The LAB: Innovating a Garage Door Opener (March 2009)
Teaching people how to innovate is rewarding. It empowers them. It unlocks their minds to believe that innovation can happen “on command.” People realize there is no excuse for not having enough ideas or being innovative once they have been trained.
This month’s LAB features the output of one of my students, Michael Sanders, in my class, “Applied Marketing Innovation.” For the final exam, students were assigned a product at random. They had three hours to apply all five templates in the Systematic Inventive Thinking method to come up with true new-to-the-world innovations. They were graded on how correctly they applied each template as well as the novelty of their inventions. Michael’s assignment: Garage Door Opener. Here is what he did.