Innovation by "taking out"

This is a blog entry that was in the draft mode for more than 2 years!. I wanted to write about new innovations by not adding something new, but "taking out" what is already there, sighting the iPhone as the example . Today, this article from CNBC, Why The Best Ideas Have Something Missing triggered me to complete this post

Below is my earlier verbatim
Innovation in future technology products seem to have interesting pattern. A new product, or revolutionary technology is being developed by applying the "taking out" principle, principle # 2. When Apple introduced iPhone, what struck me was the new design, missing a very important element of basic cell phone we have seen since beginning, the key pad!!

In this article, highlighting successful innovation with "doing less" (I would still emphasize "taking out) with examples from companies around the world, and also shares the cognitive aspects of human being to get in to this thinking. While I couldn't find an immediate connection with the examples and the rest of the article quoted from Matthew E. May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing blog, what is striking here is the "break through thinking" by really "breaking" the things.

PIA - 25 Ideas

In the early days of our class we discussed about generating wild, creative ideas without wearing the judgment cap, naturally letting the wild ideas flow within a short period of time (exactly speaking about 3 mts). Here goes mine.. :)

- Self organizing household items. Including sofa, tables, chairs, book shelf, clothes

- Color changing car body paint - Driving down in snow, changes to black, depends on mood.
- A pedaled cycle below your table to exercise while you are at work, and also power my laptop
- What if we all could have have a replica sitting at the university premises and attending this course. Can I outsource my learning to someone?
- Tasting tablet. Eat any bland food with the taste tablet. So, take your pad thai tablet and bland noodles..
- A stock market for people to invest in their & other's emotions. So, everybody is happy...
- TV that follows you wherever you go.. How about TV with tyres fit, steering wheels. If I go to kitchen, the TV follows me, so that I don't miss that Cricket match..
- Perception filter. Filter the people perception about a situation
- Open top in the plane at 34K feet. Real star gazing is possible there
- Unlearning tool. How about an unlearning tool, so that I don't burden my mind with new knowledge
- Outsource my fat burning to some people in Ethiopia (Well, assume I have lot of fat..) Blessing in disguise..
- Creativity drug - Take a small dose of this, and there flows your creative juices
- Vegetable shops selling not vegetables, but help you grow the same at your house
- Open patents - Anybody can use it and make money
- Social networking for your pets
- Vertical travel. Don't take a flight to Hong Kong from NY. Go all the way up above the earth's gravitational force and stay there, and since earth is rotating, Hong Kong will be below after sometime, and you land there
- Computer that emits pure oxygen for your breath. You don't need an Oxygen parlor
- Freezing horn - To teach a lesson to the jay walkers in this part of the world.
- I stay still, wherever I'm supposed to go comes to me - Office, holiday spot, pub, restaurant...
- Bank that keeps your ideas. And they pay you interest for your ideas
- Selectively listening gadgets. You want to filter unwanted things and listen only what is interesting to you
- Fast forward meetings
- 1200 Sqft house on 5 foot. Build a tall pillar on the 5 foot, and construct house of top of that. Easy to say I can live right there on the Time square..Reality meltdown is ruled out..

PIA - Where do you feel most creative?

This is another discussion we have had during our course.

Environment plays a critical role in many people's creative thinking. Some of us get energized at the beach, while others prefer a comfy chair in a darkened room. To start our journey together, we would love to know what your ideal creative space looks like?

My answer

While I strongly agree the environment plays an important role in our creative thinking, it is a myth that creative thinking is a spark influenced by the environment. Having said that I get creative ideas when I think I need to be creative irrespective of the place, but I'm good at creative thinking while discussing with friends on the subject other than the business. I feel this is due to the nature of association I can make with my problem context and the discussion point which is completely irrelevant.

When I conduct the innovation workshop and facilitation, I like to keep the environment colorful by full of colored charts around, giving them gizmo to play, which intern makes things little creative.

Putting Ideas into Action - Attempt to define creativity

The first part of our class Putting Ideas into Actions, we started with some basic questions about the creativity and our definitions of creativity. The discussion forum is too big to summarize here, because the class was so fired up to give their perspectives. However, there are some interesting points I wanted to capture. Since I can not copy paste the discussion from others, I'm focusing on certain questions from them and my answers for that.

