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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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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December 28, 2009
Published by boydadmin at December 28, 2009
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Innovation Sighting: The Multiplication Template and Virtual Reality

People are fascinated with the idea of human cloning after researchers cloned a sheep in 1997. The debate about the risks and benefits of human cloning rages on. What if you could clone yourself in a virtual sense? Even better, imagine cloning yourself into another person's body? What would you feel? What would you learn? How would your life be better? Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist from Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has pioneered a method of allowing us to get out of our bodies and into the body of someone else...virtually...so that you sense whatever the other person senses. We "clone" ourselves everyday with simple technologies like a mirror or camera. But this is different. This technique clones you into another form so you can experience life from that point-of-view.
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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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August 16, 2010
Published by boydadmin at August 16, 2010
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Simulating Innovation

People can improve their innovation skills by mentally simulating the use of innovation tools. Chip and Dan Heath in their book, Made to Stick, talk of the importance of mental simulation with problem solving as well as skill-building.
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September 6, 2010
Published by boydadmin at September 6, 2010
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The Voice of the Product

Could the greatest innovation of all time be a method of innovation? Roger Smith proposed this in The Evolution of Innovation. Is such a method out there? The answer is yes. Suppose you want to come up with a new product idea. Where do you begin? What method would you use? Conventional thinking suggests three possible directions. First, we could seek insights from our customers through research and observation (Voice of the Customer). Second, we could emulate what past inventors such as Edison and Disney did to create new ideas (Voice of the Expert). Or we could seek ideas from competitors and other sources using the "open" mindset (Voice of the Market).
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March 19, 2012
Published by boydadmin at March 19, 2012
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Marketing Innovation: The Unification Tool on a Grand Scale

The Unification Tool is a tricky but effective advertising tool. Unification recruits an existing resource and forces it to carry the advertising message. That resource can come from within the medium itself or within the environment of the medium. In other words, the tool uses an existing component of the medium or of its environment in a way that demonstrates the problem or the promise to be delivered.
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September 30, 2012
Published by boydadmin at September 30, 2012
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The LAB: Innovating Pinterest with Attribute Dependency (September 2012)

It's official. Pinterest has joined the elite group of social apps along with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Google Plus. "Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard that lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web." How popular is it? It is the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. A report by Shareaholic claims, “Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.” As of March 2012, Pinterest was valued at $1.5 billion. There are many creative ways to use Pinterest. New apps are emerging around it much like what happened with Twitter. But to maintain growth, Pinterest needs innovation. For this month's LAB, we will apply Attribute Dependency, one of five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking, to Pinterest. Our goal will be to create new innovations around Pinterest as we did with Twitter and Facebook.
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December 1, 2014
Published by boydadmin at December 1, 2014
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The Power of Patterns That Guide Our Thinking

Could creativity be as simple as following templates? In 1914 psychologist Wolfgang Köhler embarked on a series of studies about chimpanzees and their ability to solve problems. He documented the research in his book The Mentality of Apes. In one experiment, he took a newborn chimp and placed it in an isolated cage, before the newborn saw or made contact with other chimps. He named her Nueva.
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