GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

The economic outlook for 2015 is, by most accounts, “slightly better than 2014.” That, of course, depends on what industry you’re in. For some, that outlook could be a lot better with an injection of good, old fashioned innovation. Here is my short list of five industries most ripe for innovation in 2015.

1. Commercial Aerospace: I may be biased because I’ve worked in this industry, but I’ve always considered the aerospace industry the most complicated and difficult of any. Think about the conditions that airlines, for example, work under. They’re heavily regulated, union intensive, recession sensitive, fiercely competitive, fuel price sensitive, and operationally complex. Putting thousands of full airplanes safely in the sky everyday is no small feat. And it’s not just the airlines that face challenges. The aircraft and engine manufacturers like Airbus and GE face enormous technology and business risk when building new equipment.

It’s these challenges that make the aerospace industry ripe for innovation. Tight constraints are a necessary condition for creativity, and this industry has it more than any. We should expect a significant focus on innovation from this sector next year, especially in creating many small, incremental innovations rather than seeking the big disruptors.

2. Pharmaceutical: The pharma industry has many of the same attributes as aerospace in terms of the regulatory scrutiny and long lead time development risks. But this industry has been turned upside down by a series of independent events. Changes in how new drugs are discovered, the shift to generics, the move to personalized medicine, and the shrinking pipeline have conspired to create the “perfect storm” for this industry. Drug companies are moving past just hoping for a billion dollar, blockbuster drug to save them. They need to find relevance beyond the prescribers and pharmacies that dispense their products.

We should expect to see big pharma companies innovate across the entire value chain, from pill manufacturing all the way into the patient’s home. Big brands what to become a household name, not just an clinical industry name.

3. Food: Pressure on this industry isn’t just from the FDA and other regulators. Consumers are on high alert like never before about what they put in their mouths. It’s not hard to see why. The obesity epidemic has tainted our image of sugar, once thought of as sweet, but now seen as deadly and addictive. Constant media reports about food poisoning and listeria outbreaks make consumers nervous and suspicious. Changing consumer trends in taste and ingredients create a moving target for ingredient makers and food processors. Even Bill Gates has weighed in on the need for innovation in this industry, noting that our approach to food hasn’t changed much over the last 100 years. “It’s ripe for innovation.”

I expect to see the big food companies like Kraft and Cambell’s step up their innovation efforts in everything from manufacturing lines, packaging, and retailing. Like the pharma companies, they need to bring more relevance to the consumer once the product reaches the home.

4. Higher Education: Like aerospace, this industry is a hot button for me because I’m in it. Universities are under constant scrutiny, from outside and from within, about the many challenges they face. Type into Google, “the problem with universities” and you’ll get 200 million results. What’s interesting about this industry is how long it’s been around, how well understood the problems are, yet how difficult it is to make progress. The university model faces issues around the tenure system, the role of a university in terms research versus teaching, and most importantly, relevance – are universities producing the right product for our society, or have they become so insular and out of touch in preparing students?

We should expect to see more innovation outside of the university model that will put pressure to change inside. New educational models, social learning, corporate learning resources, and revised expectations of the consumer about college and its costs will isolate universities to the brink of change.

5. Consulting: Consultants can be their own worst enemy in forgetting to take care of their own business model while working to improve their client’s. As with the other ripe industries, market forces are causing cracks in the seams of this one, too. The biggest change is transparency. Consulting firms used to live behind a shroud of brand reputation, where executive selected a consultant to reduce risk to their own stock. Now clients want to see more of what goes on inside, and it is changing the way they hire consultant, pay them, and use them. Customers don’t want to pay too much for features they don’t value, especially when they have unprecedented access to the same information and Big Data as the consultants.

We should expect consulting firms to innovate new ways to deliver faster results, and to take more accountability for those results.

Bring on 2015!

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Innovation is anything that is new, useful, and surprising. “Surprising” means that the idea makes you slap your forehead and say, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?”

