Innovation in Practice Blog

May 4, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at May 4, 2021
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How to Use Teamwork to Become More Innovative

Creativity is a team sport. It is not a solo event.  When you try to generate creative ideas all by yourself, you’re sitting in a vacuum. […]
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April 27, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at April 27, 2021
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How to Take Advantage of Distractions for Greater Creativity

We face hundreds of distractions every day. There is no way to escape them completely. We can’t just get up every morning and spend hours thinking […]
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April 20, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at April 20, 2021
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How to Generate Creative Ideas At Home, Work, and Everywhere In Between

Creativity is nothing more than combining two things in an unexpected way. However, it is critical that it really is unexpected. For example, if you mash […]
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April 13, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at April 13, 2021
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Creativity for Charities: How to Apply the SIT Techniques to Be More Creative and Resourceful

Charities and nonprofit organizations need to be just as innovative – and in some ways, they have to be even more innovative than for-profit organizations. Think […]
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April 6, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at April 6, 2021
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Gender Role in Creative Thinking – Not What You Think!

Guess who’s more creative – men or women?  Well, neither is more creative than the other because both are equally creative. They just have different roles […]
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March 30, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at March 30, 2021
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Why People Resist Our Innovative Ideas and How To Overcome It

Try to recall and go back to those moments when your ideas got rejected. How did you handle those rejections? Did you just instantly give up? […]
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March 23, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at March 23, 2021
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Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Secret Key to Unlocking Your Creative Potential

No matter who you are, it doesn’t matter if you’re born creative or gifted in some way, everyone has the potential to become more creative, regardless […]
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March 16, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at March 16, 2021
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Creativity? Make It Someone Else’s Problem

Are you in a creative rut? Then make it someone else’s problem.  Now, it doesn’t mean you should just stop being creative and outsource your creative […]
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March 9, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at March 9, 2021
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Avoid Cliches Like the Plague – How to Speak and Write More Creatively

Cliches oftentimes do a good job of communicating what your point is. Other people understand them readily, but using the same old cliches can get boring.  […]
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March 2, 2021
Published by Danny Ozment at March 2, 2021
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Two New Apps to Help You Learn Creativity

Can you learn to be more creative?  100%! There are lots of ways for you to learn about systematic creativity. In fact, here are two amazing […]
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October 31, 2008
Published by boydadmin at October 31, 2008
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The LAB: Innovating a Recruiting Process with Subtraction (October 2008)

Do systematic methods of innovation work on services and processes? This may be the most common question from corporate executives who want to learn innovation methods. This month's LAB will focus on a familiar corporate process: employee recruiting. The tool we'll use is Subtraction. To use Subtraction, we make a list of the components. With a process or service, the components are simply the steps to deliver the process or service. We remove a step one at a time to create the Virtual Product/Process. Working backwards with Function Follows Form, we innovate what the potential value or benefits would be without the component. What would the new process do? Who would use it? Why would they use it?
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March 28, 2009
Published by boydadmin at March 28, 2009
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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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June 7, 2009
Published by boydadmin at June 7, 2009
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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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July 5, 2009
Published by boydadmin at July 5, 2009
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The LAB: Innovating Shredded Wheat with S.I.T. (July 2009)

“We put the ‘no’ in innovation!” The good people at Post Cereal have a new twist on innovation…NOT innovating as a statement of the products ubiquity and staying power. “Some things just weren’t meant to be innovated." How could I resist? It was just too tempting to use systematic innovation on this simple product, especially in light of the perception that it should not be innovated. Though the ad campaign is a spoof, I wonder just how much the people at Post really believe this. What if shredded wheat could be innovated to create new growth potential for this sixty year old product?
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August 24, 2009
Published by boydadmin at August 24, 2009
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The LAB: Innovating Health Care with S.I.T. (August 2009)

Health Care Reform, as the U.S. government sees it, promises lower costs, better access, and improved quality for all. Let's apply a structured innovation method to health care to see if we can achieve some of these goals. For this month's LAB, we will apply Systematic Inventive Thinking to the hospital discharge process.
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December 7, 2009
Published by boydadmin at December 7, 2009
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The LAB: Innovating Your Wallet Using S.I.T. (December 2009)

Innovation puts cash in your wallet. But what about the wallet itself? For this month's LAB, we will apply the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to create new and useful concepts for the wallet. Wallets are the most personal items we own. They carry our money, credit cards, identification, licenses, photographs, and other memorabilia. Your wallet says a lot about you. As with food, we try to stuff more inside while staying thin. Wallets have been around a long time. Today, the wallet industry is a multi-billion dollar market fueled by new designs and innovation. Here are six unique wallet concepts invented using the five templates in the S.I.T. method. They were created by graduate students at the University of Cincinnati as part of their course requirements in "Applied Marketing Innovation."
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February 15, 2010
Published by boydadmin at February 15, 2010
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Innovation Sighting: Subtraction on CPG Products

Here are two CPG products from this week's Best New Product Awards. I tried them at home and noticed a pattern. That pattern suggests a different way to use the Subtraction Template of the innovation method, S.I.T.. The question is whether that pattern can be replicated on other products to create line extensions and new categories. The first product is the Bounce® Dryer Bar from Procter & Gamble. The second is the Scrubbing Bubbles® Toilet Cleaning Gel from SC Johnson. See if you can spot the pattern in each:
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February 20, 2010
Published by boydadmin at February 20, 2010
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The LAB: Innovating an Aquarium Using S.I.T. (February 2010)

There are a 183 million pet fish in the United States, more than double the number of dogs. Fourteen million U.S. households have fish. During the past decade, the pet fish category grew by more than 20% making it one of the fastest growing in the industry. For this month's LAB, we will apply the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to the mainstay of fish keeping - the aquarium. Here are five unique aquarium concepts invented by one of my graduate students, Janette Douglas, at the University of Cincinnati as part of her final exam in "Applied Marketing Innovation." For the this exam, each student was given a product randomly. They had three hours to create new-to-the-world concepts and demonstrate proficiency using each of the templates.
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April 26, 2010
Published by boydadmin at April 26, 2010
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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.
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May 3, 2010
Published by boydadmin at May 3, 2010
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Innovation Sighting: Double Down – Two Innovation Templates in One Bite

Here is an example of two innovation templates in one product. The Double Down sandwich from KFC removes the traditional bread slice (demonstrating the template, Subtraction), and it assigns the additional job of "sandwiching" to the two slices of fried chicken (demonstrating the template, Task Unification).
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