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Since entering the Chinese market in 2014, SIT China has conducted more than 50 Innovative Thinking training sessions in the education world. Many of the sessions were sparked by a paradigm shift occurring in the educational sphere; the deep-rooted belief that educators should solely provide content knowledge to students is being reevaluated and replaced by the idea that educators should additionally empower students with life and learning skills. Moreover, the integration of new technologies and access to unlimited information is disrupting the traditional role and purpose of schooling.

I find it important to discuss the general concepts that have repeated in most activities, as I find them applicable to the global educational landscape.

In general, our activities have helped participants—whether it’s staff, principals, teachers or teachers’ teachers—understand that now is the best time to update, challenge, change and improve their schools’ current practices and objectives. The critical role that an innovative thinking mindset plays was stressed as was the importance of identifying and breaking the cognitive barriers that prevent the discovery of new opportunities. Once this general framework was established, participants were taught relevant SIT tools and principles to apply to their roles with the objective of developing new ideas or solutions that can provide value to students, teachers, schools and society.

Our training sessions focus on the 13 topics that are most relevant to today’s education landscape

1. Developing students’/ teachers’ innovative thinking skills
2. Enhancing class formats to create a more engaging and interactive environment
3. Altering teaching formats
4. Redesigning tests
5. Creating new ways to evaluate students
6. Finding ways to develop life-long learners
7. Enhancing students’ curiosity and reading habits
8. Introducing more opportunities for students to collaborate/express themselves
9. Changing homework tasks and dealing with the No Homework for Primary Schools’ guideline
10. Integrating moral education
11. Building a collaborative environment among teachers and administration (less authoritative and more consolatory)
12. Modifying and refining administrative tasks
13. Improving communication with parents

A Few Examples of Our Work

Principals’ Training Program

We recently held a training program for 40 primary school principals, during which we focused on the changing role of educators and the recent paradigm shift discussed above (i.e. students are no longer solely provided content knowledge, instead educators also develop students’ life and learning skills).

The benefits of Learn by Play were explored while participants engaged in a playful, interactive learning experience. As a part of the process, participants reflected on their experiences and wrote their reflections on a piece of paper. A quasi-snowball fight then ensued; participants transformed their pieces of paper into paper balls and threw them at one another. Afterwards, they teamed up to discuss their reflections and, by doing so, developed a deeper understanding of each other’s thought processes.

One of the most stimulating parts of the program was on the topic of how to enhance students’ curiosity to read.  Hebrew children’s books were divvied out to the Chinese participants, who then broke into teams in order to collectively use their creative skills to generate a story to correspond with the illustrations. This activity allowed them to sense the power of group work and encouraged them to be more attentive to each other’s ideas. By giving participants hands-on experience, it was easy for them to reflect on the positive impact such an activity could have on students’ learning and life skills, while also enhancing their curiosity to read a book. Following this activity, participants applied SIT tools to this topic, which brought about one of my favorite ideas of the training—a school guard could greet children in the morning

dressed up as a character from a book, encouraging students to search for the particular book around the school and, of course, read it. Once this idea was generated, it unleashed a wave of similar ideas about additional activities the school can hold to support a book “Scavenger Hunt”.

World Education Summit for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

SIT China participated in The World Education Summit for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (WESIE) in Shenzhen on the March 23^rd, 2019.  It was a large event for 500-600 participants, mostly parents, educators and individuals from private educational institutions. WESIE is an initiative created by Einstein, a local Chinese education company whose aim is to integrate Israeli educational methods and practices in China.

During the event, Yaacov Hecht, the founder of Democratic schools in Israel, held an inspiring session highlighting the power of students taking responsibility and ownership over their learning process. Several Chinese innovators in the education world shared their efforts. One important initiative regards expanding education to rural China via online classes for students of all ages, offering a wider diversity of topics and access to experienced teachers.

SIT shared several examples of how to create meaningful learning experiences from students’ daily activities. For example, when going to the supermarket, one can practice writing the shopping list, reading the food labels, calculating the costs, planning the budget, comparing colors and shapes (for younger kids) and so much more. Taking advantage of these activities could contribute to children’s self-motivation to learn and explore outside of the classroom and take advantage of the learning opportunities all around them.

Two-Day Innovative Thinking Program

Changing Innovation Landscape

The education landscape is ever changing. And though some might say it is impossible to predict the future, trends reveal that a teacher’s traditional role of only encouraging students to acquire a core standardized body of knowledge is no longer the standard. The role of the educator is expanding, and teachers, students, and schools must adjust to this new reality. The topics presented in this blog only graze the surface of topics in which one can innovate in the educational world. By developing new methods for those educating our youth, the millions of new students entering schools across the globe every year can take part in a meaningful learning journey, which capitalizes on current technology and gives them the necessary knowledge, support, and tools needed to navigate the deep waters of our changing world.

