"Structuring the Fuzz"
The Design of Ideation for
New Product Ideas
By Arthur VanGundy PhD
(Continued from page 5)
The Muddled Middle
The "Sensing and Feeling" and "Thinking and Knowing" stages prepare you to confront the "Muddled Middle." Questions during the Fuzzy Front End (FFE) should provide you with the confidence to move on to idea generation. If you were thorough with the FFE, concept generation should be less muddled. As educator and philosopher John Dewey once said, "A well-defined problem is a half-solved one."
One secret to successful new product idea generation is "stimuli."
Stimuli are words and phrases that help trigger ideas. They can be problem-related words or they can be the ideas of yourself or others. When you free associate, for example, you use each previous thought as a stimulus. Stimuli come in two varieties: related and unrelated. Related stimuli have some direct connection to a product, platform, consumer, or similar topics. Unrelated stimuli are used to force the mind away from the problem and trigger free associations which then can be related back to the problem as concepts. The focus of this talk is on related stimuli, so I will restrict myself to that category.
A major source of related stimuli are the answers to the questions during the Thinking and Knowing phase. Idea generation techniques use these stimuli in different combinations to spark ideas. (I’ve written about these techniques since the late 1970s and first spoke on them at PDMA in the early 1980s.)
Here are some examples of how to use stimuli to "set up" idea generation techniques.
I’ll use the problem, "How might we make homes safer with our products?"
1. Random word combinations. A simple way to use stimuli is to select random, two-word combinations from a category and use the word combination to stimulate ideas. For instance, you might list safety-related descriptors such as: air bag, circulate, ice, helmet, water, knife, stairs, wind, freeze, glass, wax, electricity, slippery, razor. Next, select two of the words and use them as triggers:
Wind-Glass: Sensor detects high winds and drops a screen or shutters to protect window glass
Glass-Wax: Special wax cleans glass and leaves barely-detectable haze to prevent walking into
2. Semantic Intuition. This method was developed in the early 1970s at the Battelle Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. It involves generating two lists of words, one relating to the product and the other to the end user. Choose one word from each list and use the combination for idea stimulation.
For the home safety problem, list words describing home safety. For instance: glass, lock, slippery, shock, fall, break, lighting, dark, toxic fire. Next, generate safety-related words describing consumers at home: cautious, insecure, sick, children, elderly, careless, disabled, burglar, dog, alarm, fear. Finally, generate ideas using two-word combinations:
Shock-Burglar: Consumer-activated electrical shock in door handles.
Fire-Children: Alarm senses fire and emits audible instructions to help children evacuate
3. What’s in a name? I developed this technique which is based on creating product names or slogans and then using them as idea stimuli. Here are some sample home safety names followed by potential ideas:
A Matter of Prevention
Accidental Security
Look Before You Leap
In Arms Way
Monitor This!
Use All Your Senses
The Protector
Safety to Go
An Alarming Development
Feudal Families
Dependables
Private Dector
Backup or Die
Dangerous L’Raisens
Electronic Insurance
Watch Your Step
All the Trappings
Radon Smadon
Gas No More
Secure Clearance
Speed Demon
Sounds in the Night
Stranger Encounters
Traveler’s Advisory
There’s Trouble Brewin’
Warming Warning
Leak Speak
Invisible Visibility
Mobile Warnings
A Weak Link
Leak Speak: An electronic monitor for gas and water pipe leaks.
Accidental Security: A home monitor that senses the status of all home safety systems and makes needed adjustments for smoke detectors, CO detectors, security systems, etc.
Private Detector: Clothing with built-in sensors for extreme variations in temperature (which then are adjusted), plus a locator-transmitter that automatically activates on command, or after a prescribed time. Useful for children, elderly, and the terminally absent-minded.
Summary and Conclusions
We all think in boxes when solving problems. Boxes provide structure and clarity and guide us in developing solutions. Sometimes, however, we need to move out of a box to create new perspectives. This involves moving to another box, not just "thinking outside the box." "Out of the Box" thinking is passe.
We actually think outside of "a" box whenever we shift our frame of reference from one box to another. Thus, thinking outside "the" box is not important since we always are in a box. Rather, it is important to decide in what box we can best resolve a particular problem.
Finding this box involves asking a series of questions. Such questions expand our thinking realms and force us to consider new viewpoints. As General George S. Patton used to say, "If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking." Thinking differently requires using questions to identify and then test all assumptions blocking fresh viewpoints. The more questions we ask, the better we understand a problem.
To gain more problem clarity, consider using a two-phase process of Sensing and Feeling and then Thinking and Knowing. Become aware of your problem and evaluate your emotional reactions to it. Emotions can block our ability to see with new eyes.
Next, use Thinking and Knowing to help analyze a problem by immersing yourself in it (Thinking) and then Knowing to redefine a problem within a box or to move to a new box. For within box thinking, ask, "Who?" "What?" "Where?" "When?" "How?" For box-to-box thinking, ask, "Why?" and "What else might it / we do?"
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Copyright 2000, Arthur B. VanGundy. All rights reserved
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