Посты с тэгом: innovation method

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.

Task Unification: The Essence of Citizen Science

Published date: March 17, 2014 в 3:00 am

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Back in 2008, biology professor Gretchen LeBuhn at San Francisco State University was growing exceedingly concerned. Her study of bee populations in Napa Valley, California, showed that the number of wild specialist bees (bees that specialize in pollinating certain species of flowers) was declining rapidly. She speculated that the decline might be due to the extensive vineyards in the area—Napa Valley is the heart of California’s wine region—but she needed more data to be certain. She was especially worried about the implications on a national level. Was this happening everywhere?

The consequences of wild specialist bees disappearing would be quite severe. One of every three bites of food you put into your mouth exists due to “animal pollination,” or the movement of insects— particularly bees—between plants. Animal pollinators play a crucial role in both flowering plant reproduction and the production of fruits and vegetables. Most plants require the assistance of pollinators to produce seeds and fruit. About 80 percent of all flowering plants and more than three-quarters of staple crop plants such as corn and wheat that feed humankind rely on animal pollinators like bees.
Scientific studies had been suggesting for some time that both honey bee and native bee populations were declining. Scientists like LeBuhn feared this would harm pollination of garden plants, crops, and wild plants. If scientists knew more about bee behavior—if they could collect enough data about bees across multiple time zones and geographic locations—they could perhaps devise ways to conserve and increase the size of the bee population.
But how could you track bees on such a large scale? Gretchen had a limited research budget—just $15,000—scavenged from various organizations and grants by her department. Although she sent a student back to Napa Valley to perform additional measurements and bee counts, even this proved too expensive and time consuming due to the distance between the San Francisco–based campus and Napa Valley. Then Gretchen had an idea. She’d gotten to know several of the Napa vineyard owners well over the course of her study. Perhaps they would collect data for her? She asked, and they agreed to perform the relatively simple task. They agreed so readily, in fact, that Gretchen got excited. If a busy vineyard owner could count bees, anyone could. An avid gardener herself, she wondered if she could recruit homeowners with gardens to join her mission.
First, Gretchen needed to come up with a simple, standardized protocol for collecting bee data that anyone could follow. “Sunflowers,” she thought. Sunflowers are easy to grow, are native to the continental forty-eight United States, and, best of all, have a large and relatively flat surface area. It’s easy to see bees on the face of a sunflower. Gretchen tested the idea on some friends at the local nature conservatory. She gave them sunflower seeds, asked them to plant and water them, and, when the flowers bloomed, to count bees for an hour at a specific time each day. Everyone objected immediately. Although willing to help, her friends were not going to gaze at sunflowers for an hour at a stretch. But even after cutting the time to fifteen minutes, Gretchen heard nothing from her volunteers. No one reported any data. She finally got on the phone and began making calls. What she heard shocked her. “I didn’t call you back because I didn’t see any bees,” her friends told her.
Alarmed, Gretchen decided to push on with the experiment, which she dubbed the Great Sunflower Project. She created a website and found volunteers by emailing a small number of master gardener coordinators in a few southern states. They, in turn, broadcast her request to their networks. Within twenty-four hours, Gretchen had 500 volunteers. By the end of the week, she had 15,000 offers to help. Eventually the website crashed due to the overwhelming response.
Gretchen’s Task Unification innovation—assigning an internal task (data collection) to an external resource (home gardeners)—had launched with a bang. Today the Great Sunflower Project has more than 100,000 volunteers who count bees and report their findings online. Gretchen uses the data to map pollinators; pollinator services use it to determine where bees are thriving and where they need help. Gretchen kept the structure of the experiment simple. Each year on a specific day in mid-July or August, volunteers go out to their gardens and watch for bees. For fifteen minutes, they count the number and types of bees that land on their sunflowers. Volunteers enter their observations online. And then they’re done for another year. But however small a role any individual volunteer plays, each bit of information adds up to a very large and rich pool of research data. With so many tens of thousands of people contributing from all over the country, researchers have created national maps of wild specialist bee populations that are helping them determine when and where to focus conservation efforts.
“Simply by taking that fifteen-minute step, these citizen scientists make a contribution to saving bees,” LeBuhn said. “It’s remarkable having all these different people willing to participate, willing to help, and interested in making the world a better place.”

