This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
In a lot of ways, there’s really nothing new under the sun, and creativity is all about the remix. It’s all about the re-juxtaposition of ideas, of concepts, of experiences that formerly were never mashed up together. It helps sometimes to draw people out of the weeds and the trees to be able to really zoom out and see the forest, and that’s the best way to begin to remix, reframe, and repurpose in a creative way.
Think like a fashion designer
I love to help people understand the things that they can learn to innovate their businesses by thinking more like a fashion designer. Fashion is outstanding at looking retrospectively about what has been done and incorporate it in new ways. Fashion is also really good at delving into the street and into the elite. So fashion designers are notorious for hunting out the cool, underground subculture clubs, sometimes subcultures in the form of youth culture, and really understanding what’s on the pulse, on the margins, and on the fringes, but fashion’s also astutely aware that the groups that are buying what’s on runway tend to be the elite groups. So they’re really excellent at balancing out both.
An example of a non-fashion sector organization that thinks and acts very well like a fashion designer is Apple. For example, the iPhone. People lined up outside of an Apple store gives you that idea of that rockstar, mashup approach of putting together ideas and experiences into their product innovation that never had been done before. They’re basically building a frenzy of fans, and this is the tone and timber that fashion is also excellent at.
Use the SCAMPER method
One method that the fashion industry uses to be all about the remix and repurposing and mashup is something called the SCAMPER method. The S in SCAMPER stands for substitute. So this is about, “What can we replace that will really energize the ways we’ve always done business?” Electronic vehicles are an example of substitution. Instead of using petrol as the source of energy, we’re using electricity.
The C in SCAMPER stands for combine. So a lot of us, most of us probably, have a smartphone device in our pocket, in our bag, and that’s an example of a recombination – a combination of a landline phone and a computer – where there’s an integration of the two, and we now have both in one object and product.
The A in SCAMPER stands for adapt, and an adaptation can be a bit more incremental. So for example, Coca-Cola looked at the landscape of the beverage industry and realized that water, not soft drinks, not sugary soft drinks, are becoming much more palatable to the everyday consumer. So what did they do? They adapted by introducing Dasani water.
The M in SCAMPER stands for modify, and a great example of a modification comes from Nike. When most other footwear sneaker brands were looking at woven construction, Nike said, “What if we actually did an entire shoe that was based on a knitted construction?” And that totally shifted and modified the landscape of athletic footwear.
Now, the P in SCAMPER is all about putting something to a completely different use. So a company called Ubitricity looked at all of our lamp poles in a lot of our cities and said, “Hang on. That’s actually an opportunity to supply charging stations for our ever-present smartphones.”
The E in SCAMPER is about elimination. When is the last time you used a travel agent to book a trip? Websites and apps like Kayak have totally eliminated the need for a travel agent.
And finally, the R in SCAMPER stands for reverse, doing something in totally opposite order. An example that I love are un-conferences. Instead of a conference where you have a main speaker and the audiences are a bit passive, at an un-conference, it’s the audience members, the attendees, who generate the topics and who are the subject matter experts. They’ve totally reversed the ways we typically think about a convening and a conference.
Now that you’ve heard examples of the SCAMPER method, I’d love for you to try this out on a challenge or an opportunity that you and your team have been staring at for the past quarter or months or weeks.