Here’s a great example:

“Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new display technology that automatically corrects for vision defects — no glasses (or contact lenses) required.” It is a classic and clever example of the Divison Technique, one of the five techniques in Systematic Inventive Thinking.

From MIT News:

“The first spectacles were invented in the 13th century,” says Gordon Wetzstein, a research scientist at the Media Lab and one of the display’s co-creators. “Today, of course, we have contact lenses and surgery, but it’s all invasive in the sense that you either have to put something in your eye, wear something on your head, or undergo surgery. We have a different solution that basically puts the glasses on the display, rather than on your head. It will not be able to help you see the rest of the world more sharply, but today, we spend a huge portion of our time interacting with the digital world.”
In hindsight, it makes so much sense to “divide” the function of your glasses (vision correction) and place it somewhere else. For example, this technology might be applied to televisions, car windshields, windows in your home, or just about anything that you have to focus on.

To get the most out of the Division technique, you follow five basic steps:

1. List the product’s or service’s internal components.

2. Divide the product or service in one of three ways:

• Functional (take a component and rearrange its location or when it appears).
• Physical (cut the product or one of its components along any physical line and rearrange it).
• Preserving (divide the product or service into smaller pieces, where each piece still possesses all the characteristics of the whole).

3. Visualize the new (or changed) product or service.

4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge?

5. If you decide you have a new product or service that is indeed valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create this new product or perform this new service? Why or why not? Can you refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

Keep in mind that you don’t have to use all three forms of Division, but you boost your chance of scoring a breakthrough idea if you do.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Can you imagine flying in a plane without windows? A design team from Technicon Design in Paris created an interior that displays 360-degree views that are simulated on internal screens from external cameras that capture the surrounding environment in real time. The images displayed in the interior cabin—including the walls and even the ceiling—give passengers the feeling of flying through the air in an invisible vessel.

It’s an excellent example of the Subtraction Technique, one of five techniques in Systematic Inventive Thinking.

As reported on Fox News:

For business minded clientele, the screens can also be used for video conferences. Or if you’re in the mood for a some entertainment, kick back and relax with a state of the art in flight movie. For claustrophobic passengers, the screens can also be used to project relaxing landscapes like a tropical beach. Technicon Design created the design for a National Business Aviation Association and has since won an award at the International Yacht & Aviation Awards in the exterior design category.

“I challenged the team to break out of conventional thinking with regards to a business jet exterior and interior,” Gareth Davies, design director at Technicon Design’s studio near Paris, told the Daily Mail. “We quickly settled on the controversial yet interesting idea of removing the windows from the cabin and using existing or very near future technology to display the exterior environment on flexible screens.”

See video here

To get the most out of the Subtraction technique, you follow five basic steps:

1. List the product’s or service’s internal components.

2. Select an essential component and imagine removing it. There are two ways: a. Full Subtraction. The entire component is removed. b. Partial Subtraction. Take one of the features or functions of the component away or diminish it in some way.

3. Visualize the resulting concept (no matter how strange it seems).

4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this new product or service, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge? After you’ve considered the concept “as is” (without that essential component), try replacing the function with something from the Closed World (but not with the original component). You can replace the component with either an internal or external component. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values of the revised concept?

5. If you decide that this new product or service is valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create these new products? Perform these new services? Why or why not? Is there any way to refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

People need time to innovate, but corporations tend to “tax” employees with time-wasting bureaucracy. As reported in The Economist, clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity.

“Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than one colleague.”

Endless meetings aren’t the only forms of corporate clutter. Complex organizational design forces people to waste valuable time and energy figuring out how to get things done. Emails overload, especially when employees don’t know how to use filtering techniques. Status reports dull the mind and waste energy by forcing employees to regurgitate old news

To fight through the clutter, I recommend the following:

1. Develop an Innovation Competency: Innovation is a skill, not a gift. It can be learned by anyone and applied systematic. Innovative companies treat it as just another core skill by creating a well-defined set of innovation competencies and embedding them into employee’s competency model along with other required behaviors such as ethics and leadership. A innovation method such as SIT, for example, gives an employee the ability to “innovate on demand.”

