Посты с тэгом: division technique

The Division Technique: Cut Your Challenges Down to Size

Published date: April 11, 2016 в 3:00 am

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The division technique works by dividing a product or its components functionally or physically and then rearranging them back into the product. Division is a powerful technique in the SIT Method because it forces you to break fixedness, especially structural fixedness. Division forces you to create configurations by rearranging components in ways you were not likely to have done on with on your own.
To apply the division technique, you start by listing the product’s internal components. Next, you divide the product or one of the components. There are three ways you can do this.
First is functionally, where you rearrange along some functional role. Look at this example. A water sport company took the controls of the speed boat and then functionally divided them off and placed them into the handle of the waterski tow rope. Now, the water skier controls the movements of the boat without having a separate driver.
Next is physically, where you are cutting the product or component along any physical line. Physical division is different than functional in that we are actually making a cut along some physical line of the product itself or component.
RadioTake a look at this car radio. In this example, the faceplate has been physically cut away from the main radio. When you leave your car, you grab the faceplate by pulling it away from the main radio, and taking it with you. That makes the main radio completely worthless so thieves won’t break into your car to steal it.
And the third type is called preserving. That means you divide the product into smaller versions of itself. Each smaller unit preserves the characteristics of the whole. A real simple example of this is what you see here. Cupcakes are essentially smaller versions of a normal sized cake. Cupcakes
Many food manufacturers use this technique by taking a normal full-size product and then cutting it down into smaller individual portions. These smaller units have just the right amount of food needed by the customer. This saves them money, the product is easier to store, there’s less wasted food, and it gives the manufacturer more ways to sell its products.
So once you’ve rearranged the components, this now becomes your virtual product. Using function follows form, you visualize the virtual product. Then you identify potential benefits and target markets. Finally, you modify and adapt the concept to improve it.
The division technique cuts your biggest challenges down to size so you can see new innovative opportunities.
 

Structural Fixedness: A Barrier to Creativity

Published date: October 19, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Imagine you’re driving down the highway, and you notice a flag waving in the distance. But something’s not right. The flag is upside down. You’d notice it right away because it’s not in its usual position that you have seen hundreds of times before.
We all have this tendency to notice things that are out of order. We have an innate sense of how things are structured, and it helps us make sense of the world around us. But this sense of structure is also a barrier to creativity. Here’s an example:
Take a look at this and tell me, which is the odd one out? Do you see it?
1) 17
2) 19
3) 13
If you’re like most people, you selected one of the three numbers you see here: 17, 19, or 13.
But I want you to step back from the problem and see it in a different light. Now, I want you to consider all the numbers on the page, including the ones on the left side – 1, 2 and 3.
Now, out of these six numbers, which one is the odd one out? You should have no difficulty seeing that the number 2 is the only even number on the page. It’s truly the odd one out.
But why do people have such a difficult time seeing the number 2 as part of the set of numbers? It’s because we all have another type of fixedness called structural fixedness. Like functional fixedness, it’s a cognitive bias. It blocks us from considering other structures than what we’re used to.
Look back at our list of numbers. We’re so used to seeing a list with numbers and parenthesis that we treat the numbers behind the parenthesis differently. We have this structure so fixed in our mind, we don’t consider other configurations.
Structural fixedness makes it hard to imagine different configurations of a product or service that could deliver new benefits to the marketplace. This type of fixedness is a big concern with services and processes, because they tend to happen in a fixed sequence, one step after another. Without a way to break fixedness, we’re prevented from seeing new creative options.
The good news is that you can break structural fixedness just like you do functional fixedness. You do it with one of the five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking.
One in particular, the Division Technique, is your tool of choice.
 