Innovation is a nascent discipline and, as such, very few of its “truths” and tenets have had the opportunity to mature and to brave the test of time. Less diplomatically, one can say that much of what is said about innovation is not worth the flip-chart paper it is written on. Strangely enough, even though the topic is so new, some common views have already attained the status of myths, which makes it a bit difficult to unseat them and thus avoid some of the damage that these beliefs cause in organizations.

This third installment of our series from the Behind the Scenes of Corporate Innovation meetup, co-hosted with 3M, focuses on some of these corporate myths. Why? Because becoming aware of their existence and their effect is an important first step in ridding oneself of their effect.

The myths are divided into buckets, each placed under the relevant element from our 7 Elements Model.

Skills

Myth #1: Artists are creative. Engineers, accountants and bureaucrats are not.

Alternative: Look around you – most innovations you will see were invented and designed by engineers.

It is commonly assumed that some of us have the innovation gift while others simply don’t, rendering them incapable of innovating.

This is incorrect and, in addition to academic research, we have 23 years of experience in the field to prove it. The truth is that skills and processes that lead to innovation can be taught. Everyone can significantly improve their skills, regardless of their baseline.

Governance

Myth #2: Innovation cannot be measured

Alternative: ROI – Return on Innovation, absolutely must be measured, otherwise no serious innovation effort will be sustained in the organization.

To many, innovation is amorphous and mysterious and thus can be difficult to measure and monitor. There is even a fear that measurement itself can stifle innovation. This is true, but only if the wrong indicators are used at the wrong time. That’s why it’s important to clearly define what the organization means by innovation. Once there is a clear definition, it is possible and crucial to measure your ROI, although the way to do it is not always straightforward.

Outcomes

Myth #3: Innovation is mostly about creating products or services.

Alternative: Innovation can and should be applied to every aspect of your business.

We advocate an innovation mindset, not merely to create new products and services, but to “innovate in what you do”. If applied in a structured way, using appropriate tools, any task or process can be innovated on, to improve results and achieve goals.

Resources

Myth #4: Top Management’s only job is to launch the innovation program, and budget it.

Alternative: Without ongoing management commitment, the effort cannot be sustained

Top management very often makes a brave decision to launch an ambitious, company-wide innovation effort, and even budgets it generously. But, very quickly, responsibility is relegated to lower ranks in the corporate hierarchy, and management impatiently adopts the role of demanding quick and tangible results. Instead of supporting the effort for the long haul, management becomes impatient to either celebrate prematurely or move on to the next “management-flavor-of-the-month”.

Processes

Myth #5: Brainstorming is the best way to come up with new ideas.

Alternative: It has been proven time and again that BS is not effective in generating truly novel ideas.

Brainstorming has many advantages but, as research and corporate experiences have shown time and again, creating novelty is not one of them. By placing constraints on your thinking and using a structured approach, you can consistently achieve success.

Behaviors

Myth #6: Innovation and creativity are always fun.

Alternative: Dabbling in innovation, as enrichment or mental exercises can be lots of fun, but true innovation, in the sense of challenging your deep assumptions and firmly set ways of working, mostly involves hard work and requires discipline. There is much in the process that one can enjoy, but true change of beliefs and habits cannot be all fun and games. That is why very often a facilitated team effort is required to achieve impactful innovation.

Communication

Myth #7: Those who oppose innovation programs are wrong. They are simply “resisting”.

Alternative: Very often, those who “resist innovation” have an important point to make.

Resistance to innovation often emerges from the “wrong” motivations: fear of change, turf wars, oversized egos, etc. But, this opposition doesn’t always need to be “overcome”, rather, it is often very useful to listen carefully since those who oppose change often do so for valid and solid reasons. Resistance can also be a sign of the strong potential for novelty, pointing at valuable dig-sites.

These are only several of the common myths and traps that organizations deal with and fall into when embarking on innovation journeys. Talk to us, and we’ll be happy to hear/read your thoughts, and also to acknowledge – when relevant – that we ourselves are as vulnerable as anyone else to being wrong(:

With this post, we finalize the “Behind the Scenes” MeetUp series but continue to share and learn.

What to expect?

• A soon-to-come additional MeetUp in Minnesota. We are discussing potential topics with our colleagues and will update accordingly.
• A new series based on our ‘learnings’ from our New York city meetup, co-hosted with Kaltura, on Digital Transformation & Innovation.

