Business Strategy 499 '10

Ask a friend to give you 3 quick suggestions for an improved alarm clock. he may come up with ideas like: introduce color effects or glow in the dark, have the clock emit a pleasant scent when it rings, create a larger and easier-to-push off-button, add soothing music to wake you up. What do all of these ideas have in common? They all involve adding something to the original. Addition is the easiest way to modify a product - it's so intuitive, in fact, that we usually don't stop to consider the alternatives. But is more always better? Do added features always mean added value for customers? We can also innovate products by actually subtracting the features
An example of such a product is ‘Exercise bikes’
It seems simple but its implementation can be tricky. Consider : exercise bike doesn't sound like a particularly innovative product today. But imagine yourself in a workshop at a leading bicycle manufacturer decades ago and someone coming up with this suggestion: "Maybe we should start selling bikes without wheels." There's a good chance that the would-be innovator would have ended his career right then and there, as his colleagues pointed out the central flaws in his "innovation":
1. most customers buy their bicycles because they want to go somewhere;
2. customers use their bicycles outdoors.
the trick is to anticipate the potential of a subtracted product, rather than only recognizing its flaws. Next time, I’ll come up with a new idea of an alarm clock inshAllah! J .. if u guys have some good ideas, lemme kn0w!!