2. Drive Innovation as a Process: Defining innovation as just the NPD process is too limiting. Leaders need to sponsor cross-functional teams using systematic innovation tools that feed concepts into the NPD process. This will eliminate the “fuzzy” in the front end to create sustainable process of generating new opportunities.

3. Innovate Under the Radar: In the Harvard Business Review, Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg make a great point in their article, “The Case for Stealth Innovation.” Savvy innovators know how to operate under the radar and nurture innovation programs through complex bureaucracy. Thomas Bonoma’s classic HBR article from 1986, “Marketing Subversives,” said something similar:

“I found that under conditions of marketplace change, success depended heavily on the presence of marketing subversives in a company. Subversive marketers undermined their organizations’ structures to implement new marketing practices….And no matter what higher management had decided to allocate to various marketing projects, the subversives found ways to work around the official budget. They bootlegged the resources they needed to implement new, more appropriate marketing practices.”

The same can be said about innovation.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

When describing the SIT method, I sometimes say it’s like using the voice of the product. That’s because SIT is based on patterns that are embedded into the products and services you see around you. If products could talk to you, they would describe the five patterns of SIT.

But there’s another important voice in business innovation: the voice of the customer. After all, that’s why you do innovation – to create new value, directly or indirectly, for your customers. A good innovator understands their needs and wants. Here are four ways to gain new insights from your customers.

One of the first things you should do is listen to what customers are saying about a particular product or brand. It’s especially important to hear what customers say to other customers. That’s when they’re the most truthful and objective, even when talking to complete strangers. If you had a way to eavesdrop on a conversation between two customers, you’ll get new insights about their attitudes.

A great way to do that is to use social media. Applications like Twitter and Facebook let you hear what’s being discussed, almost as if you were standing right there with them. It’s inexpensive and it’s easy. When you listen to customers on social media, pay close attention to the specific words or phrases they use. What emotions do they express? What beliefs do they have about a product and how it works? Whether those beliefs are true or untrue, you need to know what they’re thinking so you can design your products accordingly.

Another way to learn about your customers is to watch them. Using field research, you go into the customer’s natural setting where they use the product or service. You observe their behaviors as they do routine, ordinary activities. If you watch carefully, you’ll see things they could never have described for you in words. They’re not even aware they are doing them.

By watching them, you might learn about a new step in how they use the product. That could affect how you use the Division Technique. Or, you might become aware of a new component in their Closed World, and that might affect how you apply the Task Unification technique. Pay close attention to who else is involved, what information are they using or not using, how they prepare the product for use, and perhaps how they store it or maintain it.

A third way to get customer insights is to ask them. You’re probably familiar with marketing research tools like surveys and focus groups as a way to collect voice of the customer data. But there are two simple techniques you always want to be able to use at a moment’s notice in case you engage a customer.

The first is to use open-ended questions. An example of an open-ended question is: “What’s most important to you when using this feature of our product.”  A closed-ended question would be: “Do you like this feature of our product?” The open-ended question encourages a full, meaningful response as opposed to a closed-ended question, which encourages a short or single-word answer. You’ll get deeper insights with open-ended questions.

The second technique when talking to customers is to use laddering. Laddering means asking a series of questions, one after another, but you base the next question on the answer you received from the last one. Like climbing the rungs of a ladder, you first ask about the functional aspects of your product, then ladder up to the values the customers sees in those features.

Finally, a great way to learn about your customer’s needs is to involve them in the innovation process. Use the Function Follows Form process. Once you’ve created the virtual product using one of the five SIT techniques, you ask two specific questions. The first is should we do it? Does the new configuration deliver some new benefit? Who would want this? I can’t think of anyone better to help you answer these than your customers. After all, they stand the most to gain by a new innovation. When they see something they like, they’ll tell you or they’ll tell you how to modify the concept to make it even better.

