GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Sustainable innovation requires structured methods. But it also requires collaboration and information sharing among colleagues. Innovation is a team sport – groups produce better results than the lone genius. So how do you create a more favorable context for collaboration and sharing in your business unit?Reputation is what matters. The degree to which a technical worker will share information with a colleague depends on that colleague’s reputation for returning the favor. The rule of reciprocity states that people give back to those in the form they have received from others. It is a social rule taught by every human society to its members – you give back to those who have given to you. But the key is: to make the first move. You have to be seen as someone who gives and shares information with others, and has a reputation for returning the favor when others give to you.Dr. Prescott Ensign and Dr. Louis Hebert investigated this phenomena by surveying more than 200 pharmaceutical scientists working in the R&D operations of 63 different companies in Canada and the United States. They found that technical workers often hold critical information privately without fear of sanction or consequence. What motivates them to share with others is when they see the other person as likely to give back – the other person has a well-deserved reputation for giving information back to the other person that is meaningful. The complete results and analysis of the study are described in the book “Knowledge Sharing Among Scientists.” Here are the key findings (from Sloan Management Review, Winter 2010, Vol. 51 No. 2, pp 79-81):

• Past behavior by individual scientists, and the groups they belong to, influences whether knowledge is shared.
• Longer duration of interaction positively influences the flow of information.
• Quality matters more than quantity of information shared.
• Pre-existing personal and professional relationships increased the likelihood of knowledge sharing.
• Individuals who were already obliged to another person were less likely to be helped by that person that someone who was less obligated, not obligated or owed a favor.

Organizations who want to be more innovative need to do two things. First is co-location of knowledge workers and team building. Putting people in close proximity to one another and getting them to socialize will make them more likely to have the day-to-day, random encounters where they can share critical tidbits of knowledge and information. The second is training. Companies are recognizing a key gap in the skills of influence. People can be trained how to systematically and ethically influence and align their co-workers. Six universal principles of persuasion such as Reciprocity are well-described by Dr. Robert Cialdini in his book, “Influence: Science and Practice.” Companies are even conducting formal training courses in the practice of influence to make their knowledge workers more effective.For individual innovators:

• Make the first move. Share critical information with others even if they have not given anything to you. Make sure the information is meaningful and customized to that specific individual so that they feel especially obligated to return the favor.
• When you receive information from others, reciprocate in kind. Build a reputation as a person who is willing to give back to others who give to you.
• Develop informal social relationships and networks within – and outside – your work group.
• Learn the principles of influence and how to deploy them in the workplace and increase the level of knowledge and sharing.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Language and innovation are inseparable. Language puts meaning to our ideas, be it spoken, written, or symbolic. We convey ideas to others which is essential in corporate innovation. Innovation would be nearly impossible if we did not have language. If you want to improve your innovation effectiveness, improve your use of language. Structured innovation methods help regulate our thinking and channel the ideation process. At the moment immediately before we innovate, we hold in our minds a pre-inventive form or structure that has yet to be understood. It is at that exact moment we conjure up words and associations to attach to the pre-inventive form. It is this process of linking objective facts and judgments to the pre-inventive form that transforms it to an inventive form – an idea.Here is a step-by-step approach how language is used in innovation:

1. Generate Pre-Inventive Forms: Use a structured process such as S.I.T. or Geneplore to create novel, divergent, and ambiguous forms.
2. Match Forms to Facts: Take the ambiguous forms inside your head and connect them to objective facts outside your head. This yields an idea. Better ideas are created when we strive for facts that are both clear and true. A bad idea stems from weak or assumed facts swimming around inside our head and not validated or developed. As D.Q. McInery notes, “No idea, even the most bizarre, can completely sever its ties with the objective world, but ideas can become so remote from that world that their relation to it is difficult, if not impossible, to see.” It is not “thinking outside the box,” but rather thinking outside your head that matters here.
3. Match Ideas to Words: Take the ideas created in Step 2 and associate them with words or symbols. “As we have seen, first comes the thing, then the idea, then the word. If our ideas are sound to the extent that they faithfully represent the thing, they will be clearly communicable only if we clothe them in words that accurately signify them.” “Putting the right word to an idea is not an automatic process, and sometimes it can be quite challenging. We have all had the experience of knowing what we want to say but not being able to come up with any words for it.”
4. Match Words to Value: Take the words and symbols that describe the idea and search for the value it creates. Identify the benefit it generates and for whom. If you have trouble at this step, go back and check the objective facts that sourced the idea to begin with. Or try different word and symbol descriptors to see if it triggers different insights about the value. Use a software program like Goldfire to search semantically for knowledge and information within the domain.
5. Articulate Value With Demonstration: Take the insight around value creation and try it out. Build a prototype, drawing, model or other representation that you can test with the target audience. Demonstration enables evaluation. Testing discloses areas for improvement. Here again, the use of the right language in the form of words and symbols is essential. Using the wrong language may lead to the wrong conclusion.

