Посты с тэгом: systematic inventive thinking

Innovation Suite 2010 – New York City

Published date: October 3, 2010 в 2:54 pm

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SIT will be conducting its 5th innovation course in New York City from Nov 1-3, 2010.  This course is designed for middle management and above, but most anyone can benefit from the learning experience. Participants of previous courses were Presidents, Marketing VPs and Directors, R&D VPs and Directors, Innovation Teams, and Product Directors from both large multinationals and smaller organizations. You can register for it at https://www.sitsite.com/academy/.

Here are the goals of the course:

  • Be able to independently apply SIT innovation tools to your own business issues to arrive at solutions that you would not normally think of.
  • Learn how to develop a culture and practice of innovation in your organization utilizing only existing resources and structures, resulting in a less traumatic organizational change.
  • Begin to work on a relevant issue and arrive at some ideas through the 3-day workshop and the coaching hours.
  • Gain facilitation skills and receive support for conducting innovation mini-sessions in your organization.
  • Network with like-minded innovation lovers from a variety of companies, and learn how they approach innovation.
  • Be able to implement the knowledge acquired in the course upon your return to your company thanks to a structured follow-up program.

The course fee is $2,800 which includes course tuition; coaching hours; SIT materials including an internal “mini-session facilitation kit”; 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches and 1 dinner.  The course fee will be rebated back to you if your company orders a project from SIT by May 1st 2011.

Learn Innovation! Innovation Suite 2010

Published date: April 19, 2010 в 1:18 pm

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Here is an opportunity to learn  innovation directly from the people who taught me.  The course is called Innovation Suite 2010 and will be held in New York City from May 24-26, 2010.  You can register for it at https://www.sitsite.com/academy/.

Here are the goals of the course:

  • Be able to independently apply SIT innovation tools to your own business issues to arrive at solutions that you would not normally think of.
  • Learn how to develop a culture and practice of innovation in your organization utilizing only existing resources and structures, resulting in a less traumatic organizational change.
  • Begin to work on a relevant issue and arrive at some ideas through the 3-day workshop and the coaching hours.
  • Gain facilitation skills and receive support for conducting innovation mini-sessions in your organization.
  • Network with like-minded innovation lovers from a variety of companies, and learn how they approach innovation.
  • Be able to implement the knowledge acquired in the course upon your return to your company thanks to a structured follow-up program.

The course fee is $2,800 which includes course tuition; coaching hours; SIT materials including an internal “mini-session facilitation kit”; 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches and 1 dinner.  The course fee will be rebated back to you if your company orders a project from SIT by October 1st 2010.

The LAB: Innovating Your Wallet Using S.I.T. (December 2009)

Published date: December 7, 2009 в 2:00 am

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Innovation puts cash in your wallet.  But what about the wallet itself?  For this month’s LAB, we will apply the corporate innovation method, S.I.T., to create new and useful concepts for the wallet.

Wallets are the most personal items we own.  They carry our money, credit cards, identification,  licenses, photographs, and other memorabilia.  Your wallet says a lot about you.  As with food, we try to stuff more inside while staying thin.  Wallets have been around a long time.  Today, the wallet industry is a multi-billion dollar market fueled by new designs and innovation.

Here are six unique wallet concepts invented using the five templates in the S.I.T. method.  They were created by graduate students at the University of Cincinnati as part of their course requirements in “Applied Marketing Innovation.”

The LAB: Innovating Social Media with Task Unification (October 2009)

Published date: October 31, 2009 в 8:30 pm

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Embracing social media and the myriad of Web 2.0 tools is more challenging than just setting up a Facebook account or adding a “Follow Me on Twitter” link.  Organizations struggle with how to take advantage of the power of Web 2.0.  Where do you start?  How do you tie these new tools in with your current website?  How do you make sure your current constituents are happy while moving the organization to a more networked world?

For this month’s LAB, we will use the innovation template called Task Unification, one of five templates of the corporate innovation method called S.I.T..  To use Task Unification, we take a component of a product, service, system, etc, and we assign an additional “job” to it.  For this exercise involving Social Media, here is how it works.  Imagine your company has a large base of employees in the field.  For example, suppose your company has a large sales force or an extensive network of delivery or service people.  Consider the U.S. Postal Service, for example, with an army of postal workers and letter carriers at over 32,000 post
offices.  A key question for these organizations like the USPS is: how do we get more value out of this fixed asset?  Let’s use Task
Unification.

I start by visiting a site that inventories all the social web tools: GO2WEB20.NET.  I randomly pick an application from this list.  Then I assign the internal field resources to “use” this application to increase revenue/profits for the company.  Using our example of the postal service, I create this statement: “Postal delivery staff have the additional ‘job’ of using XXXX (web application) to increase USPS performance.” This is our Virtual Product in the S.I.T. method.

The key is to use the non-obvious applications for creating new, innovative services. You have to literally force yourself to imagine the corporate resource using the inherent aspects of the Web 2.0 application to create revenue or cut costs.  Here are examples I created using Task Unification:

The LAB: Innovating Health Care with S.I.T. (August 2009)

Published date: August 24, 2009 в 1:38 pm

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Health Care Reform, as the U.S. government sees it, promises lower costs, better access, and improved quality for all.  Let’s apply a structured innovation method to health care to see if we can achieve some of these goals.  For this month’s LAB, we will apply Systematic Inventive Thinking to the hospital discharge process.

Discharging patients from the hospital is a critical aspect of health care delivery.  It is a time of transition where one group of care givers stops treating the patient and another group starts.  The most frequent type of transition occurs when patients go from hospital to home, happening nearly 40 million times each year in the U.S.. Studies show that about 20 percent of discharged patients have an adverse event – a preventable emergency department visit or re-admission – within 30 days following hospitalization.  The discharge process is so important that a cottage industry is emerging around it.  Some  consultants, software products, best practices, training, and research studies focus just on discharging patients.

To use S.I.T., we start by listing the components of the service (process):

Innovate to Collaborate

Published date: July 26, 2009 в 5:59 pm

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People collaborate to innovate. But what about the other way around?  Could a structured innovation approach be used to bring people closer together?  In other words, collaboration becomes the endpoint and innovation becomes the means to that end?

Collaboration is where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals. Collaboration is seen as an essential element of change and group effectiveness.  People collaborate for a variety of reasons, including:

Innovation Sighting: Multiplication at Taylor Guitars

Published date: July 19, 2009 в 8:30 am

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Here is an example of the Multiplication Template, one of five in the corporate innovation method called S.I.T..  It is from the Taylor Guitars, one of the leading companies in the category and one of the most innovative.  The Multiplication Template makes copies of components but changes the copies in some way from the original.  Taylor has multiplied the pickguard of their electric guitar series, but changed the configuration with different styles of magnetic pickups (the part that translates the sound from the strings).  It is a clever idea because guitar owners can re-configure their guitar for different playing situations.  It helps Taylor Guitar extend their product reach into the aftermarket for guitar parts and maintain a more loyal following of customers.

 

The LAB: Innovating Shredded Wheat with S.I.T. (July 2009)

Published date: July 5, 2009 в 8:53 pm

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“We put the ‘NO’ in innovation!”  The good people at Post Cereal have a new twist on innovation…NOT innovating as a statement of the product’s ubiquity and staying power.  “Some things just weren’t meant to be innovated.”

How could I resist?  It was just too tempting to use systematic innovation on this simple product, especially in light of the perception that it should not be innovated.  Though the ad campaign is a spoof, I wonder just how much the people at Post really believe this.  What if shredded wheat could be innovated to create new growth potential for this 116 year old product?

Here is a brief history from Wikipedia:

Henry Perky invented shredded wheat cereal in 1893. The wheat is first cooked in water until its moisture content reaches about 50%. It is then tempered, allowing moisture to diffuse evenly into the grain. The grain then passes through a set of rollers with grooves in one side, yielding a web of shredded wheat strands. Many webs are stacked together, and this moist stack of strands is crimped at regular intervals to produce individual pieces of cereal with the strands attached at each end. These then go into an oven, where they are baked until their moisture content is reduced to 5%.

I’ll use all five templates of the Systematic Inventive Thinking method to see what new opportunities we can uncover.

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification at Airports

Published date: June 30, 2009 в 7:39 pm

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Placing advertisements on objects such as billboards and taxis is nothing new.  But here is a new twist using task unification.  It is one of five templates in the corporate innovation method called S.I.T.  Task Unification assigns an additional “job” to an existing resource.   Here is an example as reported in USA Today:

Innovation Suite 2009

Published date: June 23, 2009 в 2:22 pm

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Here is an opportunity to learn innovation from the same people who taught me.  The course is called Innovation Suite 2009, and will be held July 27-29, 2009 in Rochester, Minnesota.  For registration and more detailed information, please go to www.sitsite.com/2009innovationsuite.

Here are some excerpts about the course from the registration site:

Innovation Suite 2009 will help you successfully apply innovation to three critical levels in your company: individual, team, and organization-wide. Each day of this 3-day course focuses primarily on one level. We will take you step-by-step from the basic tools and principles of the SIT method through hands-on team innovation and company-wide sustainable processes.

Get our innovation model that has worked for 1000+ companies.

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