Amnon and I presented last week in Greener by Design (GbD) in San Francisco, subtitled “Greener Products for Leaner Times”. Our innovation message for companies working on going greener was to focus on finding and tackling their fixedness.
Cognitive Fixedness, first defined by psychologist Karl Duncker, prevents individuals and companies from creating new configurations in the systems they manage. This often blocks us from seeing potential efficiencies and material reduction, and breakthrough solutions to problems. SIT tools help break 3 kinds of cognitive fixedness:
1. Structural – The tendency to view products and systems as a complete gestalt. Many of SIT’s tools help break this particular fixedness. The following water saving toilet (click to check out the cool animation!) was developed by Villeroy-Boch in an SIT workshop. Multiplying the water streams resulted in more pressure in each stream, therefore requiring less water. This product won the ISH Innovation Prize and was chosen by Deutsche Bank in its transformation of its HQ to be the most environmentally friendly high-rises in Europe.
2. Functional – Seeing objects as capable only of fulfilling their original function. SIT uses the Task Unification tool to help innovators find new uses for existing resources, thus forcing them find new functions for available objects and tackle functional fixedness. My previous post described several such uses of unexpected resources for generating energy.