Here is an example:

1. This pre-inventive form is generated using the Task Unification template of the S.I.T. method: “A surgical instrument has the additional task of seeing through a small hole in the operating field.”
2. This form is matched with facts: the only way to see through an object is to make it transparent or to bend light around it. An idea!
3. The idea is matched to words: “Use mirrors like a toy periscope to see around the surgical device and into the small opening.”
4. The value derived is in being able to do accurate surgery in small spaces. It saves time because the surgeon does not have to peak around or withdraw the instrument to see inside the opening.
5. A prototype is built and tested, ultimately leading to a patentable product.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

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. From CNN: This is an example of the innovation template, Multiplication. It works by taking a component of a product or service, then creating copies of it that are different in some way. Using SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM innovation, we imagine potential benefits of the hypothetical solution. Dr. Ehrsson believes this technique could help us improve our self-esteem. It might help amputees put a sense of feeling into a prosthetic limb. Or it might help us identify with other cultural, racial, or gender groups by “living” in their bodies. This last idea is particularly intriguing. Imagine you had the ability to mandate when someone else uses the technique to become YOU. You would use this is critical situations when it is essential the other person understands your point-of-view: spouse, lawyer, negotiating partner, customer, boss, etc. The ultimate cloning experience is not making another copy of yourself, but rather having others clone to become you.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Ice hockey is big business. But it lags behind other professional sports – soccer, football, baseball, and basketball. As with all industries, the key to growth is innovation. Equipment manufacturers such as Reebok are taking this seriously with the creation of the Hockey Research and Innovation Center. In this month’s LAB, we will focus on the equipment side of hockey, specifically on: the hockey stick.Hockey has been around a long time with evidence of its origins dating to the sixteenth century. The first organized indoor game was played in 1875. Since then, many innovations have been introduced. Let’s see how a systematic, corporate innovation method can be applied to drive new sales opportunities.I used the Attribute Dependency template of Systematic Inventive Thinking. Attribute Dependency differs from the other templates in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components. Start with an attribute list, then construct a 2 x 2 matrix of these, pairing each against the others. Each cell represents a potential dependency (or potential break in an existing dependency) that forms a Virtual Product. Using Function Follows Form, we work backwards and envision a potential benefit or problem that this hypothetical solution solves. Here is my attribute list: Internal Attributes:

• length of stick
• curve of stick
• flex of stick
• friction of stick (bottom)
• weight of stick

External Attributes:

• game situation (even strength or penalty situation)
• condition of ice (smooth or rough)
• type of shot (forehand or backhand)
• force of shot (slap shot, wrist shot, snap shot)
• use of stick (blocking, hooking, checking, etc)

