Five patterns to innovate existing products

With the following five steps you are able to make your team “think out of the box”. It is often not easy to create an environment where people can think about really disruptive or radical innovation. Mostly, focus groups or customers opt for incremental innovations. However, real innovations are discarded in the early stages of development or flop, if they make it to market. We now will elaborate a balance act between real innovation, but close enough to fall within a company’s existing positioning and capabilities.

This excercise starts with an existing product and its characteristics rather with customer needs or problems:

1. Beginn to listing the essential elements of a product, both physical components and attributes e.g. color, warranty etc.
2. Look at the products environment e.g. type of user, ambient, temperature etc.

Then put the following five innovation patterns into practice (elaborated by engineer Genrich Altshuller). But stay calm, this can sometimes seem ridiculous or even unrealistic. However, it is very important because it is exactly the kind of environment we need to improve creative thinking and actually think “out of the box”.

Substraction (Reduction)

When people want to innovate products, they opt to intuitively add new features to an existing product. However, in this case we try the complete opposite, because adding features will lead us to simple incremental improvements. But for substraction you take a different approach: Instead of trying to improve a product by adding components or attributes, you remove them, particularly those that seem desirable or even indispensable.

Example of Philips DVD player: 

Slimline DVD player with just a few buttons

Multiplication

This approach is completely different compared to substraction. Instead of taking away elements, you take one or more components of a product and copy it one or multiple times to the product. But you have to go beyond a mere quantitative change such as the extension of a bin in terms of volume.

Let’s take the exaple of Gilette multiplying its razor blades.

Division

In this approach we divide a product into its component parts, so you can have a different perspective on something that was an integrated whole. This can lead to find new ways of reconfiguring those parts in unanticipated ways. However, this division can take a number of forms:

functional division: product components with different functions are separated. For example old hifi with speakers and turntables integrated into one cabinet.

physical division: the product is cut along a physical line. Like the car radios where you can take away the front panel, thus reducing the likelihood of theft.

preserving division: the product is divided in such a way that each part preserves the characteristics of the whole. For example, a rug for children that is divided into small ruglets, which then can be put together or taken apart.

Task Unification

In this pattern we want to achieve an innovation by using the product in a new context or by assessing a new task to an existing element of the product or its environment. An example for this would be the defrosting filament of a car. Automakers realised that they can integrate the radio antenna into the component. Or the suitcase with wheels, which replaced the old luggage cart:

Attribute Depedency Change

This pattern involves the dependent relationship that exist between attributes of a product and attributes of its surrounding envirnoments This can be color of the product, the age of user, or the gender of user. You can innovate by trying to create new dependencies with unusual envirnomental aspects.

Let’s take a smart phone example. Sony created an innovation by considering the fact that smartphones are sometimes used under heavy conditions.

Jobs such as carpenters, construction worker or extrem athletes need phones that are shockproof and waterproof. Hence, Sony came up with the Xperia Z series.

Function Follows Form

The five pattersn seem really straightforward. However, putting them into practice requires experience. You always start with putting the product and its components and functionalities. You then try to apply as many patterns as possible. You should not waste your time with debates about which pattern you use or what does not work, what seems strange and what would not work. Mostly, simply putting the product into its components and applying the patterns can make you and your team think more freely and actually “think out of the box”. This will then lead to a more creative environment.

Choosing the right Tool

There are no hard and fast rules in general. However, when you have complex products for example, you start with substraction and look for features that are no longer necessary. When the objective is to cut costs try task unification or substraction. If you have a very simple product try to find features that can be mulpiplied and actually improve the usage of it.