Inside the Box

April 1, 2013
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. Agent: Jim Levine, the Levine Greenberg Agency.

May 1, 2013

Using a set of "systematic inventive thinking" (SIT) techniques, Boyd (marketing and innovation, Univ. of Cincinnati) and Goldenberg (marketing, Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) demonstrate ways for corporations to enhance productivity and develop innovation creatively. SIT are taught in workshops or classes and involve ways of thinking about product design and concepts without restrictions caused by specific problems. Other techniques include unifying tasks for which components are asked to do double duty, or attribute dependency where results are varied depending on specific conditions. Examples of how to implement the techniques exist throughout the book and range from laparoscopic surgical innovations to Captcha characters and new ways to build skyscrapers. Many books are written on the topic of stimulating creativity, but the practical examples provided here make Boyd and Goldenberg's advice stand out from the crowd. VERDICT A captivating and fun read that adds insight to product design. Recommended for all audiences.--Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.