Last week I had the pleasure of attending my first ECRM conference. This is an AMAZING event that matches buyers with vendors in a one-on-one setting quite different from your usual 10×10, beg-for-time, hand-out-business-cards in front of a bowl of candy, trade show fiasco.

During the event, we were asked a very interesting question by two young (although they claimed they were each 103 years old. Seriously!) ladies, Thao and Amy, from Hyland’s Homeopathic. The question was “Name an innovative product or company that you’ve encountered in the past 60-90 days.” WOW, what a question! Being a self admitted “creative” group we lucked out by having them ask us at the very end of our session. We got a reprieve and were instructed that we had to have an answer by 10:00 AM the following morning and we weren’t allowed to say “Acorn Creative.” Shooot.

This got me to thinkin’ about what is it that makes a product “innovative”. Brand stuff, easy … differentiation, boldness, powerful … okay, got that. But what about “innovative”. Well, we weren’t allowed to say Acorn Creative but it begs the question “what makes Acorn Creative innovative”. To me, one obvious answer was the combination of high-end, design with Carl Jung’s concepts of psychological archetypes. The innovation is the mashing together of two previously unrelated ideas.

Immediately, several other examples popped into mind. My answer to Thao and Amy, the next morning, included:

* The mashing of kitchen appliances with livingroom and office devices — The LG refrigerator with embedded TV and Internet connectivity
* The collision of sticky notes and photographs — 3Ms post-it photo paper
and (my favorite)
* The combo of contractor’s latex caulk and spray cheese — DAPs “Easy Caulk”

Putting caulk into a spray cheese can … who woulda ever thunk it? Sure, it seems obvious to you now, but the first person to put those ideas together is a suuuuper genius. When DAP launched the product it was designed for everyone. Contractors, however, still like the control of the old tried-and-true caulking gun. Weekend warriors and housewives, on the other hand, LOVE the stuff.

To make your product or service innovative, what two ideas can YOU mash together?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 7:58 am and is filed under Idea Mashing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.