 
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Daylight Savings Time: Innovation Past Its Prime

Published date: March 9, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Daylight savings time is a great example of the Division Technique, one of five in the innovation method called SIT, short for Systematic Inventive Thinking. Division works by taking a component of a product or the product itself, then dividing it physically or functionally and rearranging it back into the system.
Daylight savings time is the result of taking the standard day, dividing it and shifting it to “appear” an hour off from standard time. It’s a great idea except for one problem – the benefit of this innovation is no longer realized. Daylight savings served a purpose early in its history, but is obsolete today. Here is a nice summary of the issues from Atlantic magazine:

As most people no doubt noticed given that they were robbed of an hour of sleep, Sunday marked the beginning of Daylight Saving Time in the United States, Canada, and several other countries and territories in North America. For morning people, Daylight Saving is a drag, depriving them of an hour of tranquil morning light. But for others, “spring forward” brings with it the promise of long, languid afternoons and warmer weather.
Like millions of other Americans who have slogged through an uncomfortably cold winter, I’m looking forward to the change of season. But Daylight Saving Time is an annual tradition whose time has passed. In contemporary society, it’s not only unnecessary: It’s also wasteful, cruel, and dangerous. And it’s long past time to bid it goodbye.
But does Daylight Saving Time actually make much of a difference? Evidence suggests that the answer is no. After the Australian government extended Daylight Saving Time by two months in 2000 in order to accommodate the Sydney Olympic Games, a study at UC Berkeley showed that the move failed to reduce electricity demand at all. More recently, a study of homes in Indiana—a state that adopted Daylight Saving Time only in 2006—showed that the savings from electricity use were negated, and then some, by additional use of air conditioning and heat.
The simple act of adjusting to the time change, however subtle, also has measurable consequences. Many people feel the effects of the “spring forward” for longer than a day; a study showed that Americans lose around 40 minutes of sleep on the Sunday night after the shift. This means more than just additional yawns on Monday: the resulting loss in productivity costs the economy an estimated $434 million a year.

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?

Innovation Sighting: The Division Technique in Vision Correcting Displays

Published date: September 15, 2014 в 7:33 am

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Innovation is anything that is new, useful, and surprising. “Surprising” means that the idea makes you slap your forehead and say, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?”

Here’s a great example. “Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new display technology that automatically corrects for vision defects — no glasses (or contact lenses) required.” It is a classic and clever example of the Divison Technique, one of the five techniques in Systematic Inventive Thinking.

From MIT News:

“The first spectacles were invented in the 13th century,” says Gordon Wetzstein, a research scientist at the Media Lab and one of the display’s co-creators. “Today, of course, we have contact lenses and surgery, but it’s all invasive in the sense that you either have to put something in your eye, wear something on your head, or undergo surgery. We have a different solution that basically puts the glasses on the display, rather than on your head. It will not be able to help you see the rest of the world more sharply, but today, we spend a huge portion of our time interacting with the digital world.”

In hindsight, it makes so much sense to “divide” the function of your glasses (vision correction) and place it somewhere else. For example, this technology might be applied to televisions, car windshields, windows in your home, or just about anything that you have to focus on.

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.
 

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.

The Multiplication Technique: Multiplying Your Problems Away

Published date: March 3, 2014 в 7:58 am

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One very effective, but nonintuitive way to use Multiplication is to multiply the most offending component in a problem and then change it so that it solves the problem. Yes, you actually make more of the very thing you are trying to discard. The key is to duplicate the nastiest component and imagine a scenario in which that copy could offer useful characteristics. Two researchers used this very technique and revolutionized the way we cope with dangerous insect species today.

Diseases transmitted by the tsetse fly kill more than 250,000 people every year. If you’re lucky enough not to die from its bite, you’re almost certain to contract sleeping sickness, a horrifying illness that causes victims’ brains to swell and a host of other painful, debilitating symptoms. People who contract this disease become confused and anxious. They lose physical coordination and experience severe disruptions in their sleep cycles. Sufferers are so fatigued that they typically sleep all day yet lie awake at night with insomnia. If left untreated, sleeping sickness causes victims to steadily deteriorate mentally until they lapse into comas and eventually die.

Tsetse flies have plagued Earth’s inhabitants for more than thirty- four million years. Yet a simple act of Multiplication can wipe them out of an entire region in less than a year.

