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Putting Innovation to Sleep: Once Upon a Mattress
By Shlomo Maital
Here are two case studies about innovation related to mattresses, as related by my friend and colleague Arie R.
* A small Israeli mattress company had a miniscule market share. Then, an advertising company employee looking for ideas for copy spoke with a line worker at the company, and discovered that after receiving complaints from customers about back pain, the company was putting a piece of extra-firm foam into the mattress at the area of the lower back. This became the focus of an ad and marketing campaign, touting the “Healthful Center” (the center of the mattress that supports the lower back and therefore contributes to our health and wellbeing). At one stroke, this campaign shifted the focus in the mattress business from “comfortable sleep” to “healthful sleep” – from comfort, to health and healthy backs and straight spines. The company became a market leader. Competitors first ignored the “healthful center”, then copied it. But in copying it, they verified and validated the very idea, and further strengthened the originating company’s innovation. Innovators: Get your competitors to copy you! If you cannot nail them for patent infringement, you can use them to prove that you are the first, original and authentic source of the innovation.
* A New York City mattress salesperson made a small observation: You do not have to go to a restaurant to buy pizza, it will be delivered to you. Why not, he thought, have mattresses, too, ordered and sold by phone? Mattresses, like pizza, are standard. People usually know what they want: extra firm, extra soft, etc., and they know the size. Why not store the mattresses in Jersey, in inexpensive warehouses, and zip them across the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan to fill orders, while taking away the customers’ old mattress? Why not save people the trouble of shopping, shipping, etc.? The result was Dial-A-Mattress, a highly successful business for many years.
Innovation, as Dell Computers’ direct-order mass customized business proves, is not solely about gadgets or technology. It can also be about such mundane things, as, how do I fill an order? Find a better way, and you can redefine an industry.
Blog entries written by Prof. Shlomo Maital
TIMnovate 
1 comment
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September 6, 2012 at 9:44 am
Eelker van Hagen
How about “It’s but a small idea for one man, but a giant leap for mankind”. Every progress we have made so far, solely exists upon the merit of one small idea of one man being able to perpetrate the lives of many. No idea meets his potential unless it finds it way to the many who may gain advantage from it. No idea meets his full potential unless it finds it way to the brain power of many who can copy it to improve it. Every innovation today stands on the shoulders of the progress we made in the past and is tributary to the ideas of many others it found shoulders to stand upon. All our legislation on the “property” of ideas has to fulfill but these 2 goals, guarantee enough economic profit for the “idea holder” to pay for his or her investment in the idea to guarantee another idea in the making but at the same time keep access to the idea to a maximum for purposes of both access to its merits and access to its shoulders for new ideas to stand upon. The moment the large corporations of today find themselves battle grounds in courtrooms across the world to seek ownership over ideas at the costs of millions to fight these battles, we know our legislation doesn’t serve but one of these 2 goals.
Returning to the 2 perfect examples of the power of idea mr. Maital gave us: Sometimes it is but a good nights rest that allows our heads to be the breeding grounds for the ideas we so desperately seek for our future.