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

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

Innovation Sighting: Getting Your Competition to Promote You

Published date: February 24, 2014 в 3:00 am

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How do you get your competitor to promote your value proposition? By thinking inside the box, or, in this case, using the box.

DHL did just that in the highly competitive package delivery category. Shipping companies compete on the basis of speed, convenience, and reliability. So the race is on to prove to the market which company performs the best.

In this campaign, DHL spoofed its competitors like UPS to broadcast that it's faster. Can you guess how?

This clever campaign is an example of two of the five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking – Task Unification and Attribute Dependency.

The Task Unification Technique is defined as: the assignment of new tasks to an existing resource (i.e. any element of the product or its vicinity within the manufacturer’s control). In this example, the"competition" has been assigned the additional task of "promoting the DHL value proposition" about being faster.

To use Task Unification:
1. List all of the components, both internal and external, that are part of the Closed World of the product, service, or process.
2. Select a component from the list. Assign it an additional task. Consider ways to use each of the three Task Unification methods:

  • Choose an external component and use it to perform a task that the product already accomplishes
  • Choose an internal component and make it do something new or extra
  • Choose an internal component and make it do the function of an external component (effectively “stealing” the external component’s function)

3. If you decide that an idea is valuable, you move on to the next question: Is it feasible? Can you actually create this new product? Perform this new service? Why or why not? Is there any way to refine or adapt the idea to make it more viable?

The Attribute Dependency Technique is defined as: the creation/removal of symmetries or dependencies between existing product properties. As one thing changes, another thing changes. In this example, DHL created a dependency between "elapsed time" and the "visibility of the message."

To use Attribute Dependency, make two lists. The first is a list of internal attributes. The second is a list of external attributes – those factors that are not under your control, but that vary in the context of how the product or service is used. Then, create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis. The matrix creates combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate.  Take these virtual combinations and envision them in two ways. If no dependency exists between the attributes, create one. If a dependency exists, break it.  Using Function Follows Form, try to envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.

Have You Reached Your Creative Peak?

Published date: February 17, 2014 в 3:00 am

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A new study by Philip Hans Franses of the Erasmus School of Economics in the Netherlands may suggest the point in time when we reach our creative peak.
Franses examined the lifespans of 221 famous painters between 1800 and 2004, and estimated the year they created their most creative work based on the artist’s most expensive painting ever sold. “For each of these artists, the most expensive painting was identified and taken as an indicator of peak creativity,” Franses said in the study.
He found that the painters produced their most highly-valued work of art when they were an average of 41.92 years old. He also noted that the paintings were created when the artists had lived about 62% of their total lives. That percentage is remarkably close to the famous “Golden Ratio” of 61.8% found in art, nature, and even financial forecasting.
If the ratio is true for painters, could it transfer to other domains? Are we destined to hit our highest point of creativity at the two-thirds point of our lives? For example, if you live to 85, that means your creative peak will occur around 53 years of age.
It’s an intriguing notion. By age fifty-something, we have accumulated essentially all the training and formal education we will ever have. By that point, we have over 30 years of experience. But perhaps more importantly, we have reached an age in our lives when our destiny is more clear. As we approach retirement, we take things less seriously, we become more bold in our thinking, and, at last, we give ourselves permission to say what’s really on our minds. We are primed for a creative explosion.
The two thirds point is your life may be when you have the most energy, the most wisdom, and the most motivation to make your ultimate contribution to humanity. It’s time to let it all hang out, damn the torpedoes, and create that ultimate statement that says to the world, “You can go to hell. I was right all along!” A creativity orgasm of sorts.
No doubt there are domains where the Golden Ratio doesn’t hold. A rule of thumb for mathematicians, for example, suggests they must publish their most significant work before age thirty or they’ll never ascend to major status. For some professions, it might be the other way around. Priests, for example, may be at their best well after age 60.
The more vexing question is: what do I do once I’ve passed the two thirds point in my life? Is it “all downhill from here?” Can you cope with the idea that you will never be as creative as you were before?
I offer this advice. First, creativity is not the only activity that adds value and fulfillment to one’s life. Consider teaching, mentoring, or any activity that transfers your life’s accumulated wisdom to the next generation.
Second, never give up. Systematic methods of creativity can turn you into a “creativity machine” regardless of your age. Learn them, perfect them, and practice them avidly. In doing so, you will make the world a better place…and you may find a new creative peak.
 
