Innovation by SIT

If you were at risk of losing your only source of income you’d probably stretch your creativity to the limit to find ways of preventing this from happening.
There’s one ‘profession’ that is constantly under threat - crime. Therefore, it’s not surprising that we can find many creative ideas in this field. It’s also not surprising that professional criminals are usually more creative than law authorities - they have a lot fewer resources at their disposal and they therefore need to look for solutions within their closed world.

Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention!

Maybe the police and other authorities should think more like criminals to become more effective in their struggle against them?
I wrote all this as an introduction to the story I’d like to share with you today: It has become standard practice for companies to install an alarm system that is connected to a security center with a response unit as a prerequisite for receiving insurance. If a burglary takes place, a signal is sent to the center and security guards rush to see what’s going on. This, of course, creates some difficulties for the burglars.
Recently I heard a very interesting story about how burglars figured out ways of overcoming this new obstacle (two people are needed for this to be successful).

They start by breaking the lock in the usual way, and the first burglar goes in and starts collecting the loot.
A signal is (as expected) sent to the security center at this point. Stay tuned to see what happens next…
The second guy takes a NEW lock and locks the door from the outside so that it seems as though nothing has happened.
When the security guards arrive, they look around, see that everything is OK, report to the center, curse the systems that have so many false alarms, and return to the office.

At the same time, our friends take their time finishing off the job and smile all the way to the next job.
Those of you who have some SIT experience would probably identify here a clear SIT tool: Multiplication - solve a problem by adding to the problem world an object that is similar to an existing one.
This idea is especially interesting because we bring in an object that seems at first to be an obstacle - the lock.

This is, of course, part of SIT philosophy: when you think you should remove something, rather think about bringing in more of whatever it is you want to remove, and when you think you should bring in more of something, think about removing it.