What is Systematic Innovation?

Systematic Innovation (SI) is now seen by some as an emerging leading innovation approach for organisations who have recognised that they need to have an effective innovation process in order to support their corporate innovation management strategies. SI provides a set of tools and techniques that can be applied within a framework to both business and technical product development and in a manner that can be understood by the non specialist innovator.

The fundamentals of SI are evidence driven. They have been constructed through the analysis of millions of global patents in terms of their technical trends, their conflict resolution performance and their functionality. This data has been used to substantiate and help develop a wide variety of SI related techniques such as; Contradiction, Inventive Principles, Functionality, Ideality, S-Fields, Trends, Time and Space, Trimming and System Completeness. SI is a subject that is rapidly advancing as a methodology. For example SI is already addressing the needs of the business systems innovator and those interested in future market/consumer behaviour through incorporating and adapting a wide variety of high quality innovation research from a variety of sources (eg Blue Ocean, Spiral Dynamics, Generational Behaviour). It is because it is seen as an advancing subject that it is attracting so much attention.

How can your organisation benefit?

There are a growing number of large and small organisations who are using Systematic Innovation and are prepared to talk about how they have used the technique within the public domain In recent years the technique has found greater favour in large corporates that are technology driven, more recently though smaller organisations (SMEs) have also been using the technique.

Here are how some organisations have benefits from SI;

In 2003, 67 SI projects at Samsung electronics resulted in about $150 million of cost savings and 52 patent applications
Boeing has utilised SI in the design of a military 767 refueling tanker, inventing two new and complete solutions to a difficult technical problem, saving roughly 12 million dollars.
SI was used to develop Crest Whitestrips for Procter & Gamble (P&G). A SI concept, a thin flexible film saturated with whitener that selectively adhered to teeth, proved to be the answer. Whitestrips was P&G's most successful product launch ever, generating $130 million dollars of sales in the first year of operation while capturing over 45% of the whitening market

Our Expertise

Our specialist in Systematic Innovation (SI) is Adrian Cole. Adrian is also a Professor at Birmingham City University and a Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. He has been trained in SI by Darrell Mann one of the world’s leading authorities in the subject. Adrian regularly provides closed corporate workshops and courses in SI both in the UK and the rest of Europe. Being an academic he has close ties with the HE sector and has been instrumental in developing our online learning portal that currently includes a number of SI modules. You might come across Adrian presenting one of his many papers on SI and innovation, if so please say hello, he’ll be glad to meet with you.