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Putting the NO in Innovation

Submitted by: Jack Hipple on Jun 24, 2009 at 12:21 am Tagged with: Innovation, standards Source: Innovation-TRIZ

PUTTING THE “NO” IN iNOvation

In the US, there is a new advertising sequence running for Nabisco Shredded Wheat™. This ad brags about the fact that the tried and true recipe for their cereal was not going to change and they were putting the “NO” in innovation (put up on a flip chart to emphasize!). With all the hype over the past few years about innovation being the savior of the business world, this gave me pause for thought. Here was a company bragging about how they were not going to innovate! And they were proud of it. Then I remembered the great fiasco of the first “new” Coke™. Someone in Atlanta headquarters decided that a decades old success story needed to be changed. This decision was either made by an internal marketing group or at least with minimum market research based only on taste. Millions of dollars were lost and much humble pie was eaten when the “old” Coke™ reappeared.

Though innovation may be a business imperative in a general sense, there are some areas and situations where we should tread lightly and seriously ask if our innovation thoughts make sense. Here are some:

1. The marker has an emotional attachment to a product or service that is not easily quantifiable. Shredded Wheat™ and Coke™ are two examples. What might be some others? Bushes Baked Beans recipe? Others?

2. Standards. I just returned from doing TRIZ and innovation workshops for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ annual meeting and they were celebrating 125 years of standards. How exciting was that?? What kind of standards, you ask? Well, how about thread screw angle? Research a long time ago figured out that the “optimum” (at the time) was a particular angle. What if every time you went down to the hardware store you had to specify which screw angle you wanted? And the corresponding nut screw angle as well? We should celebrate that we don’t have to do this! What we should be innovating is how to connect and join things without screws. Building codes are another example. Now there are differences in this area, but not in nearby geographic areas. How could a contractor do business if someone was “innovating” building codes every few months? What about the color of safety cones and clothing that we see? It’s bright orange. If someone had some hard data that said chartreuse was a much better color, how long would it take to change? How easy would it be to change octane rating standards in gasoline? There are many ASTM (American Society of Testing and Measurement) standards about how to measure things. Some of these actual lab procedures are very archaic, but that’s how it’s been done for a long time and if you want your product to be accepted by a new customer, they are going to ask you whether your new product passes that standard. If you say, “we have a better test”, you’re going to spend a lot of money proving this and doing both tests. Better to invest your efforts in getting on an ASTM testing committee and see what you can do about changing the test or creating an alternative one. We have standardized octane values in the automobile industry. While there is plenty of optimization in how to product a certain octane value with minimal cost hydrocarbon, it is unlikely that a change in the octane values themselves is worth pursuing.

3. “Tradition Standards”. By this I mean standards that exist for no particularly good reason now (the ones above had and still have good reasons). Take the QWERTY keyboard on typewriters. This was standardized on decades ago to minimize (not eliminate) the occasions when the metal connectors between the key and paper might bump into each other and jam the typewriter. When was the last time you saw connecting rods between your keypad keys and your screen? There are many more efficient ways to arrange keys on a key pad, but I would suggest that if there’s someone out there filing patents and inventing money in this that they’re wasting their time. Have you ever thought about why railroad rails are set apart the distance that they are? This governs the design and construction of railways, railroad cars, and the civil engineering that supports the rails. The distance is 4 feet, 8 ½ inches. Why isn’t it 5 feet? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English ex-patriots. Why did the English use this dimension? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways and that's the gage they used. Why did "they" use that gage then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jig and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Why? If they used any other spacing, the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. Who built these? The Romans! And this distance was for their war chariots. So the answer is that this specification derives from imperial Roman war chariot. Now this may seem like nonsense in hindsight, but can you imagine the practical reality of trying to “innovate” a new RR construction design, no matter how good it might be?

Now these cases of when not to innovate are rare, but we ignore them at our peril.