The story begins in the 1930s. Two scientists at the US Department of Agriculture in Menard, Texas, Raymond Bushland and Edward Knipling, were seeking a way to eliminate the screwworms that were devastating cattle herds across the Midwest. They wanted to do this without resorting to spraying deadly chemicals on both milk and beef cows. By the early 1950s, these insects were costing American meat and dairy farmers $200 million annually. As with most of the techniques in this book, the problem would not have been solved without breaking some form of fixedness—in this case, Functional Fixedness. Until Bushland and Knipling joined forces, scientists’ ability to think creatively was stymied by the fixed idea that when male insects mate with female insects, they produce offspring. This meant that, from the point of view of eradicating the disease, mating was considered a purely negative phenomenon.

Bushland and Knipling turned this idea on its head. By multiplying the males, but—again, a critical aspect of Multiplication—changing a key characteristic in a nonobvious way, they transformed male screwworms into a deadly force against their own species. The solution was elegant and deceptively simple. Bushland and Knipling sterilized a batch of the male screwworms. They then released the sterile males into the US heartland. Naturally, when these screwworms mated, they produced no offspring, and the screwworm population steadily declined year after year. Thanks to Bushland and Knipling’s sterile insect technique, or S.I.T.—not to be confused with the SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking) method—the United States eliminated the screwworm completely by 1982. The same technique is now used to attack other insect species that threaten livestock, fruits, vegetables, and crops. As S.I.T. uses no chemicals, leaves no residues, and has no effect on nontarget species, it is considered extremely environmentally friendly.

But back to the tsetse flies. Residents of the African island of Zanzibar had suffered for centuries from the ravages of sleeping sickness. Scientists used S.I.T. to multiply a male tsetse fly times tens of thousands. They then changed these “copies” by radiating and sterilizing them, and introduced them to the general fly population. Because tsetse females can mate only once in their life cycle, the sterile males effectively prevented them from reproducing. As the older tsetse flies died off, successive generations became smaller and smaller until they disappeared entirely. In just months, the tsetse flies’ reign of terror was over.

Multiplying is just a fancy word for copying, you say? Is it creative, you wonder? In 1992, Bushland and Knipling were awarded the prestigious World Food Prize in recognition of their remarkable scientific achievement. Former US Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman called their research and the resulting sterile insect technique “the greatest entomological achievement of the twentieth century.”

From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

Marketing Innovation: The Metaphor Tool Using the Division Pattern

Published date: February 11, 2013 в 3:00 am

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The Metaphor is the most commonly used tool in marketing communications because it is a great way to attach meaning to a newly-launched product or brand. The Metaphor Tool takes a well-recognized and accepted cultural symbol and manipulates it to connect to the product, brand, or message.

The tool is one of eight patterns embedded in most innovative commercials.  Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues describe these simple, well-defined design structures in their book, "Cracking the Ad Code," and provide a step-by-step approach to using them.  The tools are:

   1. Unification
   2. Activation
   3. Metaphor
   4. Subtraction
   5. Extreme Consequence
   6. Absurd Alternative
   7. Inversion
   8. Extreme Effort

The trick is to attach a metaphor in a non-obvious, clever way.  The process is called fusion, and there are three versions:  Metaphor fused to Product/Brand, Metaphor fused to Message, and Metaphor fused to both the Product/Brand and Message.  Here is an example metaphor fused to the message:

What's clever about this commercial is
its use of the Division pattern, one of five that form the basis of the
product innovation method, Systematic Inventive Thinking. 
Division works by taking the product and/or one of its components and
dividing it physically, functionally, or in a way we call 'preserving'
where each portion maintains the characteristics of the whole.  By
dividing the news about her affair with her husband's best friend into
one word at a time, the wife softened the impact.  Banco Continental uses
this little story as a metaphor for breaking loan payments into smaller, more
manageable amounts.

To use the Metaphor Tool, start by
defining the message. Then create a list of symbols (objects, images, or
concepts) that are directly related to the message (a metaphor). Next
make a list of the product's components or components near the product
(Closed World). Finally, choose a symbol and a component and fuse them
together. Create various combinations of metaphoric symbols and
components to find candidates that have that element of surprise or
cleverness.

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