Innovation

USING DESIGN THINKING? 5 PITFALLS AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

Published date: May 12, 2022 в 4:26 pm

Most versions of DT have these components:

1) Empathize 2) Define 3) Ideate 4) Prototype 5) Test

A key benefit of DT is that it is a full process. Embrace it to structure some innovation activities, BUT beware, while parts of the process are highly conducive to innovation, others are useless or even harmful. These are 5 major pitfalls, and the corresponding advice on how to avoid them:

1) WARNING: The crucial flaw of DT is in stage 3 – Ideation. You are required to create ideas, based on insights and observations, which you then proceed to prototype and test. But HOW do you come up with these ideas? DT doesn’t provide any tools beyond variants of Brainstorming, which do not work.

1) TO DO: Embed a structured method for breaking fixedness for stage 3. (We obviously recommend our method – SIT – but others can serve as well, provided that they are not BS variants).

2) WARNING: DT assumes that you first conduct ethnography and insight-hunting and relegates the “creative bits” to the next phase. Mistake! If you search for insights without first breaking fixedness you are searching with blinders and will rarely find novelty.

2) TO DO: Combine ethnography with tools for challenging assumptions. You’ll be surprised at the results.

3) WARNING: DT assumes that creativity and ideas are needed only until the end of stage 3. In reality, even more creativity is needed in adapting your ideas to reality, overcoming emerging challenges and selling your ideas internally (stages 4-5 and beyond).

3) TO DO: Build in problem-solving sessions and fixedness breaking exercises into prototyping and testing.

4) WARNING: Designers do great stuff and have a cool job. But it’s their job. Not yours. What sense does it make to try to think “like a designer” if you’re not one? Doctors save lives, farmers grow food – lots of professions do useful stuff, but what has that got to do with your task as innovators?

4) TO DO: Don’t try to emulate designers. Stick to your professional knowledge and use robust techniques for challenging your concepts and breaking your fixed ways of seeing. Use methods that work, not stuff that’s “cool”.

5) WARNING: “Having fun” is a distraction. It’s cotton candy. Innovation requires challenging one’s thinking. When done properly – it’s painful.

5) TO DO: People can and should enjoy innovation sessions, as you enjoy a tough workout in a gym, or a 5-mile run. Spend minimum time and efforts on getting people to have fun, just enough so they are motivated to collaborate until deeper satisfaction emerges from feeling the results of one’s hard work.

In sum: DT has powerful features and serious bugs. Pick carefully from the former while avoiding the latter.

More on Design Thinking: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6777325214293405696?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_updateV2%3A%28urn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A6777325214293405696%2CFEED_DETAIL%2CEMPTY%2CDEFAULT%2Cfalse%29

Having the Vulnerability to Innovate

Published date: May 4, 2022 в 4:14 pm

Written by: Robyn Taragin

Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

“The secret killer of innovation is shame” – Brené Brown

Given my “slight” infatuation with Brené Brown, it’s comical for me to think that I almost didn’t watch the first video of hers that I encountered. She was speaking to teachers. I’m not a teacher and therefore was wary of how it would be relevant to me. But having heard her name floating around I pressed play, only to realize that it was a 20-minute video!! But as they say – in for a penny, in for a pound.

And that’s how I found myself hearing her say these words:

“No vulnerability, no creativity, no innovation”.

Have 20 minutes ever gone by so fast?

In case you’re unfamiliar, Brené Brown, is a Social Researcher in the area of vulnerability and shame. She defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure”. Her research, even without strictly focusing on innovation, sheds so much light on what prevents innovation from thriving in companies.

Think of the innovation processes in your company, and how many stages a person has to go through in which they render themselves vulnerable:

Taking the time to work on an unknown outcome innovation instead of the pile of work on their desk
Taking a leap of faith in getting an idea off the ground
Presenting an idea to management
Answering nay-sayers who doubt you and/or your work
Using budget and resources without a guarantee of ROI
Enlisting the help of others
Accountability (for the project outcomes, for managing the project properly)

The list goes on.

But in order for innovation to happen we have to go through these stages, and therefore need to stick our neck out there.

But really, no one likes to be vulnerable.

Now why is that? Brené’s answer – shame. “Every time someone holds back on a new idea, fails to give their manager much needed feedback, and is afraid to speak up in front of a client you can be sure shame played a part”. We have a deep fear of being wrong, belittled or feeling less than other people. And this is what stops people from taking risks.

But if innovation is what we’re after, then we got to get people on track: vulnerability -creativity – innovation.

So how can we encourage people to take that first step – vulnerability?

The Institutional Yes (Amazon.com) – Usually when someone has a new idea, they must prove to the manager why they think the idea is a good one. The Institutional Yes shifts the responsibility to the manager, by having the default answer of the manager be YES. If the manager wants to say no, they are required to write a two-page thesis on why they think it’s a bad idea. In terms of helping with vulnerability, if the manager can’t prove his poor opinion of the idea, the accountability is now shared for this idea.
Kickstart Innovation Workshop (Adobe Systems) – The Kickbox is a small, red cardboard box containing $1,000 in seed money and everything an employee needs to generate and prototype an idea all the way to selling the idea to management. The idea behind the Kickbox is that instead of funding a few big ideas that do get presented, the budget is spread out to potentially find the big ideas that usually go unpresented. Anyone in the company can obtain a Kickbox. Results need to be shared, but there is no deadline when they need to be presented, and more importantly in terms of vulnerability, no judgment if their Kickbox bet doesn’t pay off.