Customers might also have new insights about the second question: Can we do it? Do we have the know how or the right material or the right processes to make this? Are there barriers that might prevent us from making this? Your customers might have some critical insight or skills about how to remove barriers or make the concept more feasible.

Listen, watch, ask, and involve. The Voice of the Customer, used along with the SIT Method, will help you become a more effective innovator.

image credit: meeting image from bigstock

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Philips North America announced the launch of the second annual Philips Innovation Fellows competition, in conjunction with the release of its 2014 North America Innovation Report. According to the report, nearly two-thirds of North Americans consider themselves innovators, of which a majority (72 percent) believe they are sitting on an idea for “the next big thing,”  and just need money and ‘know how’ to develop it. The Philips Innovation Fellows Competition awards mentoring and $100,000 in cash prizes to inspire would-be entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to life by entering the competition.

“Philips is committed to meaningful innovation, and we strive to develop technology that makes a real difference in helping people lead healthy and fulfilling lives,” said Brent Shafer, CEO of Philips North America. “We believe impactful innovation can come from anyone, and we want to celebrate the great ideas that have the potential to revolutionize the way we live, work and play. That’s why we’re encouraging all innovators out there to submit their big idea for the next innovation.”

Philips practices what it preaches. The company is featured in Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results for its use of the Subtraction Technique to create the Slimline DVD player.

Survey Findings

Almost half of respondents feel the best innovations come from individual inventors (47 percent) and startups (24 percent), followed by academics (13 percent) and corporations (11 percent). However, one in two people said financial support from big companies is the key to achieving successful innovation, followed by mentor relationships (47 percent) and government incentives (44 percent).

Top Barriers

Many respondents feel that lack of money and a narrow mindset are the top barriers to preventing people from innovating, indicating the need for collaboration with and support from big companies:

•             Lack of money (70 percent)

•             Narrow/stifled mindset (41 percent)

•             Unsupportive corporate culture (40 percent)

•             Government regulations (37 percent)

Areas for Improvement

North Americans feel that successful innovation has a purpose beyond creating technology for technology’s sake. Sixty-two percent of respondents said successful innovation improves lives, makes daily life easier (57 percent) and meets an unmet societal need (33 percent).

Healthcare (57 percent) was cited as the top area where innovation can improve lives, followed by work/life balance (38 percent), education methods (33 percent), technological solutions for the home (30 percent) and public transportation and infrastructure (30 percent).

Philips Innovation Fellows Competition

Philips is encouraging people nationwide to submit their big ideas for the next meaningful innovation that will help people live healthier, more sustainable lives. Entrants will have the chance to tap into $100,000 in prize money from Philips to help make their innovations a reality. To further promote open innovation, entrants can gain financial support for their idea on Indiegogo.com, a global web-based crowd funding site.

“Indiegogo is dedicated to helping innovators make their ideas a reality by connecting them to individuals from around the world, who can endorse their innovations through financial support,”said Slava Rubin, CEO and co-founder of Indiegogo. “Corporations need to be more involved in helping everyday innovators succeed and we’re thrilled to partner with Philips on this competition to bring new ideas to fruition.”

The grand-prize winner will be announced this fall and will receive a $60,000 cash prize from Philips, in addition to the funding raised through Indiegogo, to help make their innovation a reality. Along with the monetary prize, the winner will receive mentoring from Philips executives around their “next big thing” idea. Each of the remaining four finalists will receive a $10,000 cash prize.

Last year, Philips named Fosmo Med the grand prize winner of the first Philips Innovation Fellows competition. Philips employees selected Fosmo Med’s Maji Intravenous (IV) saline bag, which creates a sterile solution in the field for patients in developing countries from any water, clean or dirty, as the next big, meaningful innovation in health and well-being.

“We were honored to win the Philips Innovation Fellows competition,” said Ben Park, CEO and founder of Fosmo Med. “Winning has not only helped fund the research and development completion for Maji, but more importantly, validated the idea of our product. Philips helped give us the resources and credibility we need to save lives on a global level.”

