Innovation in Practice

The LAB: Innovating a Service Delivery Model with S.I.T. (July 2010)

A common question about structured innovation is can it be used on services.  The answer is yes.  A service is the same as a product in many ways, and the approach to using an innovation method like S.I.T. is the same.  Let's consider a service example for this month's LAB.  Imagine your company was a leading uniform and apparel rental service.  You own a fleet of trucks and drivers as well as uniform design and fitting services.  Your company delivers custom fitted uniforms to the client's location, picks up worn uniforms for cleaning, inspection, and repair, and returns them on schedule.  In this highly competitive industry, the key to survival is to exceed customer expectations.  The key to growth, on the other hand, is innovation.  Let's use the Subtraction tool on this service to create new opportunities.

We start by listing the internal components of the service line:

1. uniforms (inventory)
2. fitting service
3. design service
4. fabric
5. trucks
6. drivers
7. billing
8. pick-up
9. delivery
10. cleaning
11. inspection
12. repair
13. tracking
14. contract
15. sales representative

We remove a component but keep all the others intact.  Working backwards from this hypothetical solution, we consider what benefits it delivers or potential problems it solves.  We try to consider possible benefits of the "virtual service" as is, without replacing the component with something else.  Here are some examples:

Marketing Innovation: The Extreme Effort Tool

How do you create the most innovative TV commercials in the world?  By using patterns embedded in other innovative commercials.  Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures.  Their latest book, "Cracking the Ad Code," defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them.

Here are the eight tools:
   1. Unification
   2. Activation
   3. Metaphor
   4. Subtraction
   5. Extreme Consequence
   6. Absurd Alternative
   7. Inversion
   8. Extreme Effort

Consider this example from Dairy Queen:

This commercial was created with the Extreme Effort tool.  It works by conveying the attractiveness of the product or service by showing the extreme effort one must go through to use it.  There are two versions: 1. what the customer must do to use the product, and 2. what the company must do to provide the product.  As with all eight tools, Extreme Effort yields commercials that are highly innovative and memorable.  This tool is particularly useful when your brand is well established and the category is well understood.  It is an easy way to promote your product or service in a general sense when there is nothing more specific to say.

Try this exercise.  Imagine you want to promote your blog site to attract new readers.  You want to use the Extreme Effort tool.  First, visualize three ways to show how current readers go to extreme efforts to read your blog.  You have to portray it in a way that is absurd and so exaggerated that the viewer knows you are being funny.  You don't want them thinking they really have to go to this effort to read it.  Otherwise you will scare them off.

Now visualize three ways to show potential readers the extreme effort you go to write and produce your blog, again with the intent of being somewhat silly and exaggerated to make this point in a memorable way: "I want you to read my blog so badly that I go to this <exaggerated> effort to bring  it to you each week.  

To be most effective, select the simplest one to understand.  For example, in the Dairy Queen ad, we see the mother on the hood of the car reaching out the Dairy Queen truck.  We instantly "get it."  There is nothing more that needs to be said or explained. 

Also, look for ways to create fusion between the exaggerated effort and the brand promise.  In the Dairy Queen example, the mom and dad are participating in the age-old kids game that their children were playing.  Dairy Queen is about having fun.  The ad fuses that idea with the parents acting like children and having fun thanks to Dairy Queen.  Clever.

The Role of Business Schools in Innovation

"Innovation is and will always be a major driver of business and societal success, and business schools are doing much to foster innovation worldwide. The opportunities to do more to support innovation are many and the potential to create value is high."

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) released a new report, Business Schools on an Innovation Mission.  The report addresses what is meant by innovation, describes how managerial talent contributes to innovation, and outlines ways business schools support innovation.

Business schools must focus more on specific skills that support innovation, reinvent curricula to be more integrative, and convene executive programs that create new ideas and networks. Business schools must promote interdisciplinary research and recognize that innovation can come from advances in the theory, practice, or teaching of management. "Through outreach activities, such as business plan competitions, student consulting projects, and business incubators, business schools’ activities contribute directly to innovation in the communities they serve."

The AACSB report recommends the following:

Innovation Sighting: Task Unification with Gifts

Task Unification is a hard working innovation tool.  Task Unification assigns an additional task to an existing resource or component of the product or service.  Here is a clever example from Springwise. It is a service  called "Itizen."  It allows you to physically tag a special item such as a gift or heirloom that links to a website where the collective history of that gift or heirloom is recorded and kept forever. 

For example, suppose your grandfather gives you an antique hammer that's been passed down through generations.  It was used for many significant projects, and your grandfather gives you a written history about it.  You use the hammer through your lifetime, recording special stories about it.  Then you give it to your son.  Imagine how your son might use that hammer through time.  He records his experience with the hammer so he can pass it to the next generation with the complete historical record.  The value of our worldly possessions increases as the collective history is recorded. The item has been given the additional "job" of telling its story (with a little help from Itizen).

Here is how it works:

Innovation Prosthetic

An innovation tool is a cognitive prosthetic that helps individuals and groups overcome their human limitations to innovate more capably.  Just as an artificial limb or hearing aid compensates and augments a missing or impaired part of the body, a thinking tool does the same - it compensates and augments for a variety of cognitive deficiencies in all humans.

Yet there is an aversion to using a structured tool to be creative:

• The Arts:  Musicians, poets, and graphic artists shun the idea of using a standard tool or template because it makes them appear less creative to their fans and the public.  But consider Paul McCartney who sold more albums in the U.S. than anyone.  In his biography, he confided:  "As usual, for these co-written things, John often had just the first verse, which was always enough:  it was the direction, it was the signpost and it was the inspiration for the whole song.  I hate the word but it was the template."  Listen carefully to artist, Jackson Pollock, describe his approach:

• The Sciences:  People in deep scientific fields such as pharmaceuticals and nano-technology are skeptical of thinking tools because it diminishes their sense of intellect and brainpower.  Given their heavy emphasis on research and discovery, this is not surprising.  They default to the Scientific Method.  But consider a rather successful scientist named Albert Einstein.  He used a thinking tool called mental simulation to discover the special theory of relativity.  He imagined traveling through space next to a beam of light:

• The Corporations:  High achievers resist the use of structured techniques because it makes them appear weak to their intra-firm rivals.  Executives prefer to use their intuition.  They trust it because it has gotten them far. But more executives are recognizing the value of educating their intuition by using patterns and thinking tools to augment their experience.  They use a prosthetic:

For practitioners, using an innovation prosthetic is a no brainer.