Innovation by SIT

Let’s face it, in most of our daily tasks we don’t need to be creative. All we need is to retrieve from memory ready-made templates and the problem is gone.

There are however situations in life or work when the known routines don’t seem to work.

Sometimes we need to do something that simply seems impossible - we need to double the throughput of a production line within two weeks after several years in which all we were trying to do and managed to do was to increase the production by no more than 20 percent. (In one of my consulting projects we did exactly that…).

Often a problem seems very simple, but after several attempts to solve it, it turns out that the routine methods fail.

On yet other occasions, we do have a working solution, but for some reason we are not satisfied with it. We just don’t seem to find a better one.

In all these situations SIT can help us find a simple solution that for some good reason our brain could not produce.

SIT is based on the simple observation that many creative solutions in different domains fall into a relatively small number of distinctive categories.  If we know these categories, we can use them to find new solutions.

“Out of the box” solutions, it is claimed, fall into their own boxes.

Continue reading ‘Your Problem might be the Solution’