These next three examples address vulnerability by embracing outcomes, even if they were not the desired ones:

Heroic Failure Award (Procter & Gamble) – This award honors the employee or team with the biggest failure that delivered the greatest insight. As Nelson Mandela would say, this award demonstrates “I never lose. I either win or learn”. After all, crossing off something that didn’t work and understanding why, gives room to then find what needs to be fixed /pivoted to work the next time.
Dare to Try Award (Tata Group) – This award is given to ambitious projects that didn’t materialize due to any number of factors – cultural issues, technology, inability to commercialize. Yet, it recognizes that someone allowed themselves to be vulnerable enough to try, and therefore can now teach us what doesn’t work.
Wall of Shame (3d signals) -The Wall of Shame, located in a central part of the company, acknowledges employees who were voted in for saying something spectacularly, well, thick. The CEO of the company, Ariel Rosenfeld, says the wall helps people not take themselves too seriously, and realize that we’re all human, and everyone makes mistakes. To date, the company’s CTO holds the record and has just had his 5th saying hung on the wall.

These examples obviously are not intended to just reward failure because they “tried”. Rather it’s to show people that when they are willing to make themselves vulnerable, we’re willing to help them take sensible risks, and that there is just as much that can be learned from success as there is from failure.

A last piece of advice from Brené for the road – In order to develop manager’s abilities to cultivate an openness to vulnerability in their teams, they need to allow themselves to be vulnerable as well. They would lead by example and demonstrate that the picture of the leader needing to know all the answers is no longer the case. In reality, we’re all in this together.

HOW TO BE PAST-READY

Published date: April 13, 2022 в 4:45 pm

Written by: Amnon Levav

Category: Innovation

Yesterday it occurred to me that none of my girls actually knew what a letter even was. They knew the word but none had ever written nor received one. They had never lived the experience of running to the mailbox to see whether an envelope with a stamp was waiting, bringing news from a dear friend from which they had not heard for months.

I tried to convey this long-lost reality with its accompanying feelings and managed mainly to elicit laughter and ridicule, but also some genuine curiosity.

“So how did they know that you had received and read the letter?”

“Yeah. Imagine them sitting in a caffe in Brasil three weeks after sending it and suddenly hearing a buzz in their ear and saying, ahh great, they opened my letter.” LOL

“And then, when they received your response, it would say: last time she wrote a letter was on November 16th, at 13:45.” LOLer

“What?!? Then it could take like 6 weeks between the moment you wrote to tell her of the video you had just seen and the moment you received her response??? So why bother being in touch with people that far away, anyway?”

And so on and so LOL.

While they were laughing and making fun of us old-timers it suddenly occurred to me: we humans are not only limited in our ability to imagine an unknown future; we’re just as challenged when we try to overcome our fixedness about imagining unlived pasts! In fact, why should there be a difference? Why would it be easier for someone who doesn’t know what is, say, a letter, to invent the concept – that was once an obvious reality to all and sundry – than to invent the next WhatsApp or Telegram?

It somehow feels that it is more difficult, and I have some thoughts on why this is the case, but also the suspicion that the main difference is that we are simply more interested in future-looking-fixedness-breaking than in its past-looking sister, and that is why we invest so much effort trying to invent difficult-to-imagine futures rather than understanding just-as-difficult-to-comprehend pasts.

We tend to believe that innovation necessarily means advancing from iPhoneX to iPhone X+1, 2,3… But what if iP7 was actually better than iP9, say? Which innovation mechanisms do we have to help us correct our course by stepping back? Advancing backwards? Or, on a larger scale, from the perspective of say 1990’s McDonald’s – given that they were clearly selling a mostly harmful product, the obvious innovation strategy, which to a certain extent at a certain point they followed, was to try to make the product more wholesome or, at least, less harmful. This is certainly a worthy effort and a beneficial use of the company’s innovation abilities. From the perspective of the rest of humanity, though, wouldn’t the most effective and benign strategic innovation be to go backwards to a McDonald-less world? Or at least to scale it back in size and reach? In terms of our definition (click here to read the article) this course of action would undoubtedly count as a great instance of innovation, complying with our two criteria:

1) Important impact has been achieved – less harmful food is being consumed;

2) A fixedness has been broken – that the best course of action for MD is to grow and grow, regardless of its impact on society.

Innovation can, I am suggesting, work in both directions. It can mean breaking our fixedness to imagine futures that are seemingly inconceivable with our current knowledge, and it can also lead us to what is often the even more difficult task of realizing that we have forged forward on the wrong branch in the tree of possibilities and would do better to advance backwards to the last fork and select a different route to advance along.

So, as the world reaches increasingly more dead ends, those who have the skills to reimagine quasi-forgotten past-solutions and “invent backwards” to lead us to ways of being whose value we can now appreciate, with the benefit of hindsight, more than we ever did in the past, may become the visionary leaders of the future. Hindsight is given a bad rap because it is assumed that one cannot go back to make use of it. But what if one could?

