READING Directions You are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Think inside the box A Over the past decade, we have asked senior executives, on every continent and in every major industry, two key questions about innovation. The first: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is innovation to the success of your firm?” The second: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with the level of innovation in your firm?” Not surprisingly, they rate the importance of innovation very high: usually a 9 or 10. None disputes that innovation is the No.1 source of growth. Without fail, however, most senior executives give a low rating – below five – to their level of satisfaction with innovation. B How could business leaders rate innovation as so important yet feel so dissatisfied with their own organizations’ performance? Because what they really want to know is how: How do you actually generate novel ideas and do so consistently, on demand? The traditional view of creativity is that it is unstructured and doesn’t follow rules or patterns. Would-be innovators are told to “think outside the box,” “start with a problem and then brainstorm ideas for a solution,” “go wild making analogies to things that have nothing to do with your product or service.” C We advocate a radically different approach: thinking inside the proverbial box, not outside of it. People are at their most creative when they focus on the internal aspects of a situation or problem – and when they constrain their options rather than broaden them. By defining and then closing the boundaries of a particular creative challenge, most of us can be more consistently creative – and certainly more productive than we are when playing word-association games in front of flip charts or talking about grand abstractions at a company retreat. D Our method works by taking a product, concept, situation, service or process and breaking it into components or attributes. Using one of five techniques, innovators can manipulate the components to create new-to-the-world ideas that can then be put to valuable use. The five techniques are as follows. Subtraction: remove seemingly essential elements. E Consider a contact lens, an exercise bicycle, a package of powdered soup and an ATM. What do they have in common? They have all had something subtracted. Subtract the frame of a pair of glasses and you have the contact lens. Remove a bike’s rear wheel and you invent the exercise bicycle. Extract water from soup to make a package of powdered soup. Take the bank employee out of a cash transaction and you have an ATM. F Philips Electronics used subtraction to revolutionize the DVD market. Remember when a DVD player looked like a traditional, bulky (笨重的) VCR player, with a confusing array of buttons and displays on the front panel? The Philips team hit on the idea of removing these functions from the DVD player itself and placing them on a hand-held device. The result: a slimmer, cheaper, sleeker, and easier-to-use DVD machine – and a new design standard not just for DVD players but for the whole home-electronics market. Task unification bring together unrelated tasks or functions. G Consider the Captcha system, which you have probably experienced many times but without knowing its name. Captcha is what asks you to type words written in a bizarre, distorted script inside a box before you’re allowed to enter a website. Tickermaster, for instance, uses Captcha to prevent the automated programs of scalpers from immediately scooping up (把 ...... 抢购一空) the most desirable seats for events. H What most people don’t realize is that their Captcha answers serve two purposes – and here we get to task unification. In addition to proving to websites that they are not machines, the users of Captcha are deciphering (破译) difficult-to-read words from printed texts. The system’s inventor, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist names Luis von Ahn, realized that by feeding into Captcha words that computer scanners can’t read – especially the old fonts (字体) often found in older publications – users could help in the massive task of transforming printed content into digital form. Ordinary web surfers are helping to transcribe the equivalent of nearly 150,000 books a year. Multiplication: copy a component and then after it. I A range of products are the obvious result of multiplication, from bifocal lenses and double-sided tape to three-way light bulbs. But multiplication works for services as well. For the College Board, which designs, administers, and scores the SAT, maintaining the validity of its test is a big challenge: Colleges want an entrance exam that is consistent in what it measures from year to year. But how can the College Board gauge (评估) the difficulty of questions before students are actually scored on them? The answer: by including “experimental” questions in order to assess them for inclusion in future tests. These particular questions are not scored, but students have no way of knowing that, so they spend about 25 minutes of the 225-minute testing period answering zero-value questions. By using multiplication in this way, the College Board is able to offer a “new” test each year while ensuring that its quality matches that of previous tests. Division: separate the components of a product or service and rearrange them. J Consider central air-conditioning. The first air-conditioning units contained all the necessary components in a single box: thermostat, fan, cooling unit. But once the moter and fan of the cooling unit were separated from the other pieces, they could be placed somewhere else – like outside a house, thus reducing noise and heat and eliminating the need to block a window with a bulky integrated unit. K Johnson & Johnson used the technique of division to completely redesign the medical-sales training program of one of its business units. It divided the course content – anatomy (解剖学) , surgical procedures, and medical devices – into smaller parts and then rearranged it around relevant diseases and conditions. This approach dramatically reduced the amount of time needed to train a sales representative and made it much easier to roll out training on new products to its existing sales force. Attribute dependency: making the attributes of a product change in response to changes in another attribute or in the surrounding environment. L An excellent example of this technique is eyewear with transition lenses, which change from light to dark in the sunlight. So, too, are windshield wipers that speed up as it rains harder. Some instances of this technique have been around for so long that they no longer seem especially creative, but they once were. This is especially true with respect to pricing. Take, for example, loyalty programs that offer discounts to long-standing customers or discounts based on the number of friends that a customer recommends. Both work by making one variable dependent on another. M Using any one or all of these “inside the box” techniques involves retraining the way your brain thinks about problem solving. Most people think innovation starts with establishing a well-defined problem and then thinking of solutions. Our method is just the opposite: We take an abstract, conceptual solution and find a problem that it can solve. N The key to being consistently innovative is to create a new form for something familiar and then to find a function it can perform. That is why, when we first hear about a new idea, we often experience a sense of disappointment with ourselves: Gee, why didn’t I think of that? The most consequential ideas are often right under our noses, connected in some way to our current reality or view of the world. O Inventions can be extraordinary, but invention isn’t an extraordinary even or an activity for a specialized group. Nor is creativity reserved for the gifted and talented. It’s a skill that can be learned and mastered by anyone, if approached properly. Like so much else in life, the more it’s practiced, the more skilful at it we become. (1,336 words) _____ 1 “Experimental” questions in the SAT test are actually zero-value ones used to access their validity in future tests. _____ 2 Creativity is not an exclusive skill, but a skill each of us can master through enough practice. _____ 3 Many of us can be extremely creative by concentrating on the internal side of a problem and limiting our choices. _____ 4 Our method of innovation focuses on taking a notional solution and finding a problem that can be solved, which is different from the traditional way. _____ 5 There is agreement among senior executives that innovation is the key to business success. _____ 6 The most important ideas are, to some extent, associated with our world outlook. _____ 7 The Captcha system can be used to stop scalpers from getting good tickets easily for events. _____ 8 It is traditionally thought that creativity means following no rules or patterns. _____ 9 The technique used by Johnson & Johnson enabled it to spend less time training sales representatives and reduced the difficulty in starting training programs on new products. _____ 10 A contact lens and an ATM have both had things that were once thought necessary removed.
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