Here are five innovations for the hockey stick using combinations of these attributes (underlined for emphasis):1. “Extenda-Stick:” The hockey stick changes length depending on the game situation. If the player is in a defensive mode, the stick can be extended to its maximum allowable length to allow better blocking of shots. When the player transitions to the offensive puck handling mode, the stick reverts to its optimal length as determined by the height and preference of that player. This would be great for situations when your team has a player in the penalty box where defensive play is called for. The stick length could be changed, perhaps, with a push button and spring-loading within a certain range. 2. “Curve-Switcher:” Hockey sticks are either right-handed or left-handed as determined by the direction of the curve of the stick. The challenge occurs when a player wants to take a backhand shot with the back, convex side. It is difficult to control direction and speed of the puck with the back of stick that is curved the wrong way. With this new innovation, the direction of the curve changes depending on the type of shot the player is about to take. Like the “Extenda-Stick,” the curve direction changes with the push of a button or a squeeze of the stick. The would be particularly useful on the “wrap-around” attempt (demonstrated here by my son, Ryan, at age 14). This would increase goals, game interest, attendance, etc.3. “Feel-the-Ice:” The friction on the bottom of the stick adjusts to the smoothness of the ice. Hockey players want to “feel the ice” with their stick as they handle the puck. Early in the game, the ice is freshly prepared and very slippery. That is when the stick bottom needs to have more friction. Later, as the ice surface gets rough and snowy, the stick bottom needs to be slippery. Perhaps the stick has a pad that is added to the bottom at the beginning of a period and it changes over a 20 minute time frame, going from sticky to slippery, adjusting passively to the change in ice surface.4. “Flex-Flex:” The flexibility of the stick changes with the type of shot the player is taking. If the player “winds up” for a hard slap shot, the shaft of the stick stiffens to maximize the power applied to the puck. If the player takes a shot with the stick at a low angle to the ice (in other words, a wrist shot), the shaft becomes more flexible allowing the player to transfer power with the spring action of the stick.5. “Whistle-Blower:” Hockey players use their sticks for lots of things, but some of them are illegal. Hooking, tripping, and spearing are examples. With this innovation, the stick alerts the referee when it is being used improperly, causing a penalty. For example, if a player holds the stick parallel to the ice with the blade turned sideways and hooks the body of another player (placing pressure on the top of the blade), the stick would send a signal to the referee indicating a foul. Perhaps the stick could detect when it draws blood!

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

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.” 1. FINANCIAL WALLET: “A complete personal financial guide to assure financial success.” This concept features an online portfolio manager, a stock ticker, account summary, Forex calculator, and Quicken integration.

• Benefits: stay alert to changes in your financial situation so you can make better, real-time decisions to manage your personal finances.

2. ARMOR WALLET: “The most secure wallet on the planet! Helps protect and manage your critical information.” This concept features titanium casing, fingerprint scanner, auto-lockdown, missing card alert, and a data manager.

• Benefits: keep your financial instruments secure, get easy access to your important information, and be alerted when something is not right.

3. TRENDSETTER WALLET: “Always keeps you high on fashion. The ultimate style statement.” This concept features color changes according to your mood, attire, and occasion. It stores and displays pictures on an LCD screen to capture memories, plays the most hip music, gets real time fashion updates, gives you full body views with an advanced zoom in and zoom out mirror.

• Benefits: helps you match your fashion to your state of mind.

4. SHOPPERS PARADISE WALLET: “The most convenient shopping companion that always gets you the best deal.” This concept features credit card select (the appropriate credit/debit card pops out while shopping), then alerts you until the credit/debit card is back in the wallet. It manages your to-do list and shopping lists, and it gets graphical information on your expenditure with tips on money management. The wallet searches for the best discounts, and it controls cash flow with an online budget tracker. It has an aisle navigator to help you shop more efficiently.

• Benefits: gives you an enjoyable shopping experience while saving you money.

5. GLOBETROTTER WALLET: “The ultimate travel guide that makes you feel right at home anywhere in the world.” This concept features built in GPS, trip management, food/tip management, weather watch, language translator, and current Forex rates.

• Benefits: helps you get the most out of your travel experience by staying informed about what is going on around you.

6. FITNESS WALLET: “The perfect personal trainer to suit all your work out needs.” This concept features a heart rate monitor to check workout intensity, digitized locker key, first aid kit, stopwatch, distance and time, calorie watcher, MP3 player, sports updates, and a fitness scheduler.

• Benefits: helps you maximize the time spent staying in shape.

