13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

TEMPERO:
THE PARTS ARE GREATER
THAN THE WHOLE

Iteration can play a prominent role in product or service innovation. It’s simply looking at the current product and reimagining the “next” version of that product. An MP3 player becomes an iPod. An analog camera becomes a digital camera. But what if you could purposely look to combine the “ingredients” of two or more products to create a whole new third product? This is a brainstorming tool I created called Tempero, the Latin word for combine.

When you look at items that have been created in the world by “accident,” like 3M Post-it Notes (i.e., sticky notes), the microwave, Super Glue, Teflon, and Velcro, it occurred to me that you could also innovate in a more purposeful way to the same effect. Using Tempero allows the students to “see” current products, break them down, and then try to create a product that solves an existing or emerging problem. Indeed, one of the most important innovations in the world was created by combining elements from two products. Gutenberg arrived at the invention of the printing press by seeing a new connection between two existing products: the wine press and the coin punch.

WHY COMBINATIONS DRIVE INNOVATION

In the ancient world, one of the great discoveries was that by combining two soft metals—copper and tin—you could create a strong alloy: bronze. For the sake of creativity and brainstorming, consider absurd combinations. Take a product and think of an absurd way to make it work. Trevor Baylis is the English inventor who conceived the clockwork radio. What a strange combination! Radios need electricity and the clockwork is a mechanical device. Surely batteries or electricity are better ways to power a radio. However, in the developing world batteries are expensive and electricity is unreliable. Baylis built a reliable radio that people could wind up by hand. It has transformed the availability of information in many of the poorest regions of the world.

Nearly every new idea is a synthesis of other ideas. So a great way to generate ideas is to force combinational possibilities. Get your team together and brainstorm how you could mix your products with those from wildly different sources. Take it to the extreme. How could you combine your key concept with random products, services, places, or personalities? The more bizarre the combination the more original the ideas that are triggered. Vitamins and water? Vitaminwater. I have some rules regarding how I use Tempero as a brainstorming tool:

Combine unlike ideas. Being able to connect and combine nonobvious ideas and objects is essential for innovation and a key part of the creative-thinking process. It allows you to reframe problems. It engages your imagination and thereby unlocks your innovation engine. Essentially, you need to be able to reorganize and rearrange the things you know and the resources you have in order to come up with brand-new ideas.

Talk to people in different industries. Just as Reese’s combined two great tastes that taste great together and the tennis shoe met the Rollerblade to become the “roller shoe,” look for inspiration in different industries and marketplaces. The cross-pollination of ideas will increase your creativity.

Build on existing ideas. Building on existing ideas and inventions is another way to foster innovation. In fact, when you ask entrepreneurs of all types where they get their inspiration, they can usually list others before them who set the stage for their work. Painters draw on the tools, techniques, and approaches of other artists; musicians build on the styles of other musicians they have heard; writers are influenced by literature they have read; and inventors build on the creations of others. Hollywood uses the idea of Tempero well. Just look at movies like Under Siege (Die Hard on a submarine) or Speed (Die Hard on a bus) or the book Vertical Run (Die Hard in a . . . skyscraper).

Hire or surround yourself with diverse people. Very innovative companies know how important this type of cross-pollination is to creativity in their businesses, and they make an effort to hire people with unusual skills, knowing that diversity of thinking will certainly influence the development of their products. You need to guarantee that all employees are bright and skilled at their jobs, but are also interested in other unrelated pursuits. Knowing this results in random conversations between employees in the elevator, at lunch, and in the hallways. Shared interests surface, and the web of people becomes even more intertwined. These unplanned conversations often lead to fascinating new ideas. This philosophy is ingrained at a company like Pixar.

PRODUCT INNOVATION NEEDS A MARKETPLACE

You can use Tempero as a brainstorming tool to think differently about possible solutions you have not yet imagined. But you cannot do this in isolation. As I often say to students and the entrepreneurs I mentor, “Ideas are great but marketplaces matter.” Every day, it seems, someone on the campus or in the community reaches out to me and asks me if he or she can pitch me his or her idea for a startup company. My response is always the same: Your idea may be great, but what can you tell me about the marketplace? Who is the target segment? How many people is that? How big is the overall marketplace in terms of potential customers and revenue? What are the trends impacting those customers? What is the current competition not doing well? What trends are impacting the marketplace? If you know your customer and marketplace really well, pitch me your idea.