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

A common problem in photography is the occurrence of red-eye, like you see here. Redeye happens when the flash of a camera goes into the eyeball. It hits the back of your eye which has a lot of tiny blood vessels. The light picks up the red color from the blood in these vessels, and then it bounces straight back into your camera lens. Your friends get that eerie, red-eye look.

But today’s cameras have a clever and simple way to defeat redeye. They have a dual flash. The first flash causes the person’s pupil to constrict enough so that very little light will get in. At that exact moment, the second flash goes off and lights up the subject matter. Voila! No redeye.

This innovation is a classic example of the multiplication technique. The Multiplication Technique is defined as copying an element already existing in the product or service but changing it in some counterintuitive way.

To use the technique, begin by listing the components of the product, process, or service. You pick one of those components, make a copy of it. You keep the original component as is, but the copied component is changed. That creates the virtual product. Using Function Follows Form, you look for potential benefits, and you modify or adapt the concept to improve it to yield an innovative idea.

Here are some examples of multiplication:

The consumer products company, Procter & Gamble, used the Multiplication Technique to create the Febreze Noticeable Air Freshener. It’s called Noticeable because it has a clever way to keep you smelling the scent. After a period of time, your nose becomes too accustomed to a smell, and the brain shuts it out. But this product gets around that. It has not one, but two different scents. The first scent pulses out into the room, but then stops right about the time your nose stops recognizing it. Just then, the second scent starts pulsing out into the room. Your nose picks up where the other one left off. Pretty clever.

Here’s another example. Gillette multiplied the razor blade of a straight edge razor to create the TRAC II Twin Blade Shaving System. The first blade gently lifts the whisker so that the second blade can cut off the whisker for a closer shave. The copied component is different in its location and function. By the way, you may have noticed Gillette and other companies have added even more blades to their razors. They have as many as five blades, but they don’t really do anything differently than the first one. I don’t consider that a creative idea, but rather just a way to improve performance.

Look at this measuring cup. It has two sets of measurements along the side. It has its original measurements, and a second set of measurements at an odd angle around the perimeter of the cup. Why would that be valuable? As you tilt the cup to pour liquid, the second set of measurements allows you to continue measuring the amount of liquid. That’s very convenient.

Multiplication accounts for many new products and services, and it’s straightforward to use. You want to make this powerful technique part of your innovation arsenal.

image credit:nmdnet

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

The famous inventor, Thomas Edison, lived in a beautiful home. But something was unusual about the gate that led into his house. His visitors had to push the gate very hard to open it, and then again very hard to close it. It seemed odd that such a successful inventor like Thomas Edison wouldn’t fix his gate. Rumor has it that Thomas had attached a pump to his gate so that every time someone opened or closed it, they were pumping fresh water into the plumbing system of the house.

This is a great example of the innovation technique called Task Unification. Task Unification is defined as the assignment of additional tasks to an existing resource. That resource can be a component of a product or service. Or it can be something in the immediate vicinity of the product or service.

Think back to the story of Thomas’s gate. The gate has its primary job of letting visitors through, but it also has the additional job of pumping water. That’s not all to the story. The guests coming to visit Thomas are also a resource. They have their primary job of being friends of Thomas. But now they have the additional job of activating the gate to open and close it.

To use Task Unification, begin by listing the product’s internal components as well as the external components, the things right around where the product is being used. You select a component and assign it an additional task. That creates the virtual product. Using Function Follows Form, you look for potential benefits, and you modify or adapt the concept to improve it.

There are three ways to apply Task Unification:

One way is to have an internal component take a job of another internal component. Think of it as that component is stealing the function of the other component. Here is an example.

• What you see here looks like an ordinary coffee maker. In fact,this product has a clever little innovation inside. The coffee maker’s filter has the additional job of measuring just the right amount of coffee to use given how much water was put in. It gives you the perfect brew every time.

You could also have an internal component take the job of an external component.