Part two of our series on the insights, content, and learnings gathered before & during our Behind the Scenes of Corporate Innovation meetup, co-hosted with our friends at 3M, focuses on SIT’s 7 Elements Model for Organizational Innovation. This model was briefly introduced at the MeetUp as a framework to address the main challenges voiced by our corporate colleagues.

We would like to take advantage of this platform to share some of the basics of this straightforward yet powerful model with you. In a nutshell, the model allows organizations to analyze their innovation activity or, as it is referred to in our model, take their Innovation Pulse, and plan a focused and customized innovation strategy based on their analysis.

The model was created as an output of 24 years of experience, working with over 1400 companies, identifying patterns and efficient processes that led to useful strategies. Over time, we formulated a set of tools that can transform an organization into an innovative organization that continuously innovates and maintains its competitive advantage.

Working with the 7 Elements Model brings three significant results:

1)     Assesses your current situation in respect to innovation (“the Innovation Pulse”)

2)     Defines your goals and objectives

3)     Draws an initial Road Map for achieving these objectives

How does it work?

The first step is to assess and chart, on a diagram, the organization’s current efforts according to 7 distinct—yet extremely interconnected—innovation elements (please refer to diagrams below for both a description of each of the elements and a sample assessment).

7 Elements Descriptions

Example of ‘Innovation Pulse diagram’

Desired State & Mapping the Gap

This output allows you to view a clear picture of current innovation activity in the organization and areas that require improvement, thus allowing you to build a second, complementary diagram, an ideal model of your desired state in terms of innovation (see picture below).

Defining Your Course of Action

The two diagrams can then be compared to identify the gaps and determine priorities. This allows you to determine a course of action to close the gaps to achieve the desired state. SIT can assist in this task, working in one or several of the following modalities:

a)     Training

b)     Facilitation

c)     Consulting

d)  Outsourcing

This process gradually engages all parts of the organization by creating networks involving continuous learning, challenging assumptions, and systematic monitoring of results.

The valuable task of transforming into an innovative organization is, without a doubt, a demanding journey, yet one that can be made to be simpler, clearer, and well managed using SIT’s experience as expressed in the 7 Elements Model.

About two weeks ago, we shared a post about our Minneapolis Meetup, co-hosted with 3M: Behind the Scenes of Corporate Innovation.  Since we believe the content, insights, and learnings from this meetup are valuable, we will use the next three weeks to present some of this information to you:

• Today we will share the 4 most critical innovation challenges, as expressed by our 40+ participants;
• Next week, we will share with you our new 7 Elements Model with which you can analyze your organization’s innovation pulse and plan your innovation strategy;
• In our third installment, you can read about some common myths and traps, and how to avoid falling victim to them while establishing a culture and practice of innovation.

Back to the meetup: prior to attending, participants were asked to list their three most critical innovation-related corporate challenges. In brief, there were 24 respondents, who identified 67 challenges, many of them later confirmed by the rest of the attendees.

SIT’s facilitation team analyzed these responses and detected four main buckets, which are arranged below according to frequency of appearance in participants’ responses. Quotes from the survey are also given to further demonstrate and highlight the relevance of these themes.

4 Critical Innovation-Related Challenges

1. How do we de-risk our innovation efforts

seems to us that although many companies have officially adopted an LSU process, they find it difficult to wean themselves off the habits of testing and seeking a high level of certitude for each specific innovation before launch.

“Lack of external leverage; too many options to choose from makes it even more difficult.”

2. How do we change our company’s culture/mindset?

The most common task these days goes way beyond launching a product, or even an entire product line. Key words are “culture”, “change” and “transformation”. The desire is to find ways to influence the entire organization, change strategies and business models.

SIT’s take: We’ve seen this process evolve in the past 24 years, from attention to a specific local result such as solving a problem or launching a single product, to the demand to generate an entire pipeline and roadmap, all the way to the current situation, in which CEOs and top management either realize the need or are pressured by their boards or stakeholders to lead transformational changes in their organizations. This can often lead to futile high-profile and costly changes-for-the-sake-of-changing, but, if well managed by a committed management team, can truly transform and invigorate a company.

“Focusing on long-term development, not the “right now”.

“Internal cultural shift necessary to transform our business model.”

3. How do we accelerate / acquire speed and agility?

Companies are not only pressured to change, but to change faster. This obviously places additional demands on managers, often accompanied by stress.

