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Graduates, Start Your Innovation Engines: 5 Tips to Being Creative in Any Job

Published date: June 2, 2014 в 3:00 am

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A college diploma is one key to starting your career engine, but learning to be more creative could help turbo-charge it. Just like college coursework, creativity can be learned—you don’t have to be born with these skills. Focusing on them is definitely worthwhile: companies value creativity because it spurs growth and competitiveness. As a recent graduate, you can stand out from the crowd by coming up with great ideas no matter what position you start in.

Having the skill to innovate and be creative on command can make you more attractive to a company and help you land a dream job. To do so, keep these five tips in mind on how you can solve problems and be creative in any job, at any level!

1. Identify the constraints around the problem

What are constraints in the workplace? Job constraints could be limitations on budget, impending deadlines, or other limiting factors that you face during day to day tasks. Think of constraints as the mandatory requirements to doing your job. These things don’t hinder your ability to think creatively – they help it! Constraints keep you “inside the box” and force your brain to work harder and smarter. When approaching a professional problem, try looking for a solution by first identifying constraints to solving the problem (deadlines, budgets and other factors). By imposing these limitations up front, you’re doing yourself a big favor. You filter out the bad ideas from the start, before they take shape. After all, why come with an idea that’s unworkable? It’s better to limit yourself right from the start within a space where the viable ideas exist. This tactic will be sure to impress your boss and co-workers.

2. Imagine you are solving someone else’s problem

Tricking your mind into solving the problem for someone else can improve creative output. Start a meeting by explaining the task or the problem to be solved. Then, tell the group to solve the same problem, but imagine doing it in a different industry or for a different product. This activates the group and expands their thinking before they start working on their actual problem. Just getting people to step away from their daily routine will boost their creative output. Think of it like doing word problems in math class. There could be a common underlying formula to coming up with a solution.

3. Got a large problem to solve? Break it up into smaller parts.

A simple way to change perspective is by breaking problems into simple components. How does this boost your creativity? Many times, just seeing the separate components of an issue will trigger new inventive solutions.  It activates your mind to go in new directions. Think of it as unpacking a full suitcase and laying out all your clothes on the floor, then repacking in a new and better way. To do this with a problem at work, write down a list of each component, whether it’s a product, process, service, or a smaller and more specific problem that you want to tackle.

4. Need a brainstorming session? Work in pairs, not large groups.

Group brainstorming sessions can sometimes be frustrating and unproductive. A simple way to overcome this is to break a large group into smaller teams of two or three people. Working in pairs makes people more focused. You feel accountable to the other person to do your fair share of the thinking. You bounce ideas of each other and you offer suggestions on how to improve the idea. Working in pairs is also more efficient. Five groups of two can generate far more ideas in the same amount of time than one group of ten. Plus, it could be a great way to get to know people in your office.

5. Practice the Golden Rule of Creativity

Creativity is a team sport, and you’ll generate better ideas if you harness the brainpower of others! Colleagues will help you if you help them first. Imagine you find an article online that a colleague of yours would find interesting. Make this small favor even more appreciated by printing the article and highlighting the most relevant parts. Write a small note on the article pointing out how your colleague might use the information. And finally, hand deliver it to your colleague. If more appropriate, try this same method of personalized sharing digitally by highlighting and making an email note, or social media post.
I call this the golden rule of creativity. Practice it and others will do whatever they can to help with your creativity projects.

Copyright 2014 Drew Boyd (This post first appeared in Coke Journey on May 27, 2014)

Filtering Ideas to Find the Very Best Ones

Published date: May 26, 2014 в 9:46 am

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The SIT Method is designed to help you generate lots of ideas in a systematic way. But how do you select which ideas to pursue? Filtering ideas is an essential part of the creativity process. You want to make sure you spend your time only on those with the most potential.

First, put all your ideas in a standard format. That’ll make it a lot easier to evaluate them. I like to use a template like this:

  • Name of Idea:
  • Description of Idea:
  • Benefits:
  • Target Audience:
  • Challenges:

Every idea should have its own name, not just a number. Give it a name that will help people see what the idea is about. Use literal names, not vague or confusing ones.

Next, put every idea into one of three categories. The first category is for those ideas that are a bit far out, perhaps borderline crazy. They’re novel, but they may not be feasible.

The second category is for those ideas that are just the opposite. They’re not wild at all. They’re incremental improvements.

