Innovation in Practice

Academic Focus: John Hauser and the MIT Team

This month's Academic Focus features Professor John Hauser and the highly-regarded team at MIT.  Perhaps no other university in the world stands for innovation as much as this one.  MIT is an innovation powerhouse because of the way the faculty looks at innovation through multiple lens and collaborative approaches.  MIT is a great blend of innovation research, technology research, and commercialization research.   

From his online biography:

The LAB: Innovating Software Applications with S.I.T. (August 2011)

Software runs much of our lives.  It runs everyday items like computers, automobiles, banking, telephones, and even kitchen appliances.  Software will affect more of our daily routines in the future. According to market researcher DataMonitor, the global software market will grow to $457 billion, an increase of 50.5% since 2008.

The problem with software is you cannot see it.  The term was coined originally as a prank to contrast the term, "hardware." Unlike hardware, software is intangible - it cannot be touched.  So how do you innovate software especially with a corporate innovation method like S.I.T.?  This method uses the components of the product or service as the starting point.  Companies sometimes struggle creating new applications because software seems too abstract.

The secret to using S.I.T. on software is this.  Don't innovate the software code; rather, use the innovation method on what the software does.  Apply the method to the products and processes that the software affects.  This will create new-to-the-world innovations.  Then, write the software code that implements these new applications. 

Here is an example with the software program, Quicken.  We start with a component list of a routine process within the software - creating an invoice.

The LAB: Innovating Facebook with Attribute Dependency (March 2011)

Facebook innovated to become the dominate social network with 600 million users in just six years.  What will it do for an encore?  More importantly, how will it continue to innovate?  For this month's LAB, we will apply the Attribute Dependency tool to demonstrate how Facebook might continue re-inventing itself.

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.  We take these virtual combinations and envision them in two ways.  If no dependency exists between the attributes, we create one.  If a dependency exists, we break it.  Using Function Follows Form, we envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.

Here are attributes of the Facebook experience:

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

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: