Tag Archives: Coronavirus

A visual nudge for social distancing inside an elevator

As Covid-19 spreads widely, people are required to keep distance from others. The Straits Times posted a photo showing that visitors at an Indonesian shopping mall stand on the boxes inside an elevator.

In Seoul, Korea, a clever visual nudge was observed in an elevator. The floor was divided into nine squares, each marked with a pair of painted footprints. This subtle design implied that only nine people should ride the elevator at once.

Not long ago, I believed that floor signage could not influence our behavior, assuming that we naturally internalize rules over time. Back then, a yellow-painted footstep in Singapore or an orange-colored line in Shenzhen seemed unlikely to alter the rules we had already learned. However, my perspective has shifted—I now recognize that floor signage can indeed guide and reshape our behavior.

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Reference

Benartzi, S., Beshears, J., Milkman, K. L., Sunstein, C. R., Thaler, R. H., Shankar, M., … Galing, S. (2017). Should Governments Invest More in Nudging? Psychological Science, 28(8), 1–15.

Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of “nudge” interventions that governments are now adopting alter people’s decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as tax incentives and other financial inducements, and we found that nudge interventions often compare favorably with traditional interventions. We conclude that nudging is a valuable approach that should be used more often in conjunction with traditional policies, but more calculations are needed to determine the relative effectiveness of nudging.

How to breathe better with a mask

Wearing a mask becomes common as the spread of Covid-19 (Coronavirus disease) dominates our lives. However, people find it difficult to breathe with a mask. I recently found an interesting new product for masks at Granhand where I visited to buy droppers or incenses for my office.

Though you can not seize nor hold the smell, it has a decisive effect on the matter of our memory and emotion and believes on its vitally of influences on our decision among our lives. GRANHAND gives faith towards the value of the fragrance and consistently pursues to make the scent part of our regular living. Although it may be slow nor has perfection, the variety of contents that our brand is offering will build the unique value of the experience that no other brand will possess. GRANHAND will not be a product where it vanishes with ease nor be neglected. It will continuously illuminate with a distinct presence and yield to warm people’s mind.

This store sells a natural oil named as “On Your Mask.” When we spray it inside the mask, we could breathe in a fresh way. This oil impressed me a lot because when I think about a mask in the past, I paid attention exclusively to its practical functionality. In other words, I simply ignored how much comfortable I should feel when wearing it.

Customer experience is not dried up for new product development.

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Reference

Kornish, L. J., & Ulrich, K. T. (2011). Opportunity Spaces in Innovation: Empirical Analysis of Large Samples of Ideas. Management Science, 57(1), 107–128.

A common approach to innovation, parallel search, is to identify a large number of opportunities and then to select a subset for further development, with just a few coming to fruition. One potential weakness with parallel search is that it permits repetition. The same, or a similar, idea might be generated multiple times, because parallel exploration processes typically operate without information about the ideas that have already been identified. In this paper we analyze repetition in five data sets comprising 1,368 opportunities and use that analysis to address three questions: (1) When a large number of efforts to generate ideas are conducted in parallel, how likely are the resulting ideas to be redundant? (2) How large are the opportunity spaces? (3) Are the unique ideas more valuable than those similar to many others? The answer to the first question is that although there is clearly some redundancy in the ideas generated by aggregating parallel efforts, this redundancy is quite small in absolute terms in our data, even for a narrowly defined domain. For the second question, we propose a method to extrapolate how many unique ideas would result from an unbounded effort by an unlimited number of comparable idea generators. Applying that method, and for the settings we study, the estimated total number of unique ideas is about one thousand for the most narrowly defined domain and greater than two thousand for the more broadly defined domains. On the third question, we find a positive relationship between the number of similar ideas and idea value: the ideas that are least similar to others are not generally the most valuable ones.