The third category is for ideas in the middle – not too far out and not too near in. They’re in a special zone we call the sweet spot. They’re viable and creative. It’s these ideas that people get excited about.

But we’re not done yet. Once you put the ideas in these categories, look at ways to get more of them into the sweet spot. Here is what I suggest you do. Start with the far out ideas. Is there a way to pull them back in, take out some of the weirdness of the idea to make it more feasible? What if you eliminated an exotic feature of the idea but still retained the essence of what the concept is trying to do? That might eliminate some of the riskiness of the idea.

For those incremental ideas, find a way to push them out and add some novelty. For example, what if you used Task Unification to have one of the components doing an additional task? Or what if you applied Attribute Dependency to the concept to make it smart and adaptive? That would certainly add some novelty and push it closer to the sweet spot.

After this exercise, you’re ready to start evaluating your list of ideas. There are two ways to do this. One is very simple and informal. You ask a group of people to vote on the ideas. You have probably seen the so-called dot method. Here’s how it works.

First, let the group read the entire list of ideas with all the benefits and challenges. Then, each participant is given a number of small, sticky colored dots. They’re instructed to place these dots on the ideas they think are best. I usually have participants place these right onto the paper with the list of ideas. This keeps the voting anonymous and makes it more objective. Then, collect all the votes and tally them up. While it may sound overly simple, the dot method of voting has a lot of benefits. Each individual has their own biases of what makes a great idea, and they vote accordingly. But voting as a group tends to neutralize those individual biases. Many times, the group vote will tell you which ideas the company will prefer.

The other method is more formal and quantitative. First, create a scorecard by listing the four or five most important criteria for judging good ideas. Criteria might include how novel the idea is, how useful it is for your customer, how viable the idea is to implement, and perhaps how risky the idea is. For each criterion, use a rating scale of 1 to 4 where a 4 is highest and 1 is lowest. Don’t use odd number scales like 1 to 5 because people may have a tendency to overuse the middle of the scale and rate too many ideas a 3. You want to force their ratings to be on one side or the other.

Ask people to use the scorecard and rate each idea. Then, using a tool like Excel, put the data in a spreadsheet so you can calculate the averages of all raters. Add up the final score for each idea.

  • Novelty 4
  • Usefulness 3
  • Viability 3
  • Risk 2
  • Final Score 12

The ideas with the highest scores are your best ideas assuming you selected the right criteria. This approach takes more time, but it gives you more precision especially when evaluating a large pool of ideas.

True innovators generate great ideas, but they also use the wisdom of others to help evaluate them.

The Innovator’s Challenge: Fighting Back

Published date: May 19, 2014 в 3:00 am

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Even though companies want innovation, resistance to it is strong. After all, innovative ideas, by their very nature, are risky. They are likely to cause some form of change, and people are naturally fearful of change. A new disruptive innovation might be seen as a threat to someone’s job or their status in the organization. People worry that a highly innovative project might steal away some of their resources in terms of budget and manpower.

Even the leaders within your company may resist change. They might worry about the riskiness of a project and whether or not it’s going to work. No one wants to be responsible for a failed project.
Your customers sometimes resist innovative ideas and the change that goes along with it. A new product or service might cause them to have to change their habits. An innovative product might require special training or customer support. Your innovative idea might cause them to have to do things differently with their customers.
So how do you deal with resistance? First of all, don’t view resistance as a negative, as something that you have to overcome or defeat. Instead, embrace resistance as a potential benefit to your project. Use that resistance to stimulate healthy discussions and constructive feedback. By challenging your ideas, people are actually helping you strengthen them. They’re pointing out the negative aspects and soft spots in your idea. That’s a huge benefit to you, because now you know where you need to improve your idea. Without that resistance, you may never have known these issues.
The second big challenge you should expect as an innovator is competition for resources. Companies have to make choices on where to invest resources to create growth. Think of any company as a portfolio of potential projects. A company might invest in a new advertising campaign, or a new sales program, or perhaps a new technology, or the company might invest in your idea. One thing’s for sure – there’s never enough money to go around for everyone’s project.
So what can you do to earn your share of the budget? You need to understand that managers invest in projects the same way investors buy stocks in the stock market. They look at the track record of the people involved in the project and whether they’ve been successful in the past. But even more importantly, they look at the future potential of a project. What will this project produce today, and what is the pipeline of innovative ideas right behind the project to keep the machine moving?
Those teams or individuals that have a track record of success and the healthiest pipeline of new concepts are going to get the most money. What that means for you in practice is that you have to innovate continuously. Don’t put all your chips just on today’s project. You need to spend some of your time and resources generating new concepts, even if those concepts might be years away from getting investment dollars.
As you generate new ideas, you also need to make people aware of them. Create visual images of your new concepts, or build small prototypes. That helps bring your ideas to life. It gives you a way to show off your pipeline and the long term potential of your business unit.
Being an innovator is one of the most rewarding aspects of any job in any career field. After all, “The world leaders in innovation and creativity will also be the world leaders in everything else.”