Check out this and the other Dream Catalogs at the Innovation Wiki.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

For many companies, the catalog of products is the strongest statement of brand positioning a company can make. It is your arsenal of commercialization. So imagine you could peek into the future and see a copy of your company’s product catalog five years from now. What would it look like? What if you could design it now? What would you put into it? These are the questions that confront you when you use a clever innovation tool called the Dream Catalog.The Dream Catalog is a hypothetical company catalog from the future…well into the future, beyond the next business cycle. It is far into the future so that it captures the innovative thinking and imagination of today’s managers. It stretches a company’s thinking about its future, and it provokes a healthy discussion about possible company direction. A good Dream Catalog causes tension.A Dream Catalog helps a company in several ways. It sets direction. It suggests how the company is going to add and remove products from the line over time. It forces the marketing team to reconcile product line strategy. It provides placeholders for new discoveries, inventions, and even acquisitions. It provides a sense of prioritization of what should be developed and in what order. It can even help forecast revenues.Best of all – it rewards and encourages innovation. The Dream Catalog serves as the focal point for company-wide innovation efforts. Employees strive to come up with product and service ideas that “make it” into the Dream Catalog. As the catalog takes shape, employees see how their future is taking shape. It guides their innovation efforts even more. Leaders can use the catalog as a motivational tool. “Let’s turn this dream into reality…for our customers and our future.” A good Dream Catalog creates excitement and a sense of purpose.I teach MBA students how to create a Dream Catalog in a full credit course called “Applied Marketing Innovation.” Here is a quick snapshot of how to do it. Create a slew of new product embodiments over your current product line as well as products in your industry you wish you had. Do this using an efficient method such as Systematic Inventive Thinking. Mix the ideas together with your current product line. Put yourself five or ten years out and envision what product offering would make your company the most amazing market leader in your industry. Using your “palette” of ideas, pull in those that, taken together, create that kind of company. Strive for product line coherence. Strive for differentiation. Strive for a customer centric solution. Then, make an actual catalog with product photos, prices, features, and benefits. Make it seem real.Here is a neat trick. Take all of your company’s catalogs as far back as you can and lay them side-by-side chronologically. Study the product offerings each year and note the changes over time. Note the new products, deleted products, and changed products. Do you see an evolutionary theme? Revolutionary? Stagnant? Now place your Dream Catalog five or ten spots ahead of the most recent catalog. Where will your Dream Catalog take you? How far, how fast, how cool?Think about Fortune 100 companies that might have a Dream Catalog of sorts. Think about former Fortune 100 companies that have since perished. Did they have a Dream Catalog? Would you buy stock in a company if it did not have a Dream Catalog?Dream on.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

This is the eighth of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?’. Now, here is Drew Boyd’s perspective:“It’s not what you don’t know that will get you. It’s what you know that ain’t so.” – Will RogersThe most dangerous misconception about innovation today is not about innovation at all. It is about everything surrounding our innovation efforts that gives us trouble. It is rooted in a concept called fixedness. Fixedness is the inability to realize that something known to have a particular use may also be used to perform other functions. When one is faced with a new problem, fixedness blocks one’s ability to use old tools in novel ways. Psychologist Karl Duncker coined the term functional fixedness for describing the difficulties in visual perception and problem solving that arise when one element of a whole situation has a (fixed) function which has to be changed for making the correct perception or for finding solutions. In his famous “candle problem” the situation was defined by the objects: a box of candles, a box of thumb-tacks and a book of matches. The task was to fix the candles on the wall without any additional elements. The difficulty of this problem arises from the functional fixedness of the candle box. It is a container in the problem situation but must be used as a shelf in the solution situation.Roni Horiwitz of S.I.T. puts it this way: “It’s almost impossible for the human brain to produce a really fresh and unique thought. Every thought, opinion or idea is somehow connected to previous concepts stored in the brain.” Because of this, we are often unable to see the solution to a problem although it stares us in the face. We are too connected to what we knew previously. We not only can’t let it go, but we try very hard to anchor around it to explain what is going on.Fixedness is insidious. It affects how we think about and see virtually every part of our lives. At work, we have fixedness about our products and services, out customers and competitors, and our future opportunities. The most damaging form of fixedness is when we are stuck on our current business model. We cannot see past what is working today. We stop challenging our assumptions. We continue to believe what was once true is still true. In the end, it is this perpetual blind spot that is most dangerous to our innovation potential.Customers have fixedness, too. Customers have a limited view of the future, they have well-entrenched notions of how the world works, and they suffer from the same blind spot we do. Yet we continue to seek the “Voice of the Customer” as though a divine intervention will break through this fixedness so they can spew new ideas.Fortunately, there is a way to address it. The way to break fixedness is to use structured innovation tools and principles that make you see problems and opportunities in new ways.I have witnessed the effects of fixedness in many teams across numerous companies and industries. That is usually the time I invoke the classic Will Rogers quote:“It’s not what you don’t know that will get you. It’s what you know that ain’t so.”Or was it Mark Twain?You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles from the different contributing authors on ‘What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?’ by clicking the link in this sentence.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Mobility is a good thing. As mobility increases, so does our standard of living. Mobility expands job opportunities, enriches our personal life, and boosts prosperity. For nations, mobility expands trade, creates wealth, and makes countries more competitive. Mobility even helps us live longer. For hundreds of years, life expectancies hovered around 40 years. During the 1800s they began to shoot up when road transport improved. Today life expectancies in many advanced societies approach 80 years thanks to improved mobility in transportation, communications, and network computing.How can we use structured innovation to create more of it? How can we make the products and services we use every day more mobile? For this month’s LAB, we will use the Division Template. We begin by listing the product’s (or service’s) internal components. Then we divide one or more of the components in one of three ways:

