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Innovation QuickWin: Plus 3, Minus 3

This Innovation QuickWin is called "Plus 3, Minus 3" and it's a great tool to help you consider incremental innovations to your existing products or services.

For example, let's say we want to improve these headphones. I'm going to explore three things that I can add to them to create more value and three things that I can remove from them to create more value. 

The adding part is easy -- what can I add to them? I can put a GPS device in them, which will enable me to find these headphones if I lose them. I can also add a noise-canceling feature that would allow me to enjoy my music even better. I can also add a volume control onto these headphones so I can control them without having to deal with my phone. 

That's the easy part and that's normally when people stop. But there's also a lot of value in exploring what you can take away. So from these headphones, maybe I want to take away the cord so that it doesn't get tangled in my pocket. Maybe I want to take away the branding and allow people to create their own design on the headphones. And of course, I want to remove the headband simply because I don't want it to mess up my hair. 

For more tips like this, please visit our idea generation tools on futurethink.com.

By Rob Cordova on November 30, 2011 at 2:07pm |

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