(First appeared on Psychology Today, February 3, 2014)
 

Thinking Outside the Box: A Misguided Idea

Published date: February 3, 2014 в 3:00 am

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Although studying creativity is considered a legitimate scientific discipline nowadays, it is still a very young one. In the early 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford was one of the first academic researchers who dared to conduct a study of creativity. One of Guilford’s most famous studies was the nine-dot puzzle, presented with its solution here. He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. Today many people are familiar with this puzzle and its solution. In the 1970s, however, very few were even aware of its existence, even though it had been around for almost a century.

If you have tried solving this puzzle, you can confirm that your first attempts usually involve sketching lines inside the imaginary square. The correct solution, however, requires you to draw lines that extend beyond the area defined by the dots.

At the first stages, all the participants in Guilford’s original study censored their own thinking by limiting the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square (even those who eventually solved the puzzle). Even though they weren’t instructed to restrain themselves from considering such a solution, they were unable to “see” the white space beyond the square’s boundaries. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the illusory confinement and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots.

The symmetry, the beautiful simplicity of the solution, and the fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford and the readers of his books to leap to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. The idea went viral (via 1970s-era media and word of mouth, of course). Overnight, it seemed that creativity gurus everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box.

Management consultants in the 1970s and 1980s even used this puzzle when making sales pitches to prospective clients. Because the solution is, in hindsight, deceptively simple, clients tended to admit they should have thought of it themselves. Because they hadn’t, they were obviously not as creative or smart as they had previously thought, and needed to call in creative experts. Or so their consultants would have them believe.

The nine-dot puzzle and the phrase “thinking outside the box” became metaphors for creativity and spread like wildfire in marketing, management, psychology, the creative arts, engineering, and personal improvement circles. There seemed to be no end to the insights that could be offered under the banner of thinking outside the box. Speakers, trainers, training program developers, organizational consultants, and university professors all had much to say about the vast benefits of outside-the-box thinking. It was an appealing and apparently convincing message.

Indeed, the concept enjoyed such strong popularity and intuitive appeal that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research teams—Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg—ran another experiment using the same puzzle but a different research procedure.

Both teams followed the same protocol of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box bordering the dot array. In other words, the “trick” was revealed in advance. Would you like to guess the percentage of the participants in the second group who solved the puzzle correctly? Most people assume that 60 percent to 90 percent of the group given the clue would solve the puzzle easily. In fact, only a meager 25 percent did.

What’s more, in statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement over the subjects of Guilford’s original study is insignificant. In other words, the difference could easily be due to what statisticians call sampling error.

Let’s look a little more closely at these surprising results. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and explicit instructions to think outside the box did not help.

That this advice is useless when actually trying to solve a problem involving a real box should effectively have killed off the much widely disseminated—and therefore, much more dangerous—metaphor that out-of-the-box thinking spurs creativity. After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link  between thinking outside the box and creativity was a myth.

Of course, in real life you won’t find boxes. But you will find numerous situations where a creative breakthrough is staring you in the face. They are much more common than you probably think.

