I wouldn’t label myself an environmentalist, but I try to do my part. I recycle paper, aluminum and glass in my home. I make homemade notepads out of old printouts. I drive a Honda Civic on my workday commute. I use reusable containers instead of disposable ones. When I have to print documents at work, I print two-to-a-page and double-sided. I also fancy myself a new life re-user.
A re-user is someone who finds alternative uses for objects. Primarily ordinary, everyday objects, but sometimes unique or obscure items. The classic example is taking a used automobile tire and hanging it from a larger tree branch to make a swing.
When I was a kid, my dad, a pack-rat in even the loosest sense of the word, had a closet in the garage where he kept spare pieces–things like extra nails, screws, scrap wood, wire, knobs, and what have you. It was a veritable junkyard of items that would likely never be used, but my father horded collected them, on the off chance that there might be some use for the piece in the future.
I don’t recall ever seeing him use any of the items other than the odd screw or scrap piece of wood, but as a kid, I loved that closet. I used to spend long periods of time digging through the many containers of random stuff, looking for something that I could re-use. Old telephone wire was frequently used in lieu of tape or rope. Strange-looking knobs or fasteners were included in my fantasy play as spaceships or missiles, or on one occasion, for game pieces for a board game (Monopoly, if my memory serves).
Even today, I see items around the office, home or hardware store that strike me as useful for more than just their original purpose. In my garage, there hangs from the rafters a burnt-out rechargeable battery from a cordless screwdriver, inside a 5-inch section of foam noodle. This little device lets my BW know exactly how far to pull the minivan into the garage so that the garage door will close, but still leave enough room to open the tailgate. When I first installed it, she laughed, but it serves its purpose well and keeps items useful that would have likely ended up being thrown away (I would have recycled the battery, but who knows if it actually would have been recycled or not).
My penchant for re-use drew my eye to a news brief in a recent edition of BusinessWeek [22Oct2007]. The brief described the maiden voyage of a 460-foot freighter that uses a giant (the size of a football field) kite attached to its bow. What actually caught my eye was the photo of the ship with the kite unfurled. I thought, “What a great new use for a kite!” I have seen kites used for surfing, but hadn’t really considered what could be done if the scale was increased twenty-fold. The kite can cut fuel costs and emissions for the ship by up to 35%, which is pretty amazing considering the overall simplicity of concept.
There are other objects out there that have been recast from their original purpose into a whole new raison d’être. Some of them more art/fashion than function, but technology products can work the same way.
Product Managers can look at it from two perspectives–can your product be used to meet some other need or is there another, unrelated product that could solve a business challenge for your industry? In my view, the former is harder than the latter, because we naturally see our product doing whatever it was originally designed to do. It’s hard to break away from that viewpoint unless you really make the effort.
A good example of this is how blogging tools can be modified to be used as a website content management system (not an entirely new use, but one that is sufficiently different than the original purpose of the product). By looking at unconventional uses for your products, you may be able to discover a whole new market or provide a novel solution to an age-old business problem.