The Five Drivers Behind Food Innovation

Published date: April 8, 2022 в 4:34 pm

Written by: Robyn Taragin

Category: Innovation,New Product Development

One of my best friends, Rosa Seidenwar, is a pastry chef, food photographer, and stop motion artist. This gives me many perks, especially when a new recipe is in the works and I get called upon for my taste testing skills. Yes, it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. As I nibbled, taking in all the flavors and textures, I couldn’t help but marvel. Even with the colossal amount of food items, recipes, cookbooks, food blogs, food shows, restaurants, delivery methods (did I leave anything out?) – people are still able to come up with something new! And what’s more, consumers aren’t ready to say – Thank you! We have enough! In fact, according to a study by NielsenIQ, a third of Americans are actively looking for new products to try. Which makes product innovation still a lead runner for food corporations, as opposed to, say, taking a year off and just focusing on productivity (same study states that 30,000 new products are launched each year in the consumer packaged goods industry). Having worked with food corporations in the past and seeing their modes for launching innovations, I was curious to also hear Rosa’s take, as representing the personal brands rising in the industry.

So if food innovation is your bread-and-butter, here are five drivers that keep product innovation going at such an intensity:

Technology: New technology is affecting practically every aspect of the food industry – whether it’s the ingredients themselves (think cell-based meats), the equipment used on manufacturing lines, and kitchenware readily available and affordable to the regular consumer. This can deliver a whole slew of products that consumers can try out, whether because they can be manufactured, or because they can now be tried out at home.
Digital: Apps and social media have changed the way we interact with food altogether. Whether its tracking calories, scanning QR codes on labels for the history of a food product, and the constant picture-perfect meals uploaded to insta, keeping up with the Jones’ has reached new heights and consumers are demanding products that meet these needs.
Trends and lifestyle: I hate to use the C word, but Covid has changed a lot about how we connect with food. Whether it’s dining-in, family oriented meals, meals that are experiences, the food industry picks up on these trends (and other non-C related ones) and will create new products or adapt existing ones to suit. Working from home requires less products suited for eating on the go and gives rise to products like subscription boxes for creating meals at home. We see global trends such as sustainability affecting how ingredients are used and used up. And of course, while healthy eating never goes out of style, the introduction of new diets (Keto, Whole 30) also spark interest in new food items to match.
New ingredients: The introduction of new or lesser used ingredients like monk fruit, microalgae, etc. (remember when spirulina was new?) or finding new uses for favorite ingredients like chocolate, peanut butter, and yogurt to fuel the inspiration for new products on the market. The motion for reducing waste and upcycling food leads to creativity in using previously overlooked by-products in new products.
Your “Secret Sauce”: This last point is what gives each brand their exclusive drive. Ultimately, the food industry is made up of people, whether it’s one person in their home business, or teams of people in a large company). Each person involved in the food industry has their own unique offering and passion that they bring with them. It could be their experience from working in the industry or on a certain product line, the training they received at culinary school or degree in food science, or their market knowledge. It could be on a personal level such as affinities for fair trade, use of specific ingredients, risk taking, simple vs. complex flavors, specific cuisines. The combination makes up their secret sauce for what drives their creativity. You can look at this on a broader level, as what is each company’s secret sauce? What are the resources and strengths and cumulative experiences that can inspire?

So which is the biggest driver for you? The upside is, these drivers are very much connected. Ingredients can lead to products that establish behaviors. Behaviors can influence which ingredients are used. Technology can feed into trends that lead to products, and so forth. So once you get yourself onto one, you can always follow the arrows to the other. But your “Secret Sauce”? No one can follow that but you.

How Nudgers can be Nudged to Nudge

Published date: March 30, 2022 в 4:00 pm

Written by: Idit Biton, SIT senior partner & innovation consultant & future of work expert

Category: Innovation,Strategy

The work of the duo Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, further developed and popularized by Dan Ariely and others, has led to the growing popularity and use of Behavioral Economics in general, and the practice of “nudging” specifically, in advertising, marketing and communications. We refer to “nudging” here as the act of creating positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions to influence the behavior and decision-making of groups or individuals. A heated discussion has developed of late as to the validity of the idea that these small nudges can indeed move their targets to action, following what seem to be inconsistencies in the research and even some accusations of misrepresentation of data and results. Nevertheless, in this post we assume that, at least in some scenarios, it is useful to utilize so called nudges, and the task is finding the most effective way to perform them. [If you do not believe that “nudges” exist or can be useful, we recommend that you use your time to read other posts, ours or others’. If you do believe in nudges, this can be useful stuff for you].

In essence, we wish to nudge the nudgers to utilize a specific set of tools that can help them come up with effective ideas quickly and consistently. We will, therefore, focus here on HOW to create these prods.

This year I (Idit) reached the ripe age of 50. I’m not a big fan of counting my years, but my HMO does take age seriously, so they keep sending me notifications and requests to perform a set of examinations. I consistently ignored these well-intentioned messages (probably a topic for another post…) including repeated invitations for a mammograph, until, one day, a nurse called my mobile and declared: “I’ve scheduled a mammography for you, for next Thursday at 5pm. If you can’t make it, please send us a cancellation.” [What did I do?, you may ask]. I went 😊. The nudge nudged me into the desired action. Let us review a few additional examples, to point out some interesting patterns.

Many campaigns have been run across cultures to raise awareness to and combat drunken driving. How can nudges be enlisted for this purpose?

