FutureVisions^SM

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Knowledge management is a process of codifying what an organization knows. If people have a problem, they can look at the firm's database to see what others have employed. In this way, knowledge management is a tool to help people find to their problems.

Try turning this around. You've come up with a great new solution. What other problems does it solve? Shouldn't there also be a database of questions that people want to have solved? Then if you have an answer to one problem, you can look through this data­base to see what other problems it might solve. Let's call this reverse exploration ignorance management. (*Okay, few people will want the title Chief Ignorance Officer.)

Asking questions is a different skill from answering them. Some people are better at solving problems than at finding good ques­tions to solve. We've been to many CEO conferences that begin by going around the table and asking participants to share their high priority problems. What is missing from most knowledge management databases is an opportunity for people to put these information demands into the mix. There is a supply of answers, but no way to present demand for information that isn't yet there.

It's natural for us to think of problem solving as a solution search, but we can also solve problems by undertaking a problem search-looking for problems to which we can apply particularly clever . And as we become more proficient at this way of thinking, it is often useful to toggle back and forth between the two perspectives. Sometimes we might start with a particular problem and search for , but then turn around and ask whether there are any existing that with some adjustment might already solve this problem.

It is not enough to know that you want to use a solution search or a problem search (or both). The issue in each case is where and how to look. In the case of solution searches, we've discussed WWCD and improved incentives. For problem searches, we find that the tools of translation and symmetry are particularly effective.

Where Else Would It Work?: Sometimes it isn't helpful to start the problem-solving process by identifying a problem. Sometimes the solution has to come first. Only after we've discovered a better way do we realize in retro­spect that there was a problem to be solved.

For example, no one starts by saying, "Kids really need a scooter that spins more easily." Instead, they might say, "The polycarbonate wheel has revolutionized roller skates and rolling luggage. Are there any other products that might be improved?" Voila! The Razor scooter. When we translate ideas that have worked in one context and modify them to bring them to another, we discover a solution to a heretofore unnoticed problem.

Translation often requires adaptation-not just brute arbitrage, but arbitrage with a twist. The translated solution needs to be well translated or blended to fit the context and institutions of the new setting.

Let's try another example. Frequent air travelers enjoy expedited check-in lines and preboarding at most airlines. Are there any other businesses that might offer a similar benefit. In Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel suggests that frequent grocery shoppers might be given expedited checkout. (The present practice of giving special treatment only to those who buy ten items or less seems particularly backward in this light.)

Or take Avis, which rents cars twenty-four-hours a day, starting virtually any time of the day (or night). What other products could be made available at any time? Anyone who's landed in Europe on an overnight flight can answer this question: hotel rooms. You arrive at 7:00 A.M. and want to shower and change, but it's six hours until check-in time.

Not that round-the-clock room check-in wouldn't be compli­cated. Coordinating room cleaning would be more challenging. And reservations would have to include a check-in time to ensure that a room would be available. But restaurants do this routinely, so why not hotels? Some airport hotels have begun offering this service. We think that some city center hotels should follow suit, perhaps designating one floor for this service. In short, the translation tool takes existing and searches for new applications.

What Goes Around Comes Around: Tom Coleman and Bill Schlotter, two postal delivery men, were inspired on Halloween night 1987. They saw a kid carrying one of those bright, green-glowing cyalume light sticks. What else could these light sticks be used for?

Have you considered glowing candy? If you mount a lollipop on top of one of these sticks, the light would shine through the candy, creating a weird and fun effect. (Is glow-in-the-dark bubble gum next?) Coleman and Schlotter sold their Glow Pop to Cap Candy. Their next innovation was an even bigger hit.

Licking a lollipop is so much work. To make that job easier, they developed the Spin Pop, a motorized lollipop holder that spins the candy around to make it ever so much easier to lick. (You might say this is a WWCD approach to the lollipop.)

Spin Pop was a wild success, the first hit candy holder since the Pez dispenser.10 Over the next six years, 60 million of these gadgets were sold. Yet, John Osher, who headed Cap Candy, felt that the Spin Pop had not even hit its full potential. After Hasbro acquired Cap Candy, Osher left to look for new problems that the simple spinner motor might lick.