“If creativity is all about problem solving, then does the term "creative problem solving" not involve a redundancy in the sense that all problem solving is, by definition, creative?” What do you think?- A very interesting question that I really liked because I was reading about the cognitive journals few days before.

When I started a full time role to help people think creative, this is a dimension I tried to understand, and have read and researched little bit. Finally, the literature available out there slowly started to drift me in to another area of "Cognitive psychology".

It is said that our human brain is wired in such a way to look at problems as the "flight or fight". Even if the problem is so close to us that we need a solution, our conscious state of mind still want to fly away from there. In this dilemma, we generate solutions by putting least effort by pulling the mental model (a pattern of thinking) that is easily matching the criteria of "flight".These solutions are certainly not creative and can not be called as creative. However, the moment we start "fight" for solutions, we would start experimenting with different thinking patterns (mental models), involved exercising more neurons and generate creative solutions.

Summarizing, I think creative problem solving is a phase after we flush out our mind with the easily accessible solutions.

Putting Ideas to Action: Approach to "creative consciousness" in day to day life - Part 1

Creative consciousness - I don't know a phrase like this exists, and make any sense, but I found this to be catchy. :)

Ok, what I really want to talk about is, what are the creative ways we can tune our mind to have that consciousness for observing our surroundings; despite the fact that ~95% of our neuron activities (thinking) are related to the day to day problems, such as thinking about the report to be sent on a Friday evening, weekend plan to meet your friends, thinking about spending time on this creativity course etc?

My guess is that this course is really helping all of us to condition our mind to exercise the right part of our brain for creative solutions, problem identification, and asking questions etc. However, there are so many other aspects of our day to day life and thinking overrules the right brain thinking, and at times we may completely ignore something very important passing by us because we are not consciously thinking that "we need to observe", or "I need to ask a question".
I could probably carry a check list wherever I go and ask myself, "Look around you and identify 5 things you haven't seen before", or "Identify 10 customers purchasing what type of vegetables". This will work beautifully if you are doing an ethnography study, but not very well in your personal life taking your family out for a picnic, because this requires an effort in our mind, and we may not enjoy our picnic at all.

On the other hand, what if we have a "creative consciouseness" switch that I can simply turn it on before I go to that picnic, and then "somebody" else within me doing this job of asking the question, observing the surroundings? Since that somebody is my mind and as said above, requires effort to do that consciousness thinking, what can we do to make it effortless, more fun?

Making use of Twitter for idea generation

What I have started as "getting to know Twitter" few months back is now more than just that I have "got to know" ; with over 100 updates, few followers, I feel Twitter is an excellent platform for so many things, for me, something that I really love; idea generation. If you are someone like me really interested in generating wild ideas, asking weird questions and keep your creative thinking active and a positive frame of mind (generating ideas would keep you in the positive thinking frame,– this is not my theory, but study says -for more details on this, check out MIT Cognitive Neuro Journal), Twitter could be a sounding body for you. You could also be satisfying your subtle “ego” (by ego what I mean is that "itching" feeling that you are the only one “hearing” that idea) by “sharing” your ideas to somebody else by assuming at least 10% of your followers have read it.

However, we need to break some myths about the general consensus about ideas, such as the interpretation of an idea, value of an idea, environment etc.

Myth 1 – My idea(s) can not be shared to anyone that I don’t know or trust.

- Actually, you might end up starting a business if you simply share an idea to a group of people, most probably in the same wavelength, because your major followers are following you on Twitter due to the subject of interest. You could end up having someone building on top of your idea, asking questions, and connecting you to a venture capital. Even if someone simply copies an idea and do something own their own, be proud about that fact, it was “your idea”

Myth 2 – What if my idea is the best idea, and I share in a public forum, and the value of that idea is not enjoyed by me.

- Best ideas are generated by lazy people (according to my friend Bala), apart from that, if you generate an idea, and you consider it as the best idea, you would never generate another “better” idea. So, do consider tweeting an idea (read as sharing) is flushing out the current flow of ideas, so you generate another one.

Myth 3- The reason I call my idea is an idea, because I can interpret that very well, visualized that very well, and can talk about that very well. How do you expect me to share that in 140 characters for someone sitting somewhere and interpret the same way I do?

