Einstein You're Not—and Don't Have to Be

by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres

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…taking a solution from one context and seeing if it might work in another.

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.

Only after we've discovered a better way do we realize in retrospect that there was a problem to be solved.

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 solutions 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.

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. [See Spin Pop patent application, number 5,209,692.11]

The entrepreneurial team led by John Osher had the answer. Now what was the question? BusinessWeek 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 Wal-Mart, where they went for inspiration. They saw that electric toothbrushes, from Sonicare to Interplak, cost more than $50 and for that reason held a fraction o f the overall toothbrush market. They reasoned: Why not create a $5 electric brush using the Spin Pop technology?12

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 considered 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 (editmymovies.com) 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. CleanCut Cinema (cleancutcinemas.com) does the same thing, for twelve bucks. 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 (TVGuardian.com) 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 (clearplay.com) 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.

The result was the Spinbrush, now the top-selling U.S. toothbrush.

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.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business School Press. Excerpted from Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small. Copyright 2003 Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres; all rights reserved. To order, please call (800) 988-0886.

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Barry Nalebuff is Milton Steinbach Professor of Economics at Yale School of Management.

Ian Ayres is William K. Townsend Professor of Law at Yale Law School.