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

The Partial Subtraction Technique: Betty Crocker’s Egg

Published date: January 20, 2014 в 9:17 am

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In the 1950s, General Mills launched a line of cake mixes under the famous Betty Crocker brand. The cake mixes included all the dry ingredients in the package, plus milk and eggs in powdered form. All you needed was to add water, mix it all together, and stick the pan in the oven. For busy homemakers, it saved time and effort, and the recipe was virtually error free. General Mills had a sure winner on its hands.
Or so it thought. Despite the many benefits of the new product, it did not sell well. Even the iconic and trusted Betty Crocker brand could not convince homemakers to adopt the new product.
General Mills brought in a team of psychologists. Something unusual was going on. The company needed to make its next move very carefully if it was going to get this product off the ground.
Why were consumers resisting it? The short answer: guilt. The psychologists concluded that average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product.
General Mills had to act fast. Like most marketing-minded companies, it might have considered an advertising campaign to address the guilt issue head on, for example. Imagine a series of commercials explaining that saving time in the kitchen with instant cake mixes allowed housewives to do other valuable things for their families. The commercials would show how smart it was to use such an innovative product.
Against all marketing conventional wisdom, General Mills revised the product instead, making it less convenient. The housewife was charged with adding water and a real egg to the ingredients, creating the perception that the powdered egg had been subtracted. General Mills relaunched the new product with the slogan “Add an Egg.” Sales of Betty Crocker instant cake mix soared.
Why would such a simple thing have such a large effect? First, doing a little more work made women feel less guilty while still saving time. Also, the extra work meant that women had invested time and effort in the process, creating a sense of ownership. The simple act of replacing the powdered egg with a real egg made the creation of the cake more fulfilling and meaningful. You could even argue that an egg has connotations of life and birth, and that the housewife “gives birth” to her tasty creation. Okay, that may sound a bit far fetched. But you can’t argue that this new approach changed everything.
Betty Crocker’s egg teaches us a powerful lesson about consumer psychology. Many other companies sell goods and services that come prepackaged. They too might be able to innovate with the Subtraction technique by taking out a key component and adding back a little activity for the consumer.
 
From Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification and CAPTCHA

Published date: January 6, 2014 в 10:16 am

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You’ve experienced this dozens, if not hundreds, of times. Before being allowed to enter a website, you must type words written in a bizarre, distorted script inside a box.

Dr. Luis von Ahn, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, estimates that people decipher script like this more than 200 million times a day. He should know. He invented the system. Captcha, as it is called, protects websites by demanding that visitors take a simple test that humans can pass but computers cannot. Captcha, in fact, is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It requires website visitors to interpret the text correctly and type the right letters before they can enter the site.

Captcha is not without its flaws. Its words are generated randomly,and occasionally one pops up that can be easily misinterpreted. One woman trying to sign up for the Yahoo! email service was given the word WAIT. She took it literally. Only after staring at the unchanging screen for twenty minutes did she send a message to the Yahoo! help desk asking for assistance. It could have been worse: captcha sent another web user the word RESTART.

Despite these minor inconveniences, captcha has proven infinitely useful to website owners and managers who want to prevent computer generated spam or computer viruses from invading their domains.

Take Ticketmaster. It sells millions of tickets to sporting, music, and arts events. Ticket scalpers would love to get their hands on the best seats in the house for headline shows and resell them at much higher prices for hefty profits. If they could, they’d storm the Ticketmaster website and buy thousands of tickets for popular events the instant they were available. Although Ticketmaster tried to prevent abuse by limiting the number of tickets that any one customer could purchase at a time, scalpers found a way around the rules by writing computer programs capable of posing as real people, logging on to the website, and purchasing tickets. With an automated method for transacting thousands of sales a minute, scalpers were scoring big at the expense of both Ticketmaster and ordinary consumers, who ended up with less desirable seats or had to pay more for good ones.

Captcha changed all that. Only humans can interpret the distorted letters—and gain entrance to the Ticketmaster website. Yes, it takes some effort and time—about ten seconds—for you to decipher the captcha letters and type them. But Ticketmaster, as well as webmasters for hundreds of thousands of other websites, is infinitely grateful to von Ahn for his invention. Few web users begrudge the ten seconds when they learn about the benefits they reap in the form of enhanced security and fair prices on high-demand items such as concert tickets.

Few people other than industry insiders know that von Ahn has good reason to be grateful to them as well. It is an open secret in the online world that von Ahn harnesses the hundreds of millions of daily captcha test responses to achieve a goal—one arguably more useful to society than thwarting ticket scalpers: scanning and digitizing every book in the world.

Most people don’t realize it, but their captcha answers serve two purposes. In addition to proving to websites that they are not machines, users are deciphering difficult to-read words from old printed texts. When they type the words into the onscreen box, they are transforming printed content into digital form. It’s a perfect example of Task Unification, assigning a new task to an existing resource.

Digitizing old books is hard work even with today’s advanced scanning machines and powerful computers. Scanning accuracy remains poor, especially given the wide variety of fonts and poor print quality of many older publications. Von Ahn wrote a program, called reCaptcha, that feeds the words computer scanners can’t read into the captcha program, which, in turn, presents them to website visitors to crack. Major websites such as Yahoo! and Facebook use reCaptcha, and von Ahn gives the program away free to anyone who wants it.

Does it work? The results are, quite simply, astounding. Ordinary web surfers are helping to transcribe the equivalent of nearly 150,000 books a year—a job that would otherwise require 37,500 full-time workers. Among other accomplishments, reCaptcha helped digitize the complete printed archives of the New York Times dating back to 1851.

This is Task Unification at its best. Von Ahn came up with the idea after calculating how much human labor went into completing captcha tests. “I did a quick ‘backof- the-envelope’ estimate that people solve captchas about two hundred million times per day,” he explains. “So if it takes ten seconds to solve one captcha, that’s fifty thousand hours of work per day! I kept wondering what that work effort could be used for.”

Dr. von Ahn didn’t stop with reCaptcha. If he could, he says, he’d harvest more social, economic, and intellectual benefits from every moment in every life on the planet. “I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting human cycles that get wasted,” says von Ahn. And as more of humanity goes online, society has the potential to take advantage of what he calls “an extremely advanced, large-scale processing unit.”

The possibilities are tremendous, says von Ahn. For example, his latest venture, Duolingo, is an effort to translate the entire web into the world’s major languages. Today words on the web are written in hundreds of languages, but more than half of it is in English. That makes the web inaccessible to most people in the world, especially in fast developing regions such as China and Russia.

Once again, von Ahn’s solution involves Task Unification. A billion people worldwide are learning a foreign language. Millions of them use a computer. If they use Duolingo, people learn a foreign language while simultaneously translating text much as captcha and reCaptcha do: by assigning the additional job of translation to people while they are performing another task. Dr. von Ahn estimates that if one million people used Duolingo to learn Spanish, the entire Wikipedia could be translated into Spanish in just eighty hours.

Von Ahn is constantly thinking about how to “task-unify” the human race. “We’re still not thinking big enough,” he says. “But if we have that many people all doing some little part, we could do something insanely huge for humanity.”

How to Target Your Innovation

Published date: December 23, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Companies get better results from innovation by targeting initiatives at the right places. Here are six areas to focus on:

1. Your Value Drivers:  What activities across your business model create the most value? Is it operational or commercial? Who is involved and what departments make it happen? Use a systematic innovation method like S.I.T. to reinvent the value driver as well as the resources that deliver it.

SensoryEffects, a food and beverage ingredient manufacturer, delivers customized products that help food companies compete in a more diverse market. It is moving away from commodity production and focusing on its potential in downstream emulsification powders – where the value lies.

2. Your Core Competency: What skill sets create strategic assets? Strategic assets are those that deliver a sustainable competitive advantage. By re-inventing these skills and how they are sourced and maintained, companies sustain their advantage.

AkzoNobel, a maker of specialty paint, has a unique ability to color match to near perfection thanks to their skills in chemistry and spectroscopy. Applying innovation methods to the color matching process would uncover new skills or complementary skills to fortify its strategic advantage.

3. Your Potential Acquisitions: Growth through acquisition is expensive and risky. Acquisition stifles innovation and distracts management as it focuses on integration. The answer is to use innovation methods ahead of the deal-making to clarify and enhance valuation.

Google’s acquisition of Boston Dynamics gives it another foothold in robotics. By applying a systematic innovation method to the target's core products before the offer would uncover new or hidden sources of deal value. Pre-deal innovation either makes the deal more valuable or creates intellectual property to leverage against other suitors if the deal falls through.

4. Your Customer's Processes: How does your customer use your product or service? Observe and map out the detailed steps of what customers do when they use it. Use innovation methods to re-invent the way consumers seek and derive value. This will lead to new product concepts that address these new customer behaviors.