Aurora Bar, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with the help of their ad agency (Ogilvy), came up with a set of creative solutions. A valet parking service was offered to clients, with a small twist: the driver in whose hands you were to deposit your car was visibly drunk. Customers were obviously reluctant to hand over their car keys to a drunkard, clearly unfit to drive anyone’s car. Some were even upset to the point of raising their voice and rebuking the driver for being unprofessional and irresponsible. At that point, angry customers were handed a note by the drunk valet parking attendant. The note read: “Do not let any drunk driver drive your car, even if the driver is you yourself”. [Watch the customers reactions here]:

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/34464465/drunk-valet/bar-aurora-e-boteco-ferraz

Another solution implemented in the bar was a first-of-its-kind karaoke breathalyzer. The karaoke system’s microphone was adapted to become an alcohol breathalyzer, so that when happy customers who had had their fill of alcohol took the stage and opened their mouth to sing, they were surprised to see, at the end of the song, their alcohol level displayed on the karaoke screen. The singers got the message, and so did their friends.

https://youtu.be/HGCfzlpAhgQ

Brilliant solutions, aren’t they? Looking for commonalities between the two ideas, one can see that in both cases there is a “free-riding” element. Valet parking services were there anyway, they were just assigned an additional task – reminding the still-sober customer of the perils of drunken driving. The karaoke system was there anyway – it was just assigned the additional task of revealing the revelers’ blood alcohol level, both to them and to their friends.

In SIT, we call this pattern of thinking, or thinking tool: Task Unification. But, before we delve into the specifics, a word about thinking tools in general. SIT’s thinking tools are defined by observing and analyzing thousands of inventions, detecting common patterns among them and converting them into tools that have been used in the past 26+ years in thousands of companies and organizations to invent products, solutions, services, strategies, and communication campaigns.

Task Unification (TU), in SIT, means assigning an additional task to an existing resource.

The Aurora Bar solutions are examples of applying Task Unification, since new and additional tasks were assigned respectively to the parking attendant and the microphone.

[You are welcome to try this yourself, continuing with the bar example. What elements does one typically find in a bar? Components that are there anyway? For example: stools, coasters, ceiling, toilets, music, food, smartphones, social media, speakers. Can you think of another nudge idea – assigning the task of reminding people not to drink and drive to one of the components mentioned above? Could you share this idea with us as a comment to this post? Or as a personal message to one of us?]

To introduce a second tool that leads efficiently to effective nudges, we will share an old example from a medium that is rapidly going out of fashion. We will then show how the very same logic is applied some 20+ years later using updated media, finally, we will ask our-and-yourselves what the 2022 version could look like.

The following was a brilliant and impactful campaign run by Amnesty International in Spain.

Note that the act of cutting out the coupon (yes, imagine that some of us old timers can remember the days when people actually cut out coupons and mailed or used them!) concretely demonstrates the result that your donation is meant to promote. You break the handcuffs, save the prisoner about to be hanged, etc.

Two elements stand out when you compare this add to a basic version in which the coupon would simply appear beside the text and visual:

The reader is invited to perform a physical action;
The reader receives a small immediate payoff for their action.

The results of these two features of this type of ad are:

Engaging in physical action can increase engagement and long-term retention of a message. In addition to the everyday experience suggesting that this is the case, there is apparently a growing body of research on “Embodiment Theory” which proposes that knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor experiences. [If you are aware of relevant research, we would love to hear about it]
When the viewer is hesitating as to their engagement with a message or willingness to act on it, we are assuming that a “nudge” can make the difference – the extra payoff in the action can be this nudge.

Let’s observe how this plays out in several additional examples.

The following “SocialSwipe” campaign, from 2014, uses a very similar idea to that used by Amnesty, but with a newer and more sophisticated medium: a billboard invites you to swipe your credit card on the billboard itself, with the double result of both transferring a donation to Misereor, and cutting a visual loaf of bread to feed a hungry child. [Watch 90 seconds here, of how it plays out]:

https://youtu.be/zVuWtWZh4oQ

The following campaign was created by Publicis Brussels for Reporters without Borders, a non-profit organization which defends the freedom to be informed and to inform others no matter in which regime. Note the interesting combination of traditional print media with a cellular app, in which a phone, placed on top of the ad, hijacks three autocrats’ faces to pronounce an anti-dictatorial message “Because there are mouths that will never speak the truth.”

Two of these three autocrats we have been liberated from thankfully, but creepy to think that, 11 years after the campaign, [one of them is still with us, damaging the world with renewed toxic vigor]:

https://youtu.be/JywgnvmtKac

[Have you seen other examples of this type of Nudge-Activation lately? Can you share with us so that we can both enjoy and analyze them?]

How does one go about deliberately creating this kind of message-nudging?

When you wish to convey a message, through a medium, that will lead the viewer to perform a required action, we recommend using the Nudge-Activation tool. Use the medium to create an extra payoff that will nudge the viewer to perform an action which is either the required action itself or will serve as a bridging action and second nudge for the required action.

The direct version: In the SocialSwipe example the required action was swiping your card to donate. The extra payoff of this very action was seeing the bread being cut.

The double-nudge version: In the autocrat campaign the required action was donation to Reporters Without Borders, the extra payoff was seeing the dictators’ faces pronouncing anti-repression words, and this payoff, together with the physical action of triggering it, would hopefully nudge the viewer into performing the required action of donation.

[Try applying this tool, by following the simple procedure]:

Applying Nudge-Activation

Define the required action – the action you would like the viewer to eventually perform.
Possibly define a bridging action – a small action that can serve as a nudge towards performing the required action.
Invent an extra payoff that the viewer will receive once they perform either the bridging action or the required action.
Search your medium, your message or the environment of consumption of the message for resources that can help implement the extra payoff or perform the actions. Examples of components used in our examples are: the viewer’s phone, their credit card, the magazines paper, the billboard itself, a coupon, YouTube, social media. [Note that in this part you are using the Task Unification tool, described in the first part of this post]
Combine your message with an invitation to act, presenting the extra payoff or hinting at it, using an existing resource.