• Functional (divide along functional roles)
• Physical (cut the product or component on any physical aspect)
• Preserving (each part preserves the characteristics of the whole)

Using Function Follows Form, we envision potential benefits of the new form and other ways to adapt the form to make it more useful. The trick is to use each type of Division with the specific intent of increasing a person’s mobility. Each type of Division results in a different type of mobility. Here is how. Functional DivisionTo use Functional Division, we start by listing the functions alongside the component list. In some cases, multiple components may be needed to perform one function. We imagine the function “carved” out of the total system. Then we “mobilize” it. We create access to the function away from the original product. Cellphones are perhaps the best example of that. Cellphones give us access to telephone communications away from the home or office. Mobile banking is another example. Take a look at the apps on your iPhone and you will see many examples of Functional Division. My favorite is Chord Play, and app to play guitar chords while…mobile. But notice the app itself is not a mobile guitar. Rather, just the function of playing chords has been mobilized.Physical DivisionWith Physical Division, we don’t just imagine carving out a component or its function. We actually cut something out along any physical dimension. For this exercise, I prefer to physically cut the function out of the original unit in a way that it can be taken with me in mobile fashion, but then returned back to the main unit at some point. Here is an example of such a product. It is from the Stout Tool Corporation. The STX-50 is a one-handed, cordless band saw. It is a mobile cutter. But snap it into place in the STX-50 Cutting Station and it becomes a traditional tabletop band saw. This product was invented by taking the core function of the original product (cutting) and making it mobile. Let’s look at another example: how would we make a mobile refrigerator using Physical Division? We would have a refrigerator that would allow you to remove a compartment and take it with you. Imagine having a portable beverage container or freezer unit that lifts out of the refrigerator, allows you to keep things cool while away, then is reattached back inside the main refrigerator. I like this approach to Division because it tends to create the most novel mobile applications. Preserving DivisionA traditional way to make something mobile is to create a smaller version of the original. We make it portable. Many products fit into this category…portable chair, portable printer, portable music, portable disk drive. Without realizing it, we are using the Division Template. A six-pack of Coke Cola is a divided two litre bottle of Coke into smaller units that preserve the characteristics of the original. Going back to our refrigerator example, a small, portable cooler is a refrigerator that has been made mobile. Notice how this differs from the other refrigerator example above. In that example, we divided out an actual part of the main unit. Here, we just made a smaller main unit. This is perhaps the easiest method for creating mobile products.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