- If you could write your idea in 140 characters for you to understand it very well, consider majority of people out there could do the same thing.

- If others are not interpreting the way you had thought of that idea, consider that your idea has left a spark.

Ok, enough fundas. I’m not selling Twitter here, even you feel I do, Twitter is still not making money by you tweeting.

If you ask me this question, what is in it for me “tweeting” my ideas, well the answer is to cultivate a “creative consciousness” habit. I will explain my fundas of creative consciousness in the next post. So for now, start “Twinking” (I meant start thinking about tweeting J )

Putting Ideas Into Action - Role of creativity in problem definition

Over the course last few weeks I have learned how to think creative and generating creative solutions by delaying judgement, divergence thinking and the need for convergence thinking from the class I'm attedning, and posted this blog.

As said, it is very important to define the right problem before we move on to the creative thinking and idea generation (so do the delay in judgement, divergence & convergence etc). But, what is your experience of defining a problem?

Despite working as a person helping people innovate in a corporate environment, I often find it difficult to define a perceived problem to the actual problem. It is very hard to convert a problem I get on my hand from the people around me (even some of my own problem), and distilled down to the real root cause of that problem before move on to the ideation phase. I use some of the industry standard techniques like RCA, 5 Why's, Fish bone analysis, and some of the advanced concepts like problem explorer, Ideality thinking, contradiction etc. However, this is always a convergent process and usually tiring for people (I have found people do not enjoy this process very well)

How can we make the problem definition process itself a very creative process? Have you experimented anything, so that people enjoy defining a problem the same way they enjoy generating wild, creative solutions? Do you think it is important to even look at the creativity in the problem definition?

Putting Ideas Into Action...

This is the title of a new online course I’m attending from the Buffalo State University, NY. For the last 3 years or so, I was talking to Cyndi (Director of Distance Education) and see if I can attend one of their graduate or masters program, but never got materialized. Finally, thanks to Cyndi for inviting me for their first online course on creativity. I’m one among the 30 students from all over the world, understanding a very interesting part of creative problem solving, basic creativity steps, illustrated through very nice videos. Fellow students are from a diversified background, ranging from Art, to teachers, to managers to lawyers, and informative discussions, questions, exercise.

I have their permission to blog some of our discussions, blogs, question we raise, cases we discuss there to my readers, and I will try to pen them here. This course is a proof for me to believe Creativity can be taught!

Innovation facilitator, can you have the cake and eat it too?

As an innovation facilitator helping people innovate for some time, this question is probably a reality check for myself.

As an innovation facilitator you feel great about working with people using various tools and techniques to generate (great) ideas, reading and researching all over, chiseling the initial set of ideas, building on that, sticking with other, and finally having a list of ideas. End of Part 1. You have the cake now

You send out the list of ideas to the sponsor/owner, or whoever asked you to help him innovate, with the great pride, detailing every step, thought process, and there comes a great email - "Thank You for a wonderful job". - End of Part 2

You are back in your cubicle nation, toying with some of the ideas you had presented to them, and feel convinced they are great by comparing who else is doing similar things and found no one, and write emails to the owner what's going on with ideas we helped generating for him. Lot of emails To, and lot of emails FROM, CC'd to you. - End of Part 3

There comes an email with a detailed spread-sheet - With so excitement, you open that up and find someone working "close" with customer at the location from another high profile department, charging $xxx.00 for hour discussed about the ideas generated by the team and decided the following set of ideas to be implemented. With all the excitement you open the sheet, and learn what an idea our customer would have liked to have 5 years back being planned to be implemented now! And, what an ability to create mash-ups by picking what is relevant and easy to implement- End of Part 4

You say, “nevertheless, they are implementing something”, and keep that email aside, and going on with your life. There comes a call from another building, a lead developer, wanting to meet you to understand the idea. Developer explains the idea being implemented are interpreted by them "like this", and you say in your mind, what an "idea sir-ji", but this is not what you had thought of in the beginning. The lead developer also asks, "There are several other applications do the same thing, should we do something similar?" End of all the parts and rest is history.

Well, this isn't something you are unfamiliar if you are working with an organization, and doing the job as an innovation facilitator. I'm happy with the external innovation consultants that they don't get to know much about the outcome of their great effort which has been invoiced anyway.

