One of your boastful friends makes a bet with you that he can tell you in no time at all exactly how many leaves there are 
on a tree at any given moment. Of course you agree to the bet - it seems like the quickest way to earn a free meal in your favorite Italian restaurant. As soon as you’ve made the bet, you figure out the catch: how the hell can you prove him wrong?
I’ll give you a few minutes…
.
.
.
… Did you come up with something?
Those of you who have kids in school have experienced the following phenomena. You want your kids to tell you about their day when they come home from school, but they have completely different intentions. When you ask how their day was, they usually say, ‘It was OK’ and go back to staring at the TV.
I, too, have been faced with this situation. I’ve often felt frustrated that I don’t share a big enough part of my son’s experiences throughout his day. One day, while we were eating a meal at Macdonald’s and my son was trying to put the toy together that he got from the kids meal, I decided to try my luck again and ask how his day at school had been. As predicted, I got the usual, ‘It was OK’ answer.
But this time I was determined not to give up. I’m often asked if SIT can be used to solve day-to-day problems or family issues, and my reply is always a confident yes. Here was an opportunity for me to put my money where my mouth is!
Despite the innovative, inventive image I am accredited with (for no substantial reason), the mobile phone in my possession until two weeks ago was of one of the very first generations, and it certainly fulfilled my basic communications needs. However, during my last family trip to Ein Tamir (a water-filled spring tunnel in Nahal Kziv) I accidentally left my 
phone in my pocket and as I emerged from the water, soaked through, I found that the instrument had ceased to function. About an hour later, at home, I deconstructed the device and, using my daughter’s hair dryer (”utilization of existing resources”, or in SIT lingo – implementing the rule of Task Unification) I succeeded in making the phone functional again… with the exception of the display screen that could not be revived.
While my wife and daughter (clearly post-modern women as made obvious by their choice of mobile phones) began pressuring me to get rid of the device and replace it with one of a more advanced generation, I kept considering what could possibly be done with a screen-less yet functional mobile phone. The idea that flashed through my mind, spiced with a bit of black humor, was “Why not sell it to a blind person?”
But now a little more seriously… Any SIT New Product Development (NPD) workshop addressing mobile phones would inevitably, in a structured and systematic manner (by applying the Subtraction tool), reach the potential product: a mobile telephone for the blind. The end product would have no display screen (the subtracted component), but would have supporting functions appropriate specifically for a blind user. Continue reading ‘Do we really need inventive thinking tools?’
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!
Let’s see if we can come up with some cool ideas for novel shirts (it’s a pity I’m not a seamstress!).
Here are some first thoughts:
Have you ever seen a policeman giving a ticket to someone honking their car horn in a no-honking zone or at 2 am? In all of my 37 years I have seen (and gotten) speeding, parking, j-walking (etc.) tickets switching hands from the policeman’s to the felon’s. Not once have I seen a driver getting a ticket for miss-honking.
Now, this is, my friends - a problem. Not a “challenge”, not an “issue” and certainly not an “opportunity” but one big, annoying problem.
Continue reading ‘…and everything is honky dory’
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