In a world where gravity is ever present, floors are essential. We spend most of our waking hours standing or walking on them. But we tend to ignore them. That is a pity given the nearly constant contact we have with them. What if the floor could be innovated? What could it do for us that it doesn’t do today?Here is an innovative technology worth standing up for. Future-Shape GmbH, a German technology startup, has developed Sens-Floor, a layer of textile sensors that monitor human movement and can be installed underneath almost any type of flooring. The product works by sending a small electrical charge through a conductive fabric containing integrated sensor plates and radio modules. When someone walks over a sensor, a small change in charge capacity triggers the system. The company offers a few suggested applications such as home security, activating room lights, and monitoring the elderly. However, to reach its full potential, innovating with the Attribute Dependency template will link this technology to many more things that take place on a floor. Imagine, for example, the floor can detect a specific person (through body weight, foot size, etc) to activate things in the room related to that person (lighting preferences, sounds, smells…anything with an “on” button). Taking it further, imagine the floor can keep track of how many people are on the floor and what they are doing (standing, dancing, sitting, etc). The floor can tell a party host when it’s time to serve dinner or to enliven the party with different music. Think of the sports applications – score keeping in tennis, required elements in gymnastics, or basketball three second violations. What about retail store applications? The floor could keep track of customer movements – where they shop, where they stop, and how they go from product to product. Perhaps the floor can detect when to raise prices on popular items or drop prices on a slow ones.The company calls its core product, Smart Textiles, and this idea is embedded in its other products. To make them truly smart, it will take a bit more work on the application side. As an investment, Future-Shape might be an excellent “ground floor” opportunity.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Embracing social media and the myriad of Web 2.0 tools is more challenging than just setting up a Facebook account or adding a “Follow Me on Twitter” link. Organizations struggle with how to take advantage of the power of Web 2.0. Where do you start? How do you tie these new tools in with your current website? How do you make sure your current constituents are happy while moving the organization to a more networked world? For this month’s LAB, we will use the innovation template called Task Unification, one of five templates of the corporate innovation method called S.I.T.. To use Task Unification, we take a component of a product, service, system, etc., and we assign an additional “job” to it. For this exercise involving Social Media, here is how it works. Imagine your company has a large base of employees in the field. For example, suppose your company has a large sales force or an extensive network of delivery or service people. Consider the U.S. Postal Service, for example, with an army of postal workers and letter carriers at over 32,000 post offices. A key question for these organizations like the USPS is: how do we get more value out of this fixed asset? Let’s use Task Unification. I start by visiting a site that inventories all the social web tools: GO2WEB20.NET. I randomly pick an application from this list. Then I assign the internal field resources to “use” this application to increase revenue/profits for the company. Using our example of the postal service, I create this statement: “Postal delivery staff have the additional ‘job’ of using XXXX (web application) to increase USPS performance.” This is our Virtual Product in the S.I.T. method.The key is to use the non-obvious applications for creating new, innovative services. You have to literally force yourself to imagine the corporate resource using the inherent aspects of the Web 2.0 application to create revenue or cut costs. Here are examples I created using Task Unification:

• ParkWhiz:
• “ParkWhiz helps people park their cars quickly and efficiently by providing them with the tools to make an informed decision. Instead of driving around to find parking, you can use ParkWhiz to get the best parking to suit your needs.”
• Idea: The postal workers have a role to play by spotting empty parking spots and annotating this in real time using a mobile, GPS-enabled device to indicate the location of the open spot. Subscribers go online to see what parking spots might be available in their vicinity.
• Gist:
• “Gist helps you build stronger relationships by connecting the inbox to the web to provide business-critical information about the people and companies that matter most.”
• Idea: Postal workers have a role of feeding information about traditional mail that is sent and received to your key contacts into the Gist system to help inform you about these contacts.
• Walkscore:
• “Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.”
• Idea: Post workers have the additional job of providing information about what to see or experience between any two walking points. The information is real-time, so it includes weather, crowd information, safety issues, etc.
• YowTrip:
• “YowTRIP is a social network site that connects you with other world travelers in your town or wherever you’re traveling. Find people like yourself who are planning to or have traveled, live or have lived, anywhere in the world. YowTRIP’s goal is to promote cultural exchange by connecting world travelers and enabling them to share their travel experiences on this online community.”
• Idea: Postal workers have the additional role of collecting and reporting tourism-related information to the YowTrip system to inform tourists of local sightseeing opportunities.
• Orchestrate:
• “Orchestrate is an online workforce scheduling application that allows Operations Managers to schedule qualified personnel and tasks with ease. Features include qualification requirements for staff, locations, logins for managers, staff and clients, compliance reporting and visually beautiful schedules.”
• Postal workers have the additional job of feeding in critical job site information into the Orchestrate system to allow better scheduling of crews and tasks.

Companies have an enormous stockpile of Web 2.0 business model ideas sitting and waiting to be leveraged. Their challenge is to take advantage of the discipline and structure of innovation templates to lead them to new, useful, and surprising opportunities.

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