Here I am not referring to the wonderful Founders, Family and Friends;-), but to an innovation concept that I found appropriate to pearltrees. Called “Function Follows Form” , it is used by major corporations – such as Unilever and P&G – to innovate.

In fact, there are two ways to innovate : either by listening to the customer and enhancing the product according to his requirements or by creating something radically different. The 3F method is used for the latter.

It consists in modifying the product in a way to create a completely new one, then try to use this new “form” and market it. As an illustration, here is an example : Let’s take a TV. What is the most important part of a TV : obviously the screen! Now, imagine we remove the Screen from the TV, what are we left with? : a screenless TV…ok what can we do with it? At first sight, “nothing”, right? But when you think about it..we can sell it to blind people, we can use it in the car, in the shower, …we can also plug into an existing screen such as a computer monitor, we can use it where we need one TV for multiple screens such as airports…and so on…if you think about it, you will find tons of applications. Not all of them will be great ideas but at least a couple could be breakthrough innovations. By changing the form -or creating a new one -you identify new function, and not the other way around (And by the way, this is how evolution works…random changes in the genetic code, and the best survive!).
The parallel I see with Pearltrees is that users will have new “Forms” they did not even think about. : the pearls and the trees.
Using them, they will discover “Functions” , and will therefore innovate.
In conclusion, I believe that Pearltrees will be an innovation tool, and that users will go beyond our imagination in the ways they will use it!

Karim

Filed under: Community, Marketing by Karim Ayari on September 25th, 2008