The Zwicky box or Morphological box was invented by Fritz Zwicky in the sixties.

As Fabian Post tells us here: "he developed the Morphological Box as a method for structuring and investigating the total set of relationships contained in multidimensional, non-quantifiable, problem complexes.

If it sounds complex, it is not supposed to. Zwicky developed the box to solve problems by structuring potential solutions in a grid, so he could quickly identify (a combination of) solutions.

In business a morphological box is used, for example, to solve problems – arising from different dimensions – where data is scarce, where a north-star needs to be found quickly or as a creative method to develop new products or services. However, the box is used more often in social areas, more notably in politics, as the tool helps to identify solutions to complex social problems. In other words, if you are lucky, or unlucky, enough to live in a country where there are a lot of political parties, you could quite literally fill in a grid with all competing solutions for, let’s say, immigration.

In business though, the usage is broad. It can be used for planning (Turley et al., 1975), management (Proctor, 1998), creativity (Proctor, 1998), policy creation (Ritchey, 1998), strategy (Stenström & Ritchey, 2004), decision making (Sharif & Irani, 2006), financial modeling (Petrusel & Mocean, 2007), knowledge transference (Kumar & Ganesh, 2009), business model creation (Lee & Hong, 2011), market innovation (Storbacka & Nenonen, 2012) and prototyping (Seidenstricker et al., 2014)."

For finding new burgers recipes for instance, it would look like that:

Dan Shiper from the newsletter Superorganizers and Nathan Baschez from the newsletter Divinations built this online tool to do your own Zwicky box easily: