Disciplined approach to Innovation / Tools for Innovation - Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT)

Disciplined approach to Innovation / Tools for Innovation

Last article we talked about finding the Innovation Sweet Spot as an approach to “Innovate on Demand”, as required in today’s environment. . 

How do we do this? We need ideas for which we need to “think”! Well, I wonder if any one of us remembers a teacher or a professor walking into our classroom and saying “Today I am going to teach how to think”.  Not really. We have never been formally taught how to “think”.  So without proper tools to do so, we may set out on a wild goose chase without reaching much success.

The Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) method provides us with such thinking tools. At the core of SIT process are five innovation patterns. These “templates of innovation” have emerged from historical analysis of product development trends. SIT research over the years indicates that most successful product innovations fit into at  least one of these five patterns. Indeed, we have found that the patterns can help predict the emergence of new products before the appearance of signals indicating market demand. The patterns, are therefore useful not just for categorizing new product ideas but also for generating them.

Let's look first at the simplest and perhaps  the  most surprising of the bunch

Subtraction: When developing new products , people intuitively tend to add features to the existing product. While this is a perfectly logical approach, it can result in those incremental improvements that actually have little favorable impact on a consumer's buying habits.  Applying Subtraction, we take the opposite approach. Instead of adding components or attributes, we subtract them, particularly those which seem desirable or even indispensable . Philips Consumer Electronics applied Subtraction on components of its DVD player which resulted in the award winning “Slime line Q series”. At the time, subtracting  the local display and all the control buttons from its DVD  seemed like too radical a notion, yet internal and external testing confirmed that most of the functions could be moved to graphical interface with the remote control.

Multiplication: This pattern represents a very different approach to innovation. Since we already intuitively add features to products, Multiplication let's us do it but under two conditions: 1) Make one or more copies of existing product elements 2) Alter those copies in some important way. The aim is to go beyond mere quantitative change. A classic example of this is Gillette's Double bladed razor. If it was simply adding an extra blade to provide more shaving surface, it would not have been an example of “Multiplication” as SIT defines it. But Gillette's adding of an extra blade set at a slightly different angle so that the first blade raises whiskers so that the second blade can cut them cleanly, does illustrate this pattern.

Division: By dividing an existing product , we can suddenly see something that was an "integrated whole" in an entirely different light. The change in perspective can lead to reconfiguring product components in unanticipated ways or even keep the parts separate in a manner that offers foreseen benefits. There are three types of Division: Functional, Physical, and Preserving divisions. Functional Division, when we divide a product according to its functional parts,is the source of numerous product innovations. The old HiFi with speakers and a turntable integrated in one cabinet has given way to modular speakers, tuners, CD & tape players that allow users to customise their sound systems. Car radios in which you can separate the front panel and operating controls from the rest of the unit allows car owners to remove the panel from their car when unoccupied, thus reducing the likelyhood of theft.

Task Unification: We can often realize significant product innovation when an additional task is assigned to an existing element of a product or its environment, thereby unifying two tasks in a single component. Basic rationale for this bundling of the task is “if something already exists, why not see if it can do  double duty.

Thomas Edison, the renowned inventor, lived in a house with a large front garden and an iron gate at the entrance. It is said that friends who came to visit were both astonished and annoyed to discover that they were forced to push hard to swing open the gate. Time and again, they complained to Thomas to fix the creaking, old gate and who kept promising to oil the hinges and spare his guests the trouble, but never delivered. It was only after his death, at a ripe old age, that the matter came to light: the gate had been connected to a pump, and each time it was opened, water was pumped into the inventor’s bathtub.

  

Attribute Dependency: This last pattern is about creating and dissolving dependencies between variables of a product. In Attribute Dependency we work with variables rather than components. A variable is something that has the potential to change values; they are easy to identify as those characteristics that can change within a product or component (e.g. color, size, material). Let's take Domino’s Pizza 30 Minute Guarantee as an example of Attribute Dependency.  Domino’s Pizza came out with a brilliant marketing idea a few years ago. They created a new promise – if the pizza doesn’t arrive within 30 minutes you get it for free. For the first time, a pizza delivery company created a new dependency between “speed of delivery” and “price”. This led to a very attractive promise for customers: you pay only if the pizza is delivered on time.

 These five patterns may look simple but applying them takes some practice. There are no hard and fast rules as to which tool should be used in a particular situation, but there are some guidelines. For example in case of highly complex products start with Subtraction, or when trying to control costs – best to use Task Unification and see how you can utilize your existing resources better. For further details or discussion on these patterns, feel free to contact the author. In the next and concluding article we will examine the necessary conditions for elegant innovations.