SIT’s take: a paradox ensues, whereby managers are expected to lead profound transformations, rather than superficial change, which requires time and patience; but, since the environment changes at an ever-accelerating pace– requiring rapid and immediate adaptations–there is less patience and resources for profound long-term change processes to take place.

“Innovation takes time to hatch. How do we innovate with the fast-paced environment?”

4. How do we listen and get closer to our customers?

After 30+ years of constant effort to get closer to the client, listen to the Voice of the Customer, observe, empathize, research and analyze, companies still feel that true understanding and insights tend to elude them, and therefore are searching for novel approaches.

SIT’s take: although true that innovation is useless unless it addresses a customer need, it is a mistake to believe that true innovation is born just from listening to VoC. We believe that being attuned to your customers is a necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation. Instead, we recommend a combination of: a) breaking the more-of-the-same-VoC mold by engaging with your customers proactively through co-creation exercises; b) using structured innovation methods to come up with initial ideas that are in turn validated with customers.

“Doing adequate research to uncover new problems.”

“Lack of customer interaction for directed innovation.”

To summarize, we found, not surprisingly, a high level of congruence between the most pressing innovation-related issues in a wide variety of organizations and positions. In the next two posts we will relate, respectively, SIT’s approach for dealing with these issues and some common traps and misconceptions when going about it.

Companies are constantly trying to create something fresh and original, but where do they even start? A common go-to is good ole brainstorming, but as we have repeatedly stressed, this is not an effective way to ideate.  That’s when SIT steps in– making ideation more efficient and creative through proven, structured strategies and methods. By beginning with a thorough analysis of a company’s existing products or services and then jointly applying our methodology, SIT’s project outcomes are novel variations of existing products or services. Here are some new product development case studies that have resulted from SIT’s ideation efforts and exemplify SIT’s methodology in practice.

Nestea’s® usual approach of using market trends to develop new products was not generating enough revenue. Moreover, non-compete restrictions from a joint venture of their parent company, Coca-Cola/Nestle, put further pressure on Nestea® to steer clear of soft drinks and hot beverages. Thus, Nestea® aimed to develop a new product that was unique in their own domain. They called in SIT to help innovate under these constraints.

cosmetics—their unique formulas, made of elements found only in the Dead Sea, are the foundation of millions of skincare routines. In a two-year partnership with SIT, AHAVA sought to further their enterprise by developing several new products. Even though AHAVA had the power of the Dead Sea on their side, in a market saturated with hundreds of different creams and washes—all claiming one secret ingredient or another—AHAVA was looking to create something with a different “wow” factor.

Using SIT’s thinking tool task unification—a way to assign an additional task to an existing resource—AHAVA discovered a way to use the body’s own moisture to melt active ingredients in the product upon application to the skin.  Usually, this process is achieved using water during the manufacturing process, which requires many resources and carries a heavy cost. However, using SIT’s creative process led to the invention of the Gentle Body Exfoliator, which requires only the body’s natural moisture. Because the Gentle Body Exfoliator is untreated, it has the additional benefit of a rough texture, which removes dead skin cells. As the product interacts with the body’s own moisture, it dissolves into the skin, nourishing it with Dead Sea minerals. Naturally soft, smooth, and radiant skin has never been achieved like this before.

Which Scents Define Your Home?

We’re all familiar with Febreze’s air fresheners—one spray and you’ve eliminated that stinky odor from your home or car. But how do you excite your customers when they’ve grown accustomed to your product’s smell and instead want something new and different?

SIT was brought in to create new products for the Febreze brand. Specifically, SIT focused on an already existing product, the Febreze wall plug-in, a product that plugs into the wall, emits an aroma, and whose influence can be so vast that it defines your home’s scent.

By applying SIT’s multiplication tool, which adds an additional component of a product and then alters it in some way, a novel idea emerged; why not have a plug-in device with not one tank but two separate tanks to hold the liquid perfume? In each of these tanks, there would be a separate scent. The benefits of this product were many—the plug-in could switch between scents; it would be a novelty for users, and it could pulse out different smells at different time intervals. The outcome of SIT’s project was an entirely new product, the Febreze pluggable that had two alternating scents. This product led P&G to nearly double their market share in the air freshener category.

Turning Constraints into Advantages

Through the stories of Nestea, AHAVA, and Febreze, we see three examples of successful innovation that not only changed the game but revolutionized their industries. Instead of brainstorming or simply following the trends of others, each company applied SIT methodology to turn their constraints into advantages, innovating and creating something unique in the process.

Visit the case studies section of our website to learn about more ways that SIT has helped companies with new product development and various challenges.