ABSTRACT
This chapter will open with a brief general description of the “inside the box” approach to innovation, which is the basis for both the SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking) method and the homonymic company. From its inception in 1995, in Tel Aviv, the SIT method has been unique in its structured and disciplined approach to ideation and innovation. SIT stems from a method named TRIZ, originally developed in the former USSR, based on the observation that seemingly unrelated inventions actually share underlying common structures or patterns. These patterns, once identified, can be utilized to shorten and facilitate the generation of novel ideas and solutions. The SIT method has been developed to apply to a wide range of uses: develop new products, solve intractable problems, come up with novel forms of communication, rethink and restructure processes, come up with novel concepts for strategies, and more. Being highly structured and requiring discipline, the method is often more immediately appealing to engineers than the more common “outside the box” approaches, which are mostly related to Brainstorming and its variants. These characteristics also allow for fruitful collaboration on innovation among professionals of varying categories, cultures, and levels of hierarchy. SIT has had the opportunity, along the years, to work with companies in the chemical industry, on all the applications mentioned above. In the chapter, we will describe for clarity. several case studies based on our work with this industry, and also demonstrate, as thought-provoking mental exercises, how the method’s “thinking tools” can be applied to some of the pressing concerns of the composite business, throughout the entire value chain, beginning with breakthroughs in productivity of manufacturing processes, through novel product offerings that can play a key role in competing with aluminum, steel, and magnesium; all the way to strategies for launch, including novel ways of communicating to customers.