Getting you into this article may have required some nudging – we tried our best in the accompanying post, but once you were in it, we did our best to engage you in thinking about our content in a practical way, maybe even asking yourself how you could go about using our tools. [Can you identify the myriad ways we attempted to nudge you towards our objective?] We tried to pepper the article with hints [[[]]] and will be happy to read what you thought about these efforts. Thanks.

Let’s Rethink Our Relations: How to Break Relational Fixedness in the Digital World

Published date: March 24, 2022 в 4:35 pm

Written by: Allon Sasson

Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation,Strategy

Reruns of “Seinfeld” on Netflix are a glimpse into a 30-year-old time capsule that allows one to dig up innovative ideas that, for some reason, have never been implemented. One of the hidden potential startups is Elaine’s brilliant suggestion, when Jerry, George and she impatiently wait in line at a Chinese restaurant:

“You know, it’s not fair that people are seated first come – first serve. It should be based on who’s hungriest”

Credit: Seinfeld on Twitter

Silly idea? Or wonderful? It probably depends on whether you are hungry when you first hear it. One thing is sure, though – it is too seldom that one rethinks the nature of the connection between the various components of a system, product, or service, and thus, many an opportunity for real innovation is forever lost.

Imagine an external training program offered by your company to a limited number of employees. Since it is too expensive to send everyone who wishes to go, the company selects based on professional knowledge or experience.

At first thought this sounds like a logical and proper consideration, which ensures that the level of trainees is uniform, and participants can process new material based on their knowledge and experience.

But one can look at this situation from another angle. Those selected for training will probably be employees who already master the field, while employees with no background (but with high potential) will have a slim chance of joining. Paradoxically, this means that the cumulative value that the company’s employees have gained from this external training is lower than that of a similar training with participants with no previous knowledge.

The decision to use prior knowledge as a selection criterion for the training is an example of Relational Fixedness, one of the barriers that can interfere with innovation processes.

Relational Fixedness is the tendency to perceive connections and dependencies between variables of a system in one certain way, without being able to imagine different relations.

All types of fixedness are cognitive mechanisms that enable quick understanding of objects and situations, allowing us to take immediate action. Such mechanisms are beneficial and even crucial at both the personal and organizational levels. At the same time, they can be a significant barrier to innovation, as they make it difficult for us to identify new opportunities.

There are other ways to connect the dots

What does it mean to consider different relations between the variables of a system’s components? Let’s look at one of the important variables in any business: the price of the product.

Seemingly, there should be no connection between the price of a consumer product, such as a pair of glasses, and the characteristics of other parameters of the business, such as the location of the store or the day of the year. In practice, many business models display different pricing for the same product depending on these exact characteristics, as evidenced in holiday discounts or outlet stores. These models are examples of breaking Relational Fixedness.

And what do you think about this campaign by a major optical retailer in Israel? The number of percentage points discounted from a customer’s price is exactly the age of that customer. If the customer is 62 years old, he or she will receive a 62% discount.

But how do you produce such unconventional ideas, and how do you make sure they are more than a gimmick? We believe that the way to do this is through systematic thinking and the use of thinking tools that force the would-be innovator to perceive the components that are already available, but through a different lens.

The thinking tool that can lead to the generation of, for example, an age-dependent discount is called in SIT “Attribute Dependency”. The process of using this tool consists of listing the components of the product or system, specifying their characteristics, and then modifying the existing relations (or dependencies) between those characteristics (or creating new ones if none exist).

In the next section we will explain and demonstrate how this can be applied in the context of digital and data-based products.

Relational Fixedness in a data-driven world

What about the digital data-laden world we live in today – is Relational Fixedness prevalent there, as in the world of tangible products? Definitely!

Fixedness is not a feature of computers or databases, but a characteristic of human thinking, including those humans who make the design, marketing, and operational decisions in cutting-edge technology companies.

The information available thanks to digital tools can point to surprising new opportunities, which can easily be missed because they seem “illogical” or because fixedness prevents one from noticing them in the first place.

Despite the fixedness, the abundance of data that can be monitored, processed, and presented to customers has in recent years led to a wealth of new and fascinating models, and to the creation of connections that did not exist in the past between variables of product components.

Here are three reasons why companies choose to break Relational Fixedness in their digital products and offerings, and a few examples for each reason:

I. Make the most of the value embodied in the technology.

In most smartphones, “low battery” mode automatically turns on when the battery runs low. In such cases, display will be dimmed, since screen brightness is a big battery drain. In Attribute Dependency lingo, a new connection has been created between the energy level of the battery and the level of illumination of the screen.
Many digital services and apps are affected by the speed of the internet connection. App providers often operate multiple data centers around the world, and use smart traffic routing to the nearest one, according to user’s IP addresses. The location of the server from which the users receive service depends on the location of the users themselves, a dependency that was not possible in the past.

II. Improve conversion rates and sales

Determining users’ location is beneficial not only to improve the service they get, but also to maximize the probability that they purchase additional products. Location-based services (based on cellular data, WiFi, etc.) demonstrate sophisticated relations between users’ whereabouts and advertising content presented to them.
The scope and resolution of data held by digital stores allow for dynamic pricing strategies, based on a huge number of variables. Some companies even choose to implement differential pricing of the same product, based on the type of cellphone used while shopping online.