This is where the real story begins. What other question does the Spin Pop answer? To give you a hint, think big. Think a half-billion dollars big. The entrepreneurial team led by John Osher had the answer. Now what was the question? Business Week described how the idea came about:

They can't remember who came up with the concept, but they know it came from their group walks through the aisles of their local WalMart, where they went for inspiration. They saw that electric toothbrushes, from Sonicare to Interplak, cost more than $2O and for that reason held a fraction of the overall toothbrush market. They reasoned: Why not create a $2 electric brush using the Spin Pop technology.

The result was the Spinbrush, now the top-selling U.S. tooth­brush-and that includes the old-fashioned manual ones, too. In a little under four years, Osher and his team turned a $1.5 million investment into a $475 million payout when Procter & Gamble bought them out. Their success was based on finding the right problem that their existing answer had already solved.

The Airline Version of Movies. A funny thing happened last summer when one of us (Ian) was flying to San Francisco. When the airline showed an edited version of Shallow Hal, Ian immedi­ately thought of his son, Henry. For months, seven-year-old Henry had been pining to see the movie, first when it was in theaters and then when it came out on video. But Henry's prudish parents con-sidered the movie a bit too crude for a seven-year-old.

It occurred to Ian that if he had bought Henry a ticket on this flight, he could finally have seen the airline version that had been, in the euphemistic phrase, "edited for content" so that the most problematic bits were cut. However, paying $350 for a round-trip ticket clearly was not a practical way to make Henry happy. Could someone translate the airline solution to the Shallow Hal problem to the ground?

There is a potentially big market for less explicit versions-and these versions are already being made for airlines and TV broad­cast. To our minds, the untapped demand for the less explicit air­line version suggests a business opportunity. And to and behold, several entrepreneurs have started supplying this missing product.

Some of the entrepreneurs will sell you edited VHS versions of movies. For example, Edit My Movies asks that you mail it a movie you already own. Then for twenty dollars per film and a four- to six-week wait, the company will send you a custom edit. There's even an editing service, Cleanflicks.com, targeted to Mormons.

But these editing services have serious disadvantages. They're expensive, slow, and quite possibly illegal. The Hollywood studios have a right to control "derivative" products, and these edited ver­sions may violate the copyright law.

An alternative approach is to facilitate the audiences' ability to edit the flick. And both Edit My Movies and CleanCut Cinema offer editing tools so that you can edit a VHS yourself. But what a hassle-that means you have to watch Shallow Hal twice so that you can watch it with your kid once! Ugh!

The most practical products facilitate different kinds of automated consumer editing. For example, TV Guardian screens the closed-captioned information for objectionable words and mutes the audio at appropriate moments. The product edits the actual closed-captioning, deleting objectionable words and substituting family-friendly content. This set-top box costs $130 (or $30 less if you're already a supporter of the Al Menconi Ministries). But this system, to be effective, has to be overly broad in its muting because closed-captioned information does not accurately pinpoint when an objectionable word is being spoken.

ClearPlay has developed the most sophisticated product on the market. The product takes advantage of the ability of DVDs to automatically skip ahead. ClearPlay members (for ten dollars per month) gain access to a library of ClearPlay Guides instructions that tell the DVD software to skip the particular scenes or parts of scenes that contribute to a film's PG-13 or R rating. The library contains several hundred guides for current releases and older films.

Voila! With ClearPlay, your kids can watch the airline version of Shallow Hal, and you don't have to book a cross-country flight. The only problems are that the ClearPlay Guides still might violate the copyright law (picky-picky), and it's still a bit expensive. All these editing products are great translations of the airline movie. But there's an even better translation that has yet to happen.

Who is best suited to provide the ClearPlay product? It's not Delta Airlines, the Mormon Church, or, for that matter, ClearPlay. It's the Hollywood studios themselves. While we can understand why Hollywood did not offer expurgated VHS versions of its films, there is no reason why DVDs can't be programmed to offer the airline version if the viewer so desires.

DVDs today regularly offer different languages, and it would be child's play to program the DVD to omit parts of scenes or substitute particular words. Indeed, the DVD could offer a flexi­ble filter that allowed parents to omit more or less material, depending on whether they were more put off by violence or sex (but just offering the airline version would solve 90 percent of the problem).

Hollywood would be doing itself a favor by expanding the market for its product. There would be no question of illegality. And consumers would get the ClearPlay service for a lower price. (By the way, we might also have reached the edited-DVD solution by asking WWCD. For example, Howard Hughes would pay for someone to edit the movie-this would have been particularly easy during the time that he owned RKO studios.)

Creativity requires spending time "doing nothing" - workaholism guarantees its death

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