Innovation in Practice Blog

The LAB: Innovating a Credit Card with S.I.T. (June 2009)

Credit card companies must innovate to overcome the financial and public relations consequences of recent government legislation. The Credit Card Reform Act of 2009 is a “bill to protect consumers, and especially young consumers, from skyrocketing credit card debt, unfair credit card practices, and deceptive credit offers.” These changes go into effect in 2010, and they will undoubtedly reduce the financial performance of card issuers.

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Design the Future of Mobile Communications

It’s time to put innovation into practice.
LG Mobile Phones, the fastest growing mobile phone brand in North America, is partnering with crowdSPRING, an online marketplace for creative services, to announce a new competition to define the future of personal mobile communication. U.S. residents age 18 and over can have a chance to design their vision of the next revolutionary LG mobile phone and compete for more than $80,000 in awards. See https://www.crowdspring.com/LG for details on how to submit your ideas.

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How to Innovate!

This step-by-step method helps you invent new products or services using templates. Templates channel your creative thinking so you can innovate in a completely new way. It is not brainstorming. It is a structured process to focus your creative output. The way it...

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The LAB: Innovating a Garage Door Opener (March 2009)

Teaching people how to innovate is rewarding. It empowers them. It unlocks their minds to believe that innovation can happen “on command.” People realize there is no excuse for not having enough ideas or being innovative once they have been trained.
This month’s LAB features the output of one of my students, Michael Sanders, in my class, “Applied Marketing Innovation.” For the final exam, students were assigned a product at random. They had three hours to apply all five templates in the Systematic Inventive Thinking method to come up with true new-to-the-world innovations. They were graded on how correctly they applied each template as well as the novelty of their inventions. Michael’s assignment: Garage Door Opener. Here is what he did.

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