Business leaders contend that the
ability to innovate is necessary for a company is to be successful over the long haul. However, when asked,
these leaders express dissatisfaction with the amount of innovation that their companies
experience. The question: How can people generate novel ideas and do so on
demand? Some suggest that to accomplish this it is necessary to think outside
the box. Now comes another suggestion—to think inside the box instead!
Individuals
become creative when they focus attention on the internal aspects of a
situation or a problem—when they constrain their options rather than broaden
them.
To generate
new-to-the-world ideas, try using these five techniques: (1) Subtraction
(Remove seemingly essential elements such as when you subtract the frame from a
pair of glasses, you have contact lenses), (2) Task Unification (bring together
unrelated tasks or functions such as creating a purpose for a problem as
Samsonite did when it redesigned the straps of back packs to provide a soothing
massage sensation), (3) Multiplication (copy and alter a component, such as
bifocal senses, two blade razors), (4) Division (separate the components of a
product or service and rearrange them such as printing your boarding pass at
home) , and (5) Attribute Dependency (Make the attributes of a product change
in response to changes in another attribute or in the surrounding environment
such as transition lens eyewear).
The
key to being consistently innovative is to create a new form for something
familiar and then to find a function it can perform. The most consequential
ideas are often right under our noses, connected in some way to our current
reality or views of the world.
The
more you practice creativity, the more skillful at it you become. Try approaching
it both ways—by thinking in and outside the box!
(See Drew Boyd and Jacob
Goldenberg, “Think Inside the Box,” The
Wall Street Journal, June 15-16, 2013, C1, C2)
