invitation with S.I.T. (April 2010)
Over 2 million couples marry every year in the U.S.. This fuels the $50 billion dollar wedding industry. In an industry that prides itself in tradition, companies must innovate new products and services within those traditions if they want to grow and prosper. For this month’s LAB, we will use the corporate innovation method, S.I.T. to create new-to-the-world ideas for wedding invitations.
Here are five unique ideas from graduate students* at the University of Cincinnati taking the course, “Systematic Innovation Tools.” They constructed a hypothetical “Dream Catalog” of these ideas for a local start-up design company. Listed with each innovation is the specific innovation template the team used to create the idea. You can download this and the other Dream Catalogs here.
Systematic Innovation Tools: The Course
I am teaching my innovation course, Systematic Innovation Tools, at the University of Cincinnati this month. The course is a fusion of Systematic Inventive Thinking and The Big Picture marketing framework. The Syllabus can be downloaded, but here are some details about it:
“This course focuses on how to create value and growth through innovation in new and existing markets. Students will learn the skills of innovation and how to apply those skills within the context of a marketing strategy framework. Students will apply innovation methods across the entire marketing management continuum including strategy, segmentation, targeting, positioning, and the 4P’s. The course will be taught using interactive workshop methods and techniques throughout. Students will first experience these facilitation techniques while learning innovation. They will then learn and practice these techniques so that they can apply them routinely throughout their graduate experience and beyond.”
Kill Your Innovation Champion
Here are five things companies need to do to develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives to encourage successful innovation.
Academic Focus: The Jerusalem Business School
What sets innovative products and services apart from others? Common sense would suggest they have unique and unusual characteristics that make them very different than all the rest. Furthermore, if you wanted to study innovative products and services to learn the hidden secrets they hold, you would try to identify those different and original attributes. But just the opposite is true. A very high percentage of successful new products launched each year follow the same set of patterns. Innovative products are more similar than different from each other. If you can identify these patterns and overlay them onto your products and services, you should be able to innovate in a predictable, templated way. THAT is the essence of the corporate innovation method, S.I.T..
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