Johnson & Johnson’s medical device unit creates detailed heat maps of how surgeons perform complicated procedures. The maps reveal the amount of time for each step, the product used, the degree of difficulty and risk to the successful outcome. Innovation is targeted at the high difficulty/high risk aspects of the procedure where the most value will be created from breakthrough ideas.

5. Your Brand Reputation: What are you most known for in the industry and in the minds of your customer? Is it superior products, great service to your distributors, fabulous advertising, top people? Use innovation methods on how consumers perceive your brand to strengthen and reinforce brand loyalty.

L’Oreal’s professional products division leads its industry through servicing salons with product support, training, merchandising, and market insights. The use of structured innovation methods of how salons operate and service their customers would create new insights and product development opportunities. Innovating where L'Oreal is regarded as the best in the industry would reinforce its leadership status.

6. Your Strategic Capabilities: How does your company win in the marketplace? What is its "source of authority?" By innovating the way a company competes, it surprises and outmaneuvers the competition.

Barry Jaruzelski and Kevin Dehoff from Booz & Company describe three strategic orientations: Need Seekers, Market Readers and Technology Drivers.  “The most successful companies are those that focus on a particular, narrow set of common and distinct capabilities that enable them to better execute their chosen strategy.”  These strategic capabilities can be innovated using systematic methods of ideation.

 

*This article first appeard in Industy Week.

Innovation in Practice: Six Year Anniversary

Published date: December 16, 2013 в 3:00 am

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This month marks the six year anniversary of Innovation in Practice, and I want to thank my readers and supporters who follow it.

2013 was a special year for me. Jacob Goldenberg and I launched our book, Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (Simon & Schuster, June 2013). The book is nominated for Innovation Book of the Year in the U.K., and it is spreading throughout. We are very pleased with the outcome of this project as it is the first detailed description of Systematic Inventive Thinking, a creative process that works for everyone.

Writing has become a way of life for me. Not only do I write this blog every week, but I am also now a regular contributor to Psychology Today, Industry Week, and Coca-Cola Journey. I want to thank the editors at these sites for inviting me.

Teaching continues to be my number one passion. I just completed the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offered by the University of Cincinnati. The course, Innovation and Design Thinking, was the largest course ever taught at UC with over 2550 participants from 90 countries. I taught the SIT method along with my co-faculty, Jim Tappel who taught design thinking. It was fun experience.
I’ve become a teaching “author” at the online learning company, Lynda.com. I’ve produced a short course in facilitating creativity. Next month, I will be taping a full course called Business Innovation Fundamentals that teaches the SIT method.

My goal is to make this blog different from other innovation blogs and websites.  Instead of focusing on why innovation is important, I focus on how innovation happens.  The themes of this blog are:

  • Innovation can be learned like any other skill such as marketing, leadership, or playing the guitar.  To be an innovator, learn a method. Teach it to others.
  • Innovation must be linked to strategy.  Innovation for innovation’s sake doesn’t matter.  Innovation that is guided by strategy or helps guide strategy yields the most opportunity for corporate growth.
  • Innovation is a two-way phenomena. We can start with a problem and innovate solutions. Or we can generate hypothetical solutions and explore problems that they solve.  To be a great innovator, you need to be a two-way innovator.
  • The corporate perspective, where innovation is practiced day-to-day, is what must be understood and kept at the center of attention. This is where truth is separated from hype.

2014 will be a year of progress.  I plan to take this blog to the next level with a number of initiatives.  I plan to offer more resources for for teachers and professors who want to include the SIT method in their creativity courses.  I plan to highlight and recognize the practitioners who put SIT to work in their organizations.

I want to thank Jacob Goldenberg, Amnon Levav, Yoni Stern, and the entire team at SIT LLC. I thank Christie Nordhielm and Marta Dapena-Baron at Big Picture Partners, Bob Cialdini and the team at Influence at Work, Yury Boshyk at Global Executive Learning, the Washington Speakers Bureau, Jim Levine, Emilie D’Agostino, Shelley Bamburger, Deepak Mittal, the team at Innovation Excellence (Braden, Julie, Rowan), and my fellow faculty at the UC Lindner College of Business.

A special thanks to my family, especially my father who passed away earlier this year. He was a gentle gentleman, and I miss him.

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