Most entrepreneurs or product developers have it backward: idea, competition, marketplace, customer. How can the customer be last? As an entrepreneur or potential innovator, you need to prioritize your startup or new product thinking this way: idea, customer, marketplace, competition. That is, you come up with the idea, verify its “value” to the customer (by talking to at least 50 to 100 potential customers), size up the marketplace, and understand how to position your product or service relative to the competition. I wish more entrepreneurs and new product development people actually focused on large and existing customer segments, or large marketplaces, because if they do come up with a solution that a customer values, the large market is already there and can fuel them quickly and allow for rapid growth, even in a competitive industry. For example, Facebook did not invent social media (remember Friendster and MySpace?) and Apple did not invent MP3 players (thirty or so companies came before, though they are gone today). Facebook and Apple just leveraged large customer segments and growing marketplaces to quickly iterate or evolve an existing product or service. So, entrepreneurs and innovators, ideas are great but marketplaces matter.

An Innovative Combination Exercise

In class and with local entrepreneurs, I often point out that a current customer base can be used to expand your product offerings or even launch a whole new product or company. For example, if you notice your customers like your pens, would adding a USB storage device to your pen make your customers’ lives easier? Would it expand your marketplace?

Stop and ask yourself these questions about your current customer target segments:

How do your customers use your product(s)?

Do they use your products with other products?

What feature or new product attribute would solve another problem?

What similar products do they purchase?

What dissimilar products do they purchase?

Again, imagine you are a student in our classroom. Here’s your Tempero exercise:

“I just came from a meeting with the head of product development,” I say. “She wants us to come up with an innovative product idea that we could sell to existing customers but would solve another existing problem they currently have. You can only choose two products from this chart of nine total products to create the new product idea.” I show the class a chart that includes a smartphone, a bike, a Swiss army knife, a microwave, a refrigerator, wireless headphones, etc., then say, “Using the Tempero brainstorming tool, you have about forty-five minutes to solve the problem.”

First, the students, in groups of three to four, spend ten minutes analyzing the existing products, choosing two, and breaking them down into their core subcomponents.

Next, they spend ten to fifteen minutes identifying possible solutions based on combining various product ingredients.

Then they spend ten minutes narrowing it down to the best new product idea and the problem that it solves for the customer.

Then they spend ten minutes drawing the actual product, which is then presented in front of the class.

The product ideas they come up with are pretty amazing:

A mountain bike with GPS security, powered by the pedal power

A smartwatch that plays music wirelessly and has a 911 GPS panic button

A smartphone application that lets you “see” what’s inside your refrigerator using a remote camera

Headphones with a built-in hard drive to play music without another device

A microwave oven that has a toaster built into one side

A smartphone case with four Swiss army–like tools that emerge from the case

Over the last four years of teaching this course, there have been other ideas generated that were so good that they could have been turned into great products, but remember, Tempero is not a product innovation tool. It is a brainstorming tool to get your juices flowing inside of a framework structure that might spawn the idea that spawns the idea that spawns the innovative product.

WALK THE AISLES FOR YOUR INSPIRATION

This entrepreneur initially created baby product solutions and then moved into toys and candy—candy through the innovation of a “spinning” lollipop that became hugely successful. The spinning lollipop would actually serve to be the innovative force that would drive the creation of his next product and company. One of the things the entrepreneur believed in is finding and exploiting a gap in an existing market. One of the things he used to do was walk the store aisles looking for disparities or gaps in products being offered. One particular day, he stopped in front of a pretty common household product and noticed a very simple manual version of the product and then a high-end electric version of the product. These products were made by large consumer products companies that should have seen and exploited the gap. But big companies can get stuck on “analysis paralysis,” and sometimes they look too long for the perfect answers before they move. He quickly developed his product based on an earlier version of the “spinning” technology and created one of the first battery-operated toothbrushes selling in the $6 price division.

His goal was to get an early product on store shelves and then keep improving it from there. The first iteration of the product was a success right from the beginning, selling as many as 6,000 units a day in grocery stores, drugstores, and large retailers including Walmart and Target. He had taken for granted from the start that the SpinBrush would be copied quickly by other companies. As a result of that planning, he designed the company to work on a short product innovation cycle so it was able to respond very quickly to shifts in the market. As SpinBrush continued to gain market share, his little company began to attract the attention of big players in the market: Procter & Gamble (P&G), Colgate, Johnson & Johnson, to name a few. He was able to negotiate a deal with P&G about licensing the Crest brand for the SpinBrush. It became a huge success for P&G, helping revive the Crest brand, while the entrepreneur and his team pocketed $475 million.