III. Design considerations and improving the user experience

The abundance of accessible data and variables for each product and customer makes it possible to fine-tune the users’ experience. Why should all Waze users be represented by the same avatar, when new users can appear, say, as baby-Wazers, and “senior” users as grown-ups? Why should the Google logo always look the same, when it can vary on different days of the year or appear differently in each country?
To ensure a fast and smooth onboarding process, many applications offer an increasing number of features as the user’s level rises. New users will be offered a limited set of capabilities, and as they continue to gain experience, additional features will be revealed to them. A gradual onboarding prevents unnecessary confusion and allows for effective learning of each feature.

It can be clearly seen that data-driven companies know how to make good use of valuable information to create new connections between variables of the application or product components. In fact, we have become accustomed to smarter and more personalized applications, making the most of every characteristic of users’ behavior, their surroundings and even the application mode itself.

How to leverage what we have learned from these examples

How can such new proposals be systematically generated? And how can one change or unlink existing dependencies, in a way that is not intended to meet a particular need, but to open new horizons for surprising opportunities?

Applying the “Attribute Dependency” thinking tool can be just the answer. In addition to conventional thinking, which emerges from analyzing needs, this tool makes it possible to systematically explore additional possibilities. Here are the operating instructions for a simple version of the tool:

1. Prepare a list of variables:

5-8 internal variables of the product you are working on (internal variables, i.e., those that the manufacturer has control over: volume, screen size, price of the product or service, color…).
5-8 variables in the product’s immediate proximity (external variables, i.e., those that are relevant to the product, but the manufacturer has no control over: weather, age of user, location in the world).

2. Randomly select a pair of variables: one internal and one external.

3. Identify whether there is a relationship between the selected variables. If it exists – consider the possibility of changing or canceling it; If it does not exist – consider options for creating a relationship or dependency between the two.

4. Identify new opportunities that can emerge from the newly created relationship.

Here are some ideas created by using the tool, as a demonstration:

In most applications, the number of features available to the user increases the more expensive the user’s subscription. Can you find an advantage in an app where a more expensive subscription includes fewer options?
The default order of messages in an e-mail box depends on the time they were received. You can also change their order according to other characteristics, such as the subject of the message or its size. Why should the order of the messages not be related, say, to the number of recipients of each message so that bulk messages do not bother one at the top of the mailbox?
Podcasts have become a favorite format for content consumption. You can control the speed of the audio, but would it not be more useful if the speed depended on the complexity of the podcast topic, or even the complexity of each section in it, or the speaker’s velocity?
The position of Google search results depends on their ranking in Google’s algorithm. The advantage of this for Google (and for us) is obvious, but what if we add an option to display the results of the first five pages backwards? Exposure to new and unfamiliar content can expand one’s mind.

Applying Attribute Dependency is not trivial the first few times, because the process is counter-intuitive. In fact, when it comes to data driven digital products, the process may be even less intuitive than when seeking to innovate with a physical product, because of the wealth of “logical” options that can be realized before considering “weird” offers.

Gaining experience in activating this tool improves results dramatically. Since we have already chosen the less intuitive way – we have a good chance of reaching a surprising result that competitors will miss.

Now, back to Elaine’s idea of how to change the queue at the Chinese restaurant – maybe it’s worth adding a “how hungry are you?” question to the digital form used for booking seats in restaurants?

Four Ways A Common Innovation Language Improves Your Business

Published date: March 16, 2022 в 4:17 pm

Written by: Robyn Taragin

Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

Over the weekend, I was talking to a good friend who has a VERY IMPORTANT job. Big startup, lots of awards – you know the kind. We caught each other up with the goings-on at our respective workplaces. When I shared I was writing about companies having a common innovation language, she responded with “A what?” and a blank look. I realized if this topic was ambiguous even to my friend with the VERY IMPORTANT job, then this was a subject that needed addressing.

The value gained from having a Common Innovation Language (CIL) is because:

You have one
It’s common
It’s for innovation
It’s a language

Let’s dig deeper:

Having: Having a common innovation language means that there is a defined, thought-out framework for how people work and innovate. This provides an overarching structure, what’s in and what’s out. There are a lot of options (method, terms, etc.) when it comes to innovating. If you specifically want people to use one innovation methodology over another, having a CIL reflects that wish. ‘Having’ also reflects on the present – something that is current and updated as needed, therefore making it useful (as opposed to something drafted five years ago with no connection to present company practices).

Common: A common language is common for two reasons: Everyone shares the same language, and it’s prevalent amongst employees. This helps people work together more efficiently and provides clarity regarding what’s being asked of them. I.e. there are different types of prototypes. Imagine you asked for one and it took 3 months to develop, when you had in mind a simple sketch. Ouch. Or if you say MVP and someone is thinking about last night’s baseball game. Well – you get the picture. So if you have an innovation language in your company, but it’s not common, you’re missing out on all it can deliver. There’s even an emotional aspect – no one likes to be left out of a conversation or think there’s a secret language! A CIL contributes to feelings of camaraderie when working on a shared goal. So if you really expect everyone to innovate, make sure they know the jargon to do so.

Innovation: Companies have common languages, but is innovation one of them? The vast terminologies associated with innovation have made it into a sub-language of its very own. Although there is crossover and borrowing from other fields, they are used differently in the context of innovation (think Agile, Lean, Sprint, etc.). A CIL lets people align around the specific methods, processes, deliverables, roles, and responsibilities that you want people to use.

Language: People need to have a way to communicate, period. It’s all good to want innovation in your company, but folks need something more than “that thing that we do”. A CIL provides ease of working together and speeds things up. When a term is used, everyone knows what they need to get on, without having to constantly explain the why, what, and how.