• Nissan, the Japanese auto maker, has a nifty idea to make it easier to fill your tires with air. The car’s horn will beep to let you know when you’ve reached the right tire pressure. It’s called the Easy Fill Tire Alert. In this example, the car horn steals the job of the tire pressure gauge.

You could also have an external component steal the job of an internal component.

• Here’s an example from a grocery store in Korea. They placed billboards in train and subway stations that show their products on the shelves just the way you would see it in a store. Commuters use their smartphones to scan the products they need. That shopping list is sent to the grocery store so the commuter can stop by on the way home to pick up the groceries. In this example, they assigned the subway billboards the additional task of becoming the point-of-sale. Very convenient and it saves times.

Here’s another example of an external component being assigned the additional job of an internal component. It’s a concept called Play Pump. It’s a child’s merry-go-round, the kind you would see on a playground. They don’t know it, but as they play on it, they’re also turning a pump to pump fresh water out of a well and into a holding tank. It’s used in small villages in sub Sahara Africa where finding and pumping water is difficult. The kids of the village have the additional job of providing water to the community.

That almost sounds a lot like Thomas Edison and his water pumping gate! And that’s why Task Unification can lead you to some pretty clever ideas.

image credit: hand pushing image from bigstock

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Humans are creatures of habits, and these habits can be analyzed and codified into rules that help us perform better. Many times, we’re not even aware of the habits that control our choices.

Conside the child’s game, Rock-Paper-Scissors. The odds of winning are one in three. At least, that’s what chance predicts. But people do not play randomly – they follow hidden patterns that you can predict to win more games than you should, a study has revealed.

At a rock-paper-scissors tournament at China’s Zhejiang University, scientists recruited 360 students, placed them in groups of six and had each of them run 300 rounds against their fellow group members. As an incentive, winners were paid for each individual victory.

When players won a round, they tended to repeat their winning rock, paper or scissors more often than would be expected at random (one in three). Losers, on the other hand, tended to switch to a different action. And they did so in order of the name of the game – moving from rock, to paper, to scissors. After losing with a rock, for example, a player was more likely to play paper in the next round than the “one in three” rule would predict.

Humans follow patterns in many other domains including creativity. Research by Dr. Jacob Goldenberg suggests that or thousands of years, inventors have embedded five simple patterns into their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are the “DNA” of products that can be extracted and applied to any product or service to create new-to-the-world innovations.

The five patterns are:

• Subtraction: Innovative products and services tend to have had something removed, usually something that was previously thought to be essential to use the product or service. The original Sony Walkman had the recording function subtracted, defying all logic to the idea of a “recorder.” Even Sony’s chairman and inventor of the Walkman, Akio Morita, was surprised by the market’s enthusiastic response.

• Task Unification: Innovative products and services tend to have had certain tasks brought together and “unified” within one component of the product or service, usually a component that was previously thought to be unrelated to that task. Crowdsourcing, for example, leverages large groups of people by tasking them to generate insights or tasks, sometimes without even realizing it.

• Multiplication: Innovative products and services tend to have had a component copied but changed in some way, usually in a way that initially seemed unnecessary or redundant. Many innovations in cameras, including the basis of photography itself, are based on copying a component and then changing it. For example, a double flash when snapping a photo reduces the likelihood of “red-eye.”

• Division: Innovative products and services tend to have had a component divided out of the product or service and placed back somewhere into the usage situation, usually in a way that initially seemed unproductive or unworkable. Dividing out the function of a refrigerator drawer and placing it somewhere else in the kitchen creates a cooling drawer.

• Attribute Dependency: Innovative products and services tend to have had two attributes correlated with each other, usually attributes that previously seemed unrelated. As one attribute changes, another changes. Transition sunglasses, for example, get darker as the outside light gets brighter.

Using these patterns correctly relies on two key ideas. The first idea is that you have to re-train the way your brain thinks about problem solving. Most people think the way to innovate is by starting with a well-defined problem and then thinking of solutions. In our method, it is just the opposite. We start with an abstract, conceptual solution and then work back to the problem that it solves. Therefore, we have to learn how to reverse the usual way our brain works in innovation.