The Myth of Serendipitous Innovation

Published date: May 12, 2014 в 3:00 am

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In 1891, a physical education teacher named James Naismith invented the game of basketball when he nailed two ordinary peach baskets to the wall of a gymnasium. His students loved the game. But, there was a problem. Every time a player shot the ball into the basket, somebody had to get up on a ladder and take it out. That wasted a lot of time and it ruined the flow of the game.

But then something happened. After many games, the bottoms of the peach baskets became so weak that they eventually broke off, allowing the basketball to fall straight through.
This simple serendipitous invention allowed the game to be played continuously without interruption, and it gave rise to a global billion-dollar industry we know today as professional basketball.
The game of basketball isn’t the only invention created through pure chance. Many successful products you see around you today are the result of serendipity. The Post-it note, velcro, penicillin, x-rays and even chocolate chip cookies were created by chance.
With so many successful products created through serendipity, it makes you wonder whether companies can rely on it to create breakthrough products. The answer is no. Serendipity, as a method of innovation, has a very poor track record. The number of serendipitous products is a tiny percentage of the total of all products. It just doesn’t yield nearly the amount of blockbuster products as you would think.
So why does it seem there are so many of them? That’s because serendipitous products are more memorable than others. We hear about them in the news media more often. Because of that, we recall more examples of serendipitous products than other inventions. So we’re fooled into thinking they must be occurring at a much higher rate. It just isn’t true.
Instead of having to rely on chance, learn a method that you can use proactively to create new products and services.
Let’s look back at our basketball example. What if James Naismith had used a thinking tool that guided him to remove the bottoms of the peach baskets right from the start? Had he done so, he would have seen the benefit immediately.
We’ll never know for sure. But, what would you rather rely on? Pure chance? Or would you prefer to have a method that leads you to these same inventions in a systematic way?
If you’re serious about innovation, I advise you to go with the odds, not the gods. While serendipitous products are fun to read about, don’t let them distract you from using a systematic approach that will increase your creative output.

How Patterns Boost Our Performance…Without Even Knowing It

Published date: May 5, 2014 в 4:59 am

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Humans are creatures of habits, and these habits can be analyzed and codified into rules that help us perform better. Many times, we’re not even aware of the habits that control our choices.

Conside the child’s game, Rock-Paper-Scissors. The odds of winning are one in three. At least, that’s what chance predicts. But people do not play randomly – they follow hidden patterns that you can predict to win more games than you should, a study has revealed.

At a rock-paper-scissors tournament at China’s Zhejiang University, scientists recruited 360 students, placed them in groups of six and had each of them run 300 rounds against their fellow group members. As an incentive, winners were paid for each individual victory.

When players won a round, they tended to repeat their winning rock, paper or scissors more often than would be expected at random (one in three). Losers, on the other hand, tended to switch to a different action. And they did so in order of the name of the game – moving from rock, to paper, to scissors. After losing with a rock, for example, a player was more likely to play paper in the next round than the “one in three” rule would predict.

Humans follow patterns in many other domains including creativity. Research by Dr. Jacob Goldenberg suggests that or thousands of years, inventors have embedded five simple patterns into their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are the “DNA” of products that can be extracted and applied to any product or service to create new-to-the-world innovations.
The five patterns are:

  • Subtraction: Innovative products and services tend to have had something removed, usually something that was previously thought to be essential to use the product or service. The original Sony Walkman had the recording function subtracted, defying all logic to the idea of a “recorder.” Even Sony’s chairman and inventor of the Walkman, Akio Morita, was surprised by the market’s enthusiastic response.
  • Task Unification: Innovative products and services tend to have had certain tasks brought together and “unified” within one component of the product or service, usually a component that was previously thought to be unrelated to that task. Crowdsourcing, for example, leverages large groups of people by tasking them to generate insights or tasks, sometimes without even realizing it.
  • Multiplication: Innovative products and services tend to have had a component copied but changed in some way, usually in a way that initially seemed unnecessary or redundant. Many innovations in cameras, including the basis of photography itself, are based on copying a component and then changing it. For example, a double flash when snapping a photo reduces the likelihood of “red-eye.”
  • Division: Innovative products and services tend to have had a component divided out of the product or service and placed back somewhere into the usage situation, usually in a way that initially seemed unproductive or unworkable. Dividing out the function of a refrigerator drawer and placing it somewhere else in the kitchen creates a cooling drawer.
  • Attribute Dependency: Innovative products and services tend to have had two attributes correlated with each other, usually attributes that previously seemed unrelated. As one attribute changes, another changes. Transition sunglasses, for example, get darker as the outside light gets brighter.

Using these patterns correctly relies on two key ideas. The first idea is that you have to re-train the way your brain thinks about problem solving. Most people think the way to innovate is by starting with a well-defined problem and then thinking of solutions. In our method, it is just the opposite. We start with an abstract, conceptual solution and then work back to the problem that it solves. Therefore, we have to learn how to reverse the usual way our brain works in innovation.

This process is called “Function Follows Form,” first reported in 1992 by psychologist Ronald Finke. He recognized that there are two directions of thinking: from the problem-to-the-solution and from the solution-to-the-problem. Finke discovered people are actually better at searching for benefits for given configurations (starting with a solution) than at finding the best configuration for a given benefit (starting with the problem).
The second key idea to using patterns is the starting point. It is an idea called The Closed World. We tend to be most surprised with those ideas “right under noses,” that are connected in some way to our current reality or view of the world. This is counterintuitive because most people think you need to get way outside their current domain to be innovative. Methods like brainstorming and SCAMPER use random stimulus to push you “outside the box” for new and inventive ideas. Just the opposite is true. The most surprising ideas (“Gee, I never would have thought of that!”) are right nearby.
We have a nickname for The Closed World…we call it Inside the Box.

The Subtraction Technique: Reframing Your Business Model

Published date: April 28, 2014 в 3:00 am

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I had just finished a talk on Systematic Inventive Thinking in which I had stressed the usefulness of the Subtraction technique. Just then, a group of seven men approached the stage. They introduced themselves as the management board of Standard Bank of South Africa. They liked the idea that innovation is something that can be learned and applied. They were especially interested in Subtraction. “Do you think it would help us with our problem?” asked one of the delegates.

I answered the same way I always do when asked this question: “I don’t know. But there is only one way to find out.” We found an empty meeting room in the conference hall and made ourselves comfortable. The executives explained their problem.
“We want to grow by acquiring other banks,” said one of the managers, who seemed to be the appointed spokesperson. “We agree about that. We just can’t seem to agree on the best approach. Some of us want to buy another bank in South Africa, while others like the idea of acquiring a bank in North America or Europe. How can we use this innovation method to resolve this problem?”
I thought about it for a minute. I had never faced this type of strategy problem before. I really didn’t know if Subtraction would work as well with business model innovation as it did with traditional product or service innovation. But I was willing to try.
So I jumped in. “Okay, let’s be true to the process and start from the top. The first step of Subtraction is to list the key components. What are the components of a bank?”
The directors looked around at one another. It was such a simple question that it seemed to take them off guard. “Staff. We have employees of many types.”
“Good. Let’s write down ‘staff.’ ” I picked up a marker and began making a list of bank components. “What else?” “Assets,” said one. “Liabilities!” chimed in another. “We have buildings, ATMs, locations—we call it PPE, for property, plant, and equipment.”
“Keep going.”
“We have systems, and, of course, we have customers. We also have a reputation—our brand.”
I wrote this on the whiteboard:
•    Staff
•    Assets
•    Liabilities
•    Property
•    Systems
•    Products and services
•    Customers
•    Brand
“Now let’s use Subtraction and remove one of the components, preferably an essential one.” I noticed some of the men smirking. I had gotten used to this reaction. And many times, using these techniques will create a product or service configuration that seems silly. In humor and joke telling, the human mind makes a connection between two unrelated themes to form the punch line. This causes people to laugh. But even in serious situations such as this one, actually applying a technique results in a chuckle or two. Two unrelated ideas regarding a bank were about to collide, and the men just couldn’t resist the temptation to laugh.
“Let’s subtract the staff !” said one of the senior members. He said it half-jokingly, but he was genuinely interested in where the thought process would lead.
“All right. Imagine that your bank has no employees. It has all the other components, just no staff. Now ask yourself: What bank could you buy that has the ideal labor force for the kind of bank that you are? Given your customer base, your brand reputation, products, and services, what bank out there has the perfect group of employees that fit well with the rest of your components?”
One of the executives said, “We could find an employee base that is more diverse, for example. Perhaps we want employees with a global perspective. We could acquire a bank with employees who would meld with our employees but give us a broader perspective.”
Just imagining their company without one of its essential components helped these senior executives gain a whole new perspective on how to solve their problem. It no longer mattered where the bank was located. Geography had nothing to do with it. Applying the Subtraction technique (with the replacement feature) on just one component created a more useful dialogue about acquisition targets. Seeing the problem in this new light made merging with another bank even more interesting.
I let the discussion go on for a while. “Now let’s try it again. Pick another component from the list—any one of them.”
“Brand. Let’s subtract the company’s brand.” No one was chuckling this time.
“Very good. You have all the other components of your bank, but no brand. Now, what bank could you acquire that has a brand reputation that is ideally suited for the rest of the components: your staff, customer base, and so on?” The men thought about it for a moment, each of them pondering the various banks that might fit this profile. They were silent, actively thinking about other components written on the whiteboard.
After a few minutes, the leader of the group shook my hand and thanked me. Politely, he asked me to leave the room. “We have some work to do,” he said.
Following that meeting in 2004, Standard Bank of South Africa went on to acquire banks in Argentina, Turkey, Russia, and Nigeria. Note that it did not actually get rid of its staff, brand, or any of the components with these acquisitions. The point of using Subtraction was to mentally imagine the bank without these components as a way to reframe the problem and see opportunities in new, creative ways.