Your CIL can keep expanding over time. How you choose to share it can be through ‘word of the day’, during onboarding, or even have a glossary in your knowledge management system. (I’d love to hear your ideas!) The bottom line, the importance of having a CIL is that it shows respect for both the intricate innovation initiatives in your company and the people who make it happen.

31 Chances to Make a Discovery

Published date: March 2, 2022 в 8:03 pm

Written by: Robyn Taragin

Category: Innovation,Methodology

What if you had a huge discovery in front of you but missed it?

Imagine the world today if Fleming would have glanced at the mold on a culture plate, said “Gross!”, and thrown it away. Or if Spencer took the melted candy bar from his pocket after standing in front of an active radar set, and thought to himself – darn, every time I work on this project I lose my snack! And went to the vending machine for pretzels or chips instead.

History is full of inventions triggered by “lucky” accidents. Post-it® notes, chocolate chip cookies, X-rays, Teflon – the width and breadth of these discoveries demonstrate that stumbling upon these opportunities could happen to anyone, but the key really is in their recognition. It’s been said that Spencer wasn’t the first to notice the heating phenomenon, but that he was the first to investigate and experiment.

Accidental inventions share a common storyline: First, a bizarre, unexpected situation is imposed. This is followed by “What the heck?” or “What am I supposed to do with this?”. Then, there’s an Aha moment where a new functionality is found.

In innovation terminologies, this sequence is coined ‘Function Follows Form’

Ten-second historical overview: In the late 19th and early 20th century the architectural Bauhaus movement gained popularity for its Form Follows Function design approach – first understand the desired function and then create the form to deliver it.

Then, in the early ’90s, a group of psychologists[1] made an interesting discovery. When it comes to creating, people are innately better at uncovering the potential benefits of a given form rather than creating a new form to satisfy a given need. Meaning, it’s easier for us to come up with a new use for something that we already see, whereas we struggle to imagine a totally new design. This discovery spurred a reverse thinking approach: Function Follows Form. This approach encourages us to first create a virtual situation (form) and then explore its potential benefits (function).

In all honesty, unlike Fleming, I would have chucked that culture plate. Or distractedly looked at my phone while salvaging my melted candy bar. Let’s be honest, things go haywire all the time. But the point is when they do – how do we respond? Do we shelf things or do we take a second look to assess its potential value (perhaps different than originally intended, but value nonetheless)?

I invite you to join the FFF March Challenge (FFFMC). For each day of the month, there is a bizarre form on which to practice finding value and turn it into a real invention. By adopting FFF as an innovation mindset we can have our minds trained not to brush an opportunity off our lap when it falls in it.

[1] Finke, R.A., Ward, T.B., Smith, S.M. (1992). Creative cognition: Theory, research, and applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Green Eggs, Viagra, Constraints and Creativity

Published date: February 17, 2022 в 3:30 pm

Written by: Amit Mayer

Category: Innovation,Methodology

There is little argument that Dr. Seuss is one of the world’s most popular and loved writers. His name is associated with imagination, creativity, talent and originality – and on a personal note – he is one of my favorite writers as well.

In 1954, after reading an article about the shortcomings of books used to teach reading to first-graders, Dr. Seuss was challenged by his friend, William Ellsworth Spaulding, to write a book that first graders “can’t put down”. But there was one additional constraint – he was to write that book using no more than 225 words out of a designated list of 348 words that every first grader should know. Dr. Seuss ended up using 236 words, of which 221 are monosyllabic (!!), to write The Cat in The Hat – a book that has been one of the most successful children’s book ever since.

As if that was not enough, Dr. Seuss’s publisher bet him that he would not be able to write another book using as little as 50 different words. As impossible as that may sound, Dr. Seuss not only won the bet – he did so with a bang. In August 1960 he published Green Eggs and Ham – the book that would become his most successful, and the 4th best-selling English-language children’s hardcover book of all time!

So what’s going on here? How did the unreasonable constraint of writing a book using only 50 different words become the catalyst for one of the world’s most successful and admired books? After all, when we try to be creative we usually go through considerable trouble to break the constraints that limit us, and certainly do not choose to embrace new constraints. Can the explanation simply be the extraordinary talent of Dr. Seuss, or is there something else at play that could be relevant to mere mortals like you and me?

Before we try to answer this question, please take a look at these Viagra TV commercials:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMhv_wCx5ug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o8_JjiLpw0

In both these commercials, and for fairly obvious reasons, the advertisers had to avoid describing in detail what their product does, or enables… This constraint is not unique to these specific commercials. What makes them unique, though, is the way the advertisers chose to deal with that constraint.

In many similar cases advertisers have tried to bypass this constraint in various ways, such as portraying men in “the morning after”, filled with energy and joy. But in the examples we just saw there was something very different. They do not contain an attempt to avoid the constraint – quite the contrary. If you think about it, what the advertisers did in both cases is to use the constraint – and in a central and conspicuous manner!

