Yesterday I prepared an old-fashioned country style apple cake. Somewhere in the process I needed a piece of baking paper. I opened the drawer and took out the paper roll. And was stunned. What I found wasn’t a roll of paper, but a roll of pieces of paper – each piece nicely fitting onto an average oven plate. Tremendous! In the past I have always felt that the technology of baking paper packaging needed some re-engineering. “There must be more reliable means of tearing off the paper from roll”, I used to think. Typically aiming at somewhat square sized pieces, I usually ended up – due to the poor design of the tear-off mechanism – with some sort of ill-shaped polygon. With a couple of extra attempts and some folding of the paper I would eventually end up with something fitting the oven plate. I kept saying to myself, “someday, someone will come up with improved technology ensuring regular cuts every time.” How wrong I was!

Instead, some brillant innovative mind realized the optimal solution – paper rolls in packages with no cutting edge at all… The genious realized that the tearing off was not the core issue. Rather the problem with the poor design was only a problem because the paper wasn’t already cut. Solution: cut the paper and roll up the pieces. 99 out of 100 times you need the standard paper size anyway, so why bother with indiviual cuts? One size to rule them all…

My point is, that in the proces of being innovative you need to spend some energy on making sure that you have identified the problem. Otherwise you may end up with a solution, which at best is a matter of incremental innovation and limited user satisfaction, while stepping back before being creative might have led you on the path towards radical innovation and and entirely new user experience.

Now, there’s probably somebody out there shrugging, thinking; “come on, this type of roll has been available for years…” Well, admittedly I do not prepare apple cake on a regular basis. The cake was delicious, though.