DON'T BE AFRAID TO INNOVATE - BE DIFFERENT Starting With A Solution. By Robin Grugal544 words3 December 2003Investor's Business DailyEnglish(c) 2003 Investor's Business Daily

IBD'S 10 SECRETS TO SUCCESS

8 Most original ideas aren't completely original. Plenty of inventions, large and small, have come from taking an idea that has worked in one context and seeing if it might work in another.

Take the $5 power toothbrush. That invention is actually the result of a twisted string of just such piggyback inventions. Its roots trace back to, of all things, those glowing light sticks kids love to carry around in the dark.

The story begins one Halloween night in 1987. Two mail carriers, Bill Schlotter and Tom Coleman, were passing out candy at Coleman's house when they noticed one child carrying a bright, green-glowing cyalume light stick. That sparked an idea. Why not mount a lollipop atop such a stick, allowing the light to shine through the candy, thus creating a fun effect?

They took their prototype to an annual inventors' show in Pittsburgh and got noticed by Cap Candy, now a division of Hasbro. The two men were quickly signed to a deal for the Glow Pop, which Cap later renamed the Lazer Pop.

A New Spin

That got Schlotter and Coleman thinking. If adding light to a lollypop stick can make licking more fun, why not try a motor? That led to their next invention - a motorized lollipop stick that spins the candy around as it sits on the tongue.

Kids ate up the idea. The Spin Pop was the first hit interactive candy since the Pez dispenser almost 50 years before. Over the next six years, 60 million of these gadgets were sold, despite the unheard of price of $2.99 a pop.

That Spin Pop became the inspiration for yet another invention. John Osher, who headed Cap Candy, left the company to look for new applications for this simple spinner motor. As the story goes, his entrepreneurial team, while scanning for ideas in the aisles of their local Wal-Mart, came upon electric toothbrushes from Sonicare and Interplak, costing more than $50 each. It immediately struck them. Why not create a $5 electric toothbrush using the Spin Pop technology?

Toothsome Idea

The result was the Spinbrush, now the top-selling toothbrush in the U.S., manual or motorized. In less than four years, Osher and his team turned a $1.5 million investment into a $475 million payout when Proctor & Gamble bought them out.

As these examples illustrate, it's often more helpful to start the innovation process not with a problem that needs solving, but with a solution, says Barry Nalebuff, a Yale School of Management professor and co-author of "Why Not?"

"It's about asking the question, "Where else would it work?' " he said. "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."

Sometimes, he adds, it's only after we've discovered a better way that we realize in retrospect there was a problem to be solved. It's a story that has played out time and again.