It worked!

Inside versus Outside: The Story of the Inside the Box

Published date: April 20, 2014 в 5:25 am

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Go behind the scenes of “Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results”  with co-author, Drew Boyd, who shares insights about the writing of the book and its impact on the creative potential of organizations.

The book has been or will soon be published in the following languages: English/US, English/UK Commonwealth, Dutch, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Portuguese, Thai, Russian, German, and Turkish. See all book jacket versions here: http://www.pinterest.com/drewboyd/inside-the-box/.
 

The Division Technique: Cutting Innovation Down to Size

Published date: April 14, 2014 в 4:06 am

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You can frequently make groundbreaking innovations simply by dividing a product into “chunks” to create many smaller versions of it. These smaller versions still function like the original product, but their reduced size delivers benefits that users wouldn’t get with the larger, “parent” product. This is one of three approaches of the Division Technique called “Preserving Division.”

Les Paul used Preserving Division to produce his multitrack recording by taking a single piece of media—a tape—and dividing it into multiple smaller tracks that perform the same function as the original large piece of tape.

We see this all the time in the technology industry. For years, computer makers kept increasing the capacity of hard drives (the devices within PCs on which programs and data are stored). Then an engineer had a brilliant idea to use Preserving Division to create mini personal storage devices. Today many people won’t leave their desks without placing their “thumb” drives in their briefcase or pocket. These mini storage units are designed specifically for people who must carry electronic versions of documents with them but don’t want to be burdened with laptops or other computing devices. They simply transfer documents from their PCs to their thumb drives, and walk away from the computer.

Many food manufacturers use the Preserving Division technique to create more convenient versions of popular products. By taking a regular serving or portion of a product and dividing it into multiple smaller portions, manufacturers allow consumers to purchase food products in more convenient and cost-effective ways. Consumers buy only what they need instead of a larger amount. Recently, manufacturers have even used Preserving Division to help people curb their calorie intake by providing popular snacks in smaller, more diet-friendly packages. Kraft Foods’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese brand does this by offering individually wrapped single-serving-size portions of its flagship product for people to put in their brown-bag lunches or take to the office with a breakfast bagel.

The time-sharing arrangements that many hotels and condominiums offer provide more examples of Preserving Division. Under timesharing, a year of “ownership” of a property is divided into fifty-two smaller units of a week each. Each unit is then sold to a different owner, who has the right to live in the property for that week. Each smaller unit preserves the characteristics of the whole. Ownership has been divided over time.

Likewise, when you make payments on a loan, you are sending small amounts of money created by dividing the larger, principal amount of the loan. Like the time-sharing condos, the division is based on time.