This process is called “Function Follows Form,” first reported in 1992 by psychologist Ronald Finke. He recognized that there are two directions of thinking: from the problem-to-the-solution and from the solution-to-the-problem. Finke discovered people are actually better at searching for benefits for given configurations (starting with a solution) than at finding the best configuration for a given benefit (starting with the problem).

The second key idea to using patterns is the starting point. It is an idea called The Closed World. We tend to be most surprised with those ideas “right under noses,” that are connected in some way to our current reality or view of the world. This is counterintuitive because most people think you need to get way outside their current domain to be innovative. Methods like brainstorming and SCAMPER use random stimulus to push you “outside the box” for new and inventive ideas. Just the opposite is true. The most surprising ideas (“Gee, I never would have thought of that!”) are right nearby.

We have a nickname for The Closed World…we call it Inside the Box.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

You can frequently make groundbreaking innovations simply by dividing a product into “chunks” to create many smaller versions of it. These smaller versions still function like the original product, but their reduced size delivers benefits that users wouldn’t get with the larger, “parent” product. This is one of three approaches of the Division Technique called “Preserving Division.”

Les Paul used Preserving Division to produce his multitrack recording by taking a single piece of media—a tape—and dividing it into multiple smaller tracks that perform the same function as the original large piece of tape.

We see this all the time in the technology industry. For years, computer makers kept increasing the capacity of hard drives (the devices within PCs on which programs and data are stored). Then an engineer had a brilliant idea to use Preserving Division to create mini personal storage devices. Today many people won’t leave their desks without placing their “thumb” drives in their briefcase or pocket. These mini storage units are designed specifically for people who must carry electronic versions of documents with them but don’t want to be burdened with laptops or other computing devices. They simply transfer documents from their PCs to their thumb drives, and walk away from the computer.

Many food manufacturers use the Preserving Division technique to create more convenient versions of popular products. By taking a regular serving or portion of a product and dividing it into multiple smaller portions, manufacturers allow consumers to purchase food products in more convenient and cost-effective ways. Consumers buy only what they need instead of a larger amount. Recently, manufacturers have even used Preserving Division to help people curb their calorie intake by providing popular snacks in smaller, more diet-friendly packages. Kraft Foods’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese brand does this by offering individually wrapped single-serving-size portions of its flagship product for people to put in their brown-bag lunches or take to the office with a breakfast bagel.

The time-sharing arrangements that many hotels and condominiums offer provide more examples of Preserving Division. Under timesharing, a year of “ownership” of a property is divided into fifty-two smaller units of a week each. Each unit is then sold to a different owner, who has the right to live in the property for that week. Each smaller unit preserves the characteristics of the whole. Ownership has been divided over time.

Likewise, when you make payments on a loan, you are sending small amounts of money created by dividing the larger, principal amount of the loan. Like the time-sharing condos, the division is based on time.

When doctors treat cancer tumors with radiation therapy, they have to be sure to kill the cancer tissue without doing too much damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. How? They divide the total dose of radiation into smaller, less lethal doses and aim them at the tumor from many different angles. The smaller beams of high-energy X‑rays, divided in space, converge to hit the cancer cells. But the lighter dose of any one beam does not do enough damage to other tissue that it hits along the way.

To get the most out of the Division technique, you follow five basic steps:

1. List the product’s or service’s internal components.

2. Divide the product or service in one of three ways:

• Functional (take a component and rearrange its location or when it appears).
• Physical (cut the product or one of its components along any physical line and rearrange it).
• Preserving (divide the product or service into smaller pieces, where each piece still possesses all the characteristics of the whole).

3. Visualize the new (or changed) product or service.

4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge?

5. If you decide you have a new product or service that is indeed valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create this new product or perform this new service? Why or why not? Can you refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

Keep in mind that you don’t have to use all three forms of Division, but you boost your chance of scoring a breakthrough idea if you do.

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