And look at the results: two commercials that are based on a unique element, and are therefore interesting, distinct and memorable; dialogues in which the use of “censorship” leads us to imagine the exact same things you just cannot show on primetime television; a central role for the product itself, as an integral part of the commercial; and last, but not least, a Cannes award for the campaign. All in all not too bad for an idea that was paradoxically inspired by the inability to do what initially seems to be so essential (yes, you can read this sentence again…)

It is interesting to compare this campaign with another Viagra campaign that also uses the same constraint in an unusual manner. Take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExQKZKnk6rA

In this amusing commercial (that is even funnier the second time you see it) we witness a different way to address the constraint. Here, too, the advertisers are not running away from the campaign using something like “the morning after” approach. Rather, they are facing it head on by replacing the medium which is the object of the constraint – the language itself. The advertisers decided to go ahead and do exactly what they intended to do originally – constraint or no constraint. This “stubbornness” forced them to explore options and alternatives that would never come up were it not for the constraint.

Let’s summarize what we had so far. We saw a few examples in which we recognize a surprising connection between the presences of significant constraints and the ability to develop original and creative ideas. We can even go further to say that in these examples the creative ideas were not developed despite the relevant constraint, but rather because of it.

Yet with all due respect, the constraints did not do the creative work. That has been done by the individuals that chose to address them not as a force majeure that must be submissively accepted, but rather as raw material for a creative exploration. Not as an “end of story”, but as a starting point for a creative negotiation. And that, my friends, is exactly the insight we can take with us, and the state of mind we can learn to adopt.

Not every constraint, in any situation or creative process, can lead us to the development of an award winning campaign or a successful literary masterpiece; but some might, if we just give them (and ourselves) a chance. The widely accepted notion that constraints harm creativity, in not unreasonable; after all, constraints – by their very nature – limit the options available to us. But if we manage to change the way we view them, we may discover that in many cases they simply stop us from settling for the simple, immediate or generic solutions. And thus, by preventing us from taking the path of least resistance, they force us to explore and consider options we would never reach otherwise.

At any rate, in the complex reality we live in, the submissive approach to constraints is an omnipresent problem. When have you last faced a creative challenge, or a problem that needed a solution, in a constraint-free environment??? Constraints surround us in any task and every challenge, so that the ability to use them as a creative opportunity can come pretty handy in our professional lives (and our private ones, by the way). It does not take a lot of resources or complicated preparations – just a shift in our perspective.

So take a few moments to consider the challenges you are facing today, and ask yourselves what constraints make it difficult for you to face these challenges. Maybe these constraints can serve you in the same way the list of words did Dr. Seuss or the censorship the advertisers of Viagra. In what creative ways can you utilize these constraints? Which ideas can they help you come up with, and why are these better than the ones you came up with so far? It may take more than 20 seconds to find meaningful answers for these questions, but if you give it 20 minutes you might be pretty amazed at what you can come up with…

The original version of this article has been published, in Hebrew, on

http://shivuk.themarker.com

No innovation please, we’re too busy

Published date: January 19, 2022 в 12:00 pm

Written by: Amnon Levav

Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

A few weeks ago, I spoke to a high-level manager in a financial institution. We talked about his (truly) impressive activities in the field of innovation, and then he surprised me somewhat by saying: “Next year we plan to freeze innovation activities.” Since the company is not a client of ours, I wasn’t directly affected by this decision, but still, I was curious to understand the rationale. Another victim of “the Situation”, I said to myself, but to my surprise he went on to explain: “We have so many good ideas now that we need to pause with innovation and focus on implementation.” This is, in my eyes, a symptom of one of the biggest and most common misconceptions in the field; that innovation is all about coming up with ideas of what to do (products, services, whatever it is you do). The corollary of this erroneous concept is, obviously, that once you have these ideas you don’t need to be bothered with innovation any longer, all you need is to “just” implement.

In reality, the situation is nearly the opposite. The level of innovation that needs to be invested in implementation is not lower, and very often higher, than that which is required for coming up with the ideas in the first place. But this is hardly news for anyone who is involved in the day-today of innovation within a company, such as the manager mentioned above. Why, then, is the mistake so common? It is due, I think, to the fact that people tend to see innovation as a type of activity rather than a quality of performing activities; people see innovation as an answer to the question “what are you doing?” while in fact it is the answer to “how are you doing, whatever it is that you are engaged in?” To avoid this confusion, we use a practical definition:

Innovation is the ability to think and act differently to achieve your goals.

This implies, obviously, that innovation is not limited to certain kinds of activities or contexts. Rather, it is relevant, as an option, in any situation in which a person or group of persons are engaged in a mental activity of any kind. In September, I was talking to a lady who is a director-level manager in a large company. “The last thing I need now is innovation,” she said, “We’ve just finished a successful innovation project, resulting in an amazing new product idea, which I’ve been trying to convince my VP for the past 3 months to OK, but with no success. What’s the use of innovating if they are going to kill your ideas anyway?” To me, it sounded like what she most needed was innovation. From our point of view, this was a classic case of an urgent need for some problem solving, the problem obviously being the need to convince a stubborn VP. And examples of this type are abundant: a VP who doesn’t need innovation because he “just” needs to get his division organized since they keep failing at implementing the great ideas in their pipeline; and of course, the innumerable CEOs who can’t talk about innovation now, because due to “the Situation” (COVID, supply chain, whatever) they see a decrease in sales, profits disappearing, and immediate danger to cash flow. My conclusion: all those people who are too [busy, overworked, full of ideas, engaged in a huge project] to innovate, are precisely those who are most in need of a change in the way they are handling whichever “too” they are immersed in, i.e. they are in dire need of innovation.

Innovation

1) Empathize 2) Define 3) Ideate 4) Prototype 5) Test

“No vulnerability, no creativity, no innovation”.

Task Unification (TU), in SIT, means assigning an additional task to an existing resource.

How to leverage what we have learned from these examples

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