When doctors treat cancer tumors with radiation therapy, they have to be sure to kill the cancer tissue without doing too much damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. How? They divide the total dose of radiation into smaller, less lethal doses and aim them at the tumor from many different angles. The smaller beams of high-energy X‑rays, divided in space, converge to hit the cancer cells. But the lighter dose of any one beam does not do enough damage to other tissue that it hits along the way.

To get the most out of the Division technique, you follow five basic steps:

1.  List the product’s or service’s internal components.

2.  Divide the product or service in one of three ways:

  • Functional (take a component and rearrange its location or when it appears).
  • Physical (cut the product or one of its components along any physical line and rearrange it).
  • Preserving (divide the product or service into smaller pieces, where each piece still possesses all the characteristics of the whole).

3.  Visualize the new (or changed) product or service.

4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge?

5. If you decide you have a new product or service that is indeed valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create this new product or perform this new service? Why or why not? Can you refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

Keep in mind that you don’t have to use all three forms of Division, but you boost your chance of scoring a breakthrough idea if you do.

Think Inside the Skyscraper: Innovations in Architecture

Published date: April 7, 2014 в 3:00 am

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Skyscrapers are amazing from any vantage point – near, far, or even inside. If you look closely, you’ll spot the patterns inherent in the techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking. Take a look at these five examples.

1. MULTIPLICATION: Architect Bruce Graham probably didn’t realize he was using Multiplication when he created the Sears Tower in Chicago (officially now called the Willis Tower). Inspired by a pack of cigarettes, he produced a collection of nine tubes, each of a different height. When attached to specially manufactured steel frames that lashed each tube to the others, the tubes created a building possessing significantly greater structural integrity than that of a single-tube building.

Graham’s thought process actively followed the Multiplication pattern, but he could have just as easily used the Division pattern from the last chapter. He could have taken the main element—a building—and physically divided it along the tall, vertical lines to create a building with multiple parts. We see this often when teaching the SIT method: two or more techniques can yield the same innovative idea. If Graham kept each of the vertical pieces identical in terms of height and function, we would consider this the Preserving version of Division. Each technique will get to the innovative idea. Whereas Division forces you to cut a component in one of three ways—functional, physical, or preserving—and then rearrange it in space or time, Multiplication forces you to duplicate a component and change it.

Elevator2. DIVISION: What is the first thing you do when you step into an elevator? For most people: push the button of the floor you are going to. Not so with a new breed of elevators manufactured by Schindler North America.  These elevators have the buttons on the outside, not inside. The buttons for selecting your floor are on each floor. Instead of just pushing a single up or down button to hail an elevator, you push the button for the floor you want as though you were inside.

The Division Template is the culprit here. In this innovation sighting, the elevator floor button panel was divided out and placed back into the system…outside the elevator cab. Very novel, useful, and surprising.

3. TASK UNIFICATION: The essence of Task Unification is assigning as additional job to an existing resource. In this example, game designers played Tetris on the side of a 29-story skyscraper in Philadelphia. The exhibition celebrated the 30th anniversary of Tetris, which Alexey Pajitnov created in the former Soviet Union and Henk Rogers brought to the rest of the world. The spectacle was a great example of video game marketing at its finest.

“It’s humongous,” Rogers said. “I love it. I’ve been playing around with a giant Tetris at Burning Man for the last seven years. This is an order of magnitude bigger.”

In the super-sized Tetris game, multiple players could go head-to-head in a battle that people on either side of the city could watch. Several thousand people came out to witness the event.

4. ATTRIBUTE DEPENDENCY: The essence of Attribute Dependency is “as one thing changes, another thing changes.” In this example, the view changes depending on the rotation of the floor of the building.

The Da Vinci Tower (also known as Dynamic Architecture Building) is a proposed 313 m (1,027 ft), 68-floor tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Each floor will be able to rotate independently. This will result in a constantly changing shape for the tower. Each floor will rotate a maximum of one full rotation in 90 minutes.  The entire tower will be powered by wind turbines and solar panels that will also provide electricity to five other buildings in the vicinity. The turbines will be located between each of the rotating floors and could generate up to 1,200,000 kilowatt-hours of energy.

5. SUBTRACTION: A skyscrapers puzzle requires determining the heights of a grid of buildings. Numbers at the edges of the grid tell the number of skyscrapers visible from that direction. Taller buildings block the view of all lower buildings behind them. Each row and column must have exactly one building of each height.

Think “subtraction” and you may just be able to solve this little riddle.

For a fascinating look at skyscrapers, check out The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper by Kate Ascher.

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