Inside the Box
The creative method that works for everyone
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Current business wisdom holds that to forge a powerfully original solution to problems, we must think outside the box. But, as Goldenberg and Boyd reveal, based on expertise and experience in both corporate and academic worlds, this is utterly wrong. It may seem counterintuitive - but faster, better and more original innovation and creativity comes from working inside your familiar world.
The newest and most inventive ideas are much closer than you think, and can be found by using five simple techniques - subtraction, task, unification, multiplication, division and attribute dependency. This strategy helped Philips use subtraction to create the slim-line DVD players we use today, while attribute dependency allowed Domino's Pizza to corner the market with their thirty-minute delivery promise.
These strategies can be used by anyone, from CEOs of multinational companies to the Chilean miners' rescue team and even leading jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, who actually restricts the range of his instrument to induce increased creativity. Intuitive, revelatory and easy-to-implement, these ideas will help you find the creative streak you never knew you had.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marketing executives and frustrated industrial designers will enjoy this expanded version of marketing professors Boyd and Goldenberg's engaging corporate presentation on "Systematic Inventive Thinking" (SIT): a set of problem-solving techniques that help companies "make creativity part of their cultures." There are intriguing ideas in this hybrid work, which reads like a business school case study and history of industrial design innovations like the minimalist DVD player or the iPod Shuffle. While the authors use systemic approaches to find unexpected answers, their conflation of creativity with cleverness betrays the faintly grandiose promise of systematizing creativity a process intended to improve efficiency and yield dramatic, and profitable, variations on product themes. Boyd and Goldenberg's definition of innovation is loose enough to allow them to lionize the 30-minute delivery guarantee of Domino's Pizza, while they fail to see that reorganizing surgical device instruction techniques for the sake of increased efficiency is hardly inventive.
