“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.”
– Albert Einstein
My eldest daughter and son-in-law joined us for a good old-fashioned mid-west family supper last night: meatloaf, baked potatoes, and green bean casserole.
Son-in-law commented about how much he loved green bean casserole, but they seldom made it, and daughter said that the problem was that the recipe made a large amount because it called for two cans of green beans and a can of cream of mushroom soup. So they would end up either making large dish of the casserole and dealing with a large amount of leftovers, or making half a recipe and figuring out what to do with half a can of cream of mushroom soup. Sure, you can stick the remaining soup into a storage container and stick it in the fridge or freezer, but how often do you need half a can of cream of mushroom soup? (I’m not the only one to ask this question. While thinking about this, I did a web search and found this topic discussed on a web forum: “Half a can of cream of mushroom soup – Now what?“)
I’m sure I was wearing my epiphany face, and the light bulb was floating above my head, because he obvious solution struck me so forcefully and suddenly: soup companies should start making half-cans of their “ingredient” soups—the “cream of” soups (mushroom, chicken, celery), tomato—so smaller households could more easily make half-size recipes.
Are you listening, Campbell’s?
What other packaging changes could help the small household (singles and couples) demographic?
A huge challenge for entrepreneurs and small businesses is not becoming a commodity. The nature of the small business gig is that there are other small businesses in the same niche you are, and unless you make a conscious effort to differentiate yourself, you run the risk of becoming just another dish of vanilla ice cream.
Differentiation requires innovation: new and creative products, services, or business models. Sometimes innovative ideas come to us by accident (those “Eureka!” moments), but you can’t sit around waiting for lightning to strike. You have to start building time and space into your life and business for innovation.
Here’s one way: Schedule a personal “FedEx Day.” Reserve a 24-hour block of time on your calendar to solve a nagging problem or create a new product or service for your business. Some keys for making this successful are:
Whatever you come up with at the end of those 24 hours will still need some work, but you’ll have created something that helps de-commodify your business. (The FedEx Day concept was created by the Australian software company Atlassian, and Daniel Pink says a few things about this concept in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.)
Wired Science shows how, quite often, solutions to problems already exist–in nature.
For example:
When faced with a problem, try looking for inspiration in nature.
Steve Jobs has said that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least one hundred times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’ve led, and how much you get it.”
I would add that it’s also about being sure you’re asking the right questions, solving the right problems.
Daniel Burrus illustrates this with a story about the pharmaceutical company Lilly.
A pharmaceutical company’s share price tends to be tied to promising new drugs in the pipeline. As a result, research is central to Lilly’s model and it retains thousands of PhD researchers to work on the molecular problems involved in bringing breakthrough pharmaceutical products to market.
The challenge: The company faced a dangerous deadline: a key patent would expire in August 2001, ending its exclusive patent protection on Prozac, a drug that was responsible for roughly one-third of annual sales.
A dramatic example of what might be at stake came in August 2000, when the company was stripped by a US court of almost three years of patent protection from generic competition. Lilly’s share price dropped by nearly one-third, erasing more than $36bn in its market capitalisation, in a single day.
In fact, it had already ramped up its research and development budget by 30 per cent in a quest to find the next blockbuster. But this was not enough to hire the additional 1,000 PhD researchers it estimated it would need to recapture the ground lost by declining Prozac revenues.
They came up with a great solution to this problem when they stopped asking themselves “How can we increase our R&D budget?” Lack of funding was not their real problem. Go see what they did.
…and maybe a good dose of sunlight can help defeat them.
Check out Gregg Fraley’s post about a menace to innovation, patent trolls.
“Innovation isn’t always about adding things. It’s asking yourself, what can I take away?” — Carmine Gallo, The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success
