Forums Help   General Tools Principles Facilitation Project Management Method: Principles SIT's Principles are designed to help you use our Tools . The following exercise demonstrates how one of our Principles works. First, come up with an idea for an innovative new product. It can be any sort of product, just as long as it's something truly original, something you've never seen or heard of before. You have 45 seconds. (Please take this time to actually think of something before you continue.) When you are done, click here. Now, again in 45 seconds, come up with an idea for an innovative new product, but this time, please follow these instructions: Imagine your living room, and the objects in it; Choose one of the objects in the room (your sofa, TV, books, whatever); Now, invent an exercise device - something that can help keep you physically fit - using the object you chose. (The device must somehow work with, or incorporate, the object in your living room.) When you are done, click here. Which of the two exercises was easier? Which one helped you come up with more and better ideas? For most people, the second task is much easier than the first. This may seem strange, since nothing in the first round prevented you from inventing a fitness machine for your living room. But in fact, the best ideas rarely emerge when we are simply asked to "be creative" or "come up with some really good new ideas." Though it may seem paradoxical, creative solutions tend to emerge more easily when we have some constraints than when we have complete freedom. At SIT we call this the Principle of Constraints. For an example of another Principle, and more specifics about how the Principles work, please see click here. SIT uses Tools (like Subtraction) to help our clients innovate. Although the idea behind each Tool is quite simple (the Tool of Subtraction, for instance, simply asks that you subtract some element from an existing product), actually using the tool can be tough, since it requires that we think in new and unintuitive ways. Our natural resistance to doing truly unintuitive things - especially when they mean hard work - creates a mental obstacle, which makes it hard to get the most out of the Tools. To solve this problem, SIT has created a set of Principles, which we use alongside the Tools. The Principles help the user of a tool get into the right mental framework for using it and, thus, for becoming more innovative. Here's an example of how this works, using the Tool of Subtraction, and the Principle that we call Path of Most Resistance (PMR). Imagine you're a TV manufacturer and you're trying to come up with a new product. What sort of innovations comes to mind? Most, if not all, of your ideas probably involve either adding something to the TV, or enhancing a feature that already exists. When we try to create things, our impulse is to add to the existing product - it's the easiest way to go about it, and we naturally follow the path of least resistance. To use the Tool of Subtraction - to take something away from the product - is not intuitive, and not as easy. It requires us to follow the Path of Most Resistance - to do the least intuitive, most uncomfortable thing - at least temporarily. As we move forward, we continue to use the Tool and the Principle together. Let's start by subtracting what seems like the most essential element of a TV - the screen. We will most likely want to rush to replace the missing screen with something - a monitor, or projector, let's say. But since replacing the missing component is our intuitive response, and we're trying to follow the Path of Most Resistance, let's try, at least for the time being, to leave the screenless TV as is. Let's ask ourselves if there could be any possible use for such a product. In fact, there are some interesting possibilities for our screenless TV: It offers blind people a cheap alternative to a regular TV. It offers the hard of hearing a way to listen to TV shows at a high volume (with earphones) when in the company of other people with normal hearing. It allows drivers to listen to their favorite TV shows while in the car. A product that may at first have seemed ludicrous turns out to have several uses. The value of using a Principle like the Path of Most Resistance is that it forces us to think differently than we normally would. But you might have noticed that once we were pushed past our initial resistance, it was fairly easy to come up with uses for a screenless TV. The Tool and the Principle working together make it easier to be innovative. Let's return for a moment to our screenless TV. If we continue to follow PMR, we can push this idea even further. Once we see that the product has potential users - the blind, the hard of hearing, and drivers - we may want to consider how else those users can use the product. Will the driver, for example, use her screenless TV outside the car? Will the blind person's sighted family be able to enjoy it? Yes - but only if they can see, and not just hear, their programs. Which of course requires a screen. Our natural inclination might be to search for the best possible screen to which we could attach our screenless TV, but PMR will direct us to look for a solution that already exists in the product's immediate environment - like a PC. This can be the basis for a sort of PC TV, which is easy to implement by installing a card into the PC. In this case, the user of Subtraction is guided by the PMR Principle, to maximize the tool's effect. Similarly, all SIT Principles support the use of any of the five tools. Bottom Line Helping users in every field to overcome, avoid, or conquer the obstacles to truly creative thinking. FAQ SIT's focus on the product as a starting point seems like a throwback to the days when engineers created products that nobody wanted. What about focusing on the customer?   We believe that it is crucial for a company to be attentive to the voice of the customer. No one can sensibly argue that it's not important to know your customers, and to know what they want. But customers should not be the source you rely on to generate innovative ideas. First, customers are not necessarily innovators: As Henry Ford famously said: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." Second, those who do have new ideas don't necessarily want to share them (their interest is not primarily in helping your company develop new products). Third, those who do have ideas they want to share are probably sharing with your competitors as well. All of this means that you need an alternative source in order to stay ahead. At SIT we believe that the best source of new ideas is listening to the voice of your product. But this does not imply that customers should be disregarded. On the contrary, once you have begun to work on an innovative idea, you must collect customers' responses and feedback and we strongly recommend that you use all your available market research abilities at this stage in the process. (SIT even offers a tool for tapping into customers' views and even their inventive abilities. It is called a Multi Focus Group (MFG), and is usually integrated into our New Product Development projects.) SIT always uses the existing product (or situation) as a starting point. Doesn't this lead to incremental ideas, rather than breakthroughs?   In SIT terms, a Walkman is a tape recorder with a Subtraction of two essential components - the speakers and the recording mechanism. Shampoo is soap with an Attribute Dependency applied to it (viscosity varies according to part of body it is used on); a remote control is a Multiplication (of the controls), and Amazon.com is the ultimate Subtraction - a chain of book stores with no stores (or books!). All of these revolutionized their markets by creating a new category. And each of them could have been developed by applying an SIT tool to an existing product (though as far as we know, they weren't). We believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur not by jumping far "out of the box" but by restructuring existing elements, and the way we think about them. In other words, SIT is about inventing inside the box. This is one of the reasons that SIT projects tend to generate such practical and usable results. 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