Can they, innovation facilitators, still eat the cake without getting kicked out?

Dreaming the dream - Working for a dream company

We all have dreams; for a professional like me (factors to be considered - my age, passion), one such dream is to work for a dream company. There are few companies I always dream working for in the innovation space. To name some of them IDEO, ?Whatif! Innovation. While it may be difficult to make them consider people like me, I thought there is no harm in trying to get noticed by them. And I did for ?Whatif!, especially because couple of interesting factors.

1- No stupid page, and interface for filling data, educational details, work experience, and everything they would want me to fill but not even read, and also asking me to upload a CV with all that and more information about me.
2- Few questions they asked to understand the candidate better (I assume), but the kind of questions I really enjoy answering.

I thought I should post the questions and answers here for my readers if they would interpret them to understand me.. :)

Q. What is the best idea that you've ever made happen?

My Ans: Made happen = successfully implemented?
Actually nothing! I feel exhilarated generating plenty of ideas for any given situation, but unfortunate that most of them sound crazy for the people hearing me out. Then, I realized, it is better to make them generate the same crazy idea by helping them facilitate thinking using tools and techniques. Second, ideas that I have made it happen may not be the best. There is someone sitting in some corner of the world trying to think, or implementing more “ideal” state of my ideas. However, I can illustrate few ideas that I thought were best (best, because I was in love with those ideas, and helped the stakeholder implemented them winning in some aspects), but later realized there are better solutions in a different domain outside.

Q. If you had a £1m to start a business what would you do?
My Ans: Based on my observation, demographic trends, market data, and analysis, I would invest them (here in India) opening a mobile beauty spa chain (Spa here means beauty treatments). The spa business in India is growing big, but the players are still focusing on opening exclusive outlets in the up-market area of big cities, targeting the rich and super-rich consumers who are ready to spend. However, there is a huge base of middle class families within the city itself not venturing out to the up-market area, but depending on the local beautician, running their show in a converted one room within their house. Few other characteristics of these consumers are:
- Only an average of 2 such places are in the vicinity of 10 Sq Kilometer, makes many consumers (especially housewife) avoiding them.
- At least twice per week visit to a beauty spa for facials, hair trip etc
- Quick visit to a spa for certain occasions, and the best place is not available nearby.
A mobile spa should solve the problem by going to their place with well equipped amenities, well trained, using herbal compound for the customers. An average of 50 customers are expected in an area of 5 Sq Km, spending average of $ 20.00 per visit per day. Each big city could need at least 20 such units to satisfy the customer base.

Q. What brand would you love to get your hands on? What would you do?

My Ans: Major soft drinks (Coca Cola, Pepsi). The consumption of soft drink is considered bad for health, inviting criticism for exploiting water resources. (But, they make lot of money by selling carbonated drink, which means to me that the same guys criticizing are also the big time consumers). Over a period of time these companies have diversified their product portfolio to health drinks, fruit juices, and other similar non carbonated drinking products. They have already created a huge brand in the external super-system of their business, but there is an area not explored outside of their core business competence, potentially huge and appealing market to the people even criticizing them. I would like to take them through that, and give them enough pointers about the life cycle of a product -->service-->experience-->Transformation, and what they can do to move from one to other, and leveraging on their brands to make the new services or products a success.

Q. What keeps you fresh?

My Ans: Talking and thinking about the ideal customer functions. To simplify, thinking about future. (Technology, products, services, consumer behavior, trends…)

Q. What are you really passionate about?
My Ans: Working with a group of people like me to talk about new ideas, exploring places never thought about (many are wild ideas – as in how can we smell cheese while browsing an online food shopping site), creating connections with unrelated things to the context of relevance; work on tough problems with the stake holders and make them realize how creative are they in generating great solutions.

Q. If I was on a 12 hour flight with you what would I love about you? And what would irritate me?
My Ans: My stories and examples learning from unusual sources, such as biomimicry, about systematic innovation; talking about ugly user interfaces, (not just software or consumer appliances, but even the way the services were designed in the flight) micro and macro trends. I may irritate you by fast context switching without giving you any indication about that while talking.

Note: While I guess I was noticed by someone (at least), I couldn't make myself out of that cubicle.. :(