Taking out unnecessary detail

The first step to thinking innovatively is to learn to strip out any unnecessary detail or technical jargon. This will feel hard at first but is a good discipline to master. Although it’s not the way you’re taught to speak, particularly when dealing with something within your own area of expertise, it allows for clear communication as well as clear thinking.

When you work within a specific discipline, one of the first things you learn is the language. Every field uses words and acronyms that have very specific and precise meanings and these allow you to communicate efficiently with other people within that field. TRIZ is a great example – it’s much quicker than saying Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch every time!

Using the language of your discipline makes you feel comfortable and helps you to express yourself efficiently and precisely to your peers: this is why organisations develop their own shorthand, jargon and acronyms. Your language can give you a sense of belonging but, on the flip side, can resemble a club where outsiders are unable to contribute and feel unwelcome.

As a result, you can end up working in a silo of only people who share your language, which cuts you off from the brainpower and resources of others when problem solving. If you can learn to communicate in problem solving using very simple language, you can broaden the field of your enquiry and the range of solutions on offer to you. Often the greatest innovations come from the application of knowledge outside of your domain: communicating without technical terms helps you to access this new knowledge and put it to use.

Communicating with people outside your discipline or organisation becomes hard and is prone to confusion and miscommunication when you’re using your own company’s jargon and acronyms – examples specific to a discipline or company can easily be misinterpreted. I once participated in a very confusing conversation with someone concerning patents; when he spoke of increasing his ROI, I thought he meant Return on Investment – in fact, he was referring to Record of Invention (his company’s term for the formal submission of ideas).

Get into the habit of asking everyone to explain what their acronyms stand for. Often people can’t remember or will have made them up. You certainly won’t be the only person in the room who isn’t sure what they mean.

Using simple language can take courage because it’s very easy to hide behind technical jargon, especially when you don’t really understand the situation. If you can explain something using very simple language, you know you really understand it. Some of our greatest thinkers demonstrate this fact, such as Richard Feynman (see the nearby sidebar about this chap).

Using simple language really helps take out unnecessary detail and see the wood for the trees. It also helps break psychological inertia, which is what happens when you get stuck in a way of thinking.

The language you use can create psychological inertia about your situation, about what you want and even how you can use what you have. Using simple, general language will break you out of that psychological inertia, allowing you to think more conceptually and open your mind to new possibilities.

Your specific language is often couched in terms of a particular solution or view of the problem, which will be limited by your knowledge and experience. You should be wary about the language you use, and aim for it to be as general as possible. Using simple yet accurate language gives you a broader framework within which to search for the right – and potentially very innovative – solutions to your problems.

Reapplying clever solutions in new and exciting ways

Using simple language and thinking in a more abstract way isn’t instinctive behaviour for most of us. You can, however, make it a habit. Although this approach appears to take extra time and effort, it actually results in a much more efficient way to tackle your problem.

Following your Prism of TRIZ (first described in Chapter 2 and in more depth below) means that when you start looking for information and answers, you narrow your focus and attention on a smaller amount of information and the solution that will work for you. Ironically, TRIZ was developed at a time when accessing information was very difficult; it meant finding the right book or paper in a physical location such as a library. Now the opposite problem exists: a huge amount of information is available via the Internet, but how do you know which is right for you? While you can use arbitrary restrictions (most people don’t bother reading beyond the first ten responses to a Google search, for example), narrowing down to things that are more likely to be useful for you is a much better strategy. Using the Prism of TRIZ will help you do just that: you distil your problem down to its essence, and can see how it’s similar to other problems in the past (and in other industries): you can then find analogous conceptual solutions to your problem. You then use your own knowledge and expertise to translate these conceptual solutions into practical solutions that will work in your experience. You are looking beyond your own knowledge and experience but your search is targeted and well-defined.

When you think conceptually you’re able to search for analogies systematically: analogies in problem solving mean that someone has seen a similar problem in the past and found a solution to it; the similarities are at the conceptual level, the differences in the detail.

Analogous problems and solutions are captured in the TRIZ tools that you can access reliably using the Prism of TRIZ, as shown in Figure 6-1.

TRIZ thinking means that you’re thinking conceptually and focusing on the right places: where other people have found conceptual solutions to your problem. Their specific problems and solutions may well be in a completely different field to your problem; however, if you can bring their solutions into your field, you reapply proven solutions in a new application – the very definition of innovation.

Check out the two example sidebars for real-life applications of TRIZ thinking. In both of these examples, the problems and solutions are conceptually similar but the devil’s in the detail. To successfully reapply someone else’s solution, it’s useful first to see the similarities and then to look for the differences, working out the specific needs and constraints of your own situation in order to see what can be usefully transferred as it is and what needs to be modified. Locating and using known relevant solutions puts you on the fast track to innovation.

Making new connections between existing technologies

Putting different, existing technologies together to create something particularly inventive is very exciting.

The following case studies demonstrate how technologies may be combined to create something wonderful:

• Trevor Baylis’s clockwork radio: Clockwork and radio had been around for a long time before Baylis thought to combine them. On its own neither technology is very novel, but combining them to create a radio that doesn’t rely on external electrical sources or replaceable batteries was highly inventive.
• Edwin Beard Budding’s lawn mower: The first lawn mower to be patented, in 1830, was inspired by watching the cutting cylinders used in textile mills to cut away irregular nap from woollen cloth to leave a smooth finish. Budding realised the technology could be reapplied to cutting grass, and developed the first lawn mower using a cutting cylinder with a series of gears, driven by a land roller. Another roller adjusted the height of the cut, and a tray captured the cuttings. Budding also invented the adjustable spanner or wrench – combining a spanner and a screw to create a tool that could be used with many different sizes of fastener.
• Amazon’s new way of buying books: Amazon’s great innovation was to combine three existing systems – bookshops, the Internet and the postal service – to create a cheap, speedy means of selling and delivering books.

What is interesting is that these great innovations didn’t require any cutting-edge scientific research to prove them. A huge amount of work and technical expertise to develop them, sure; but the technologies behind the systems were already well proven. If you can systematically access the right, proven technologies to solve your problems, you can develop very innovative solutions with less risk.

Learning to look for what you want

The first step in finding what you want is learning to look for it intelligently. In fact, the step before that may be realising that perhaps you just need to locate it, rather than invent it.

When you have a problem, jumping straight to trying to dream up your own solutions is all too easy. However, someone else may have already tackled a similar problem and found a solution. The right way to start solving problems is to realise that what you need may already exist – either in whole or in part – rather than reinventing the wheel.

This is where the X-Factor comes in! The X-Factor is a simple TRIZ thinking tool for looking for solutions. When you want something, you imagine that some magical X-Factor can simply appear and provide it. The X-Factor enables you to look for the things you want either by making better use of resources (see Chapter 5) or as a standalone creativity tool (see Chapter 7).

What the X-Factor enables you to do is narrow your search for solutions that deliver the identified function you want – a delivered function is described as a simple Subject–Action–Object (see Chapter 12 for a full description of this process). You’re looking for something (your subject) that’s going to do something useful (the action) to something else (your object). In describing an X-Factor you’re defining the delivered function you need – you then go on a hunt to look for all the best ways of achieving it.

You could describe what the examples in the earlier ‘Making new connections between existing technologies’ section were looking for as Subject–Action–Objects. In each of these cases, the subject is the X-Factor – the thing being searched for, as shown in Figure 6-2.

When you have a well-defined Subject–Action–Object, you can look up how to deliver your function in the Effects Database, consider resources (Chapter 5) or conduct an analogy search in the wider world.

Applying the Effects Database to solve problems

The Effects Database was developed over many years of research into patent records. Altshuller’s idea was to take all the scientific effects and physical phenomena that the world had discovered so far (and captured in patents and scientific journals) and reorganise them in an inventive way, according to their application and usefulness – that is, what they do.

So when you have a problem you need to solve, you can go to the Effects Database and see what physical phenomena and scientific effects have been used in the past, and reapply them to your specific application.

The database was developed from the work and research of many scientists and engineers under Altshuller, and many versions are available. You can find condensed versions in various technical TRIZ books, in (very expensive) software and freely available on the Internet.

I particularly recommend two free online sources: Oxford Creativity’s version (developed and maintained by Andrew Martin) at www.triz.co.uk and a Korean version at www.triz.co.kr.

When using the Effects Database, follow these steps:

1. Describe your problem in normal language as a ‘How?’ question. For example, ‘How do I … purify water/carry water/ensure water is clean?’

2. Define an X-Factor question to describe what you’re hoping to do.

   Your X-Factor will either define a function you’re seeking or a parameter you need to change.

   Function examples: clean a liquid, constrain a gas, detect a solid, hold a liquid and so on.

   Parameter examples: measure purity, increase friction, change density, measure temperature, decrease volume and so on.

3. Go to an Effects Database and look up the function(s) you want.
4. Translate conceptual solutions into real-world solutions.

Clean car windscreen

A dirty windscreen as a result of mud, dust and bird droppings is a problem everyone encounters. You can think of some top-of-the-head solutions to this problem such as using your wipers or water and detergent to clean your windscreen, but what other solutions can you find, beyond your own knowledge, from the Effects Database?

Let’s follow the steps above:

1. Describe your problem: ‘Clean my car windscreen’.
2. Define your X-Factor, as shown in Figure 6-3.
3. Look up results in the Effects Database. The results from the Oxford Creativity website (www.triz.co.uk) provide 90 solutions; these are: ablation, abrasion, acoustic cavitation, adhesive, adsorption, amphiphiles, brush, capillary action, capillary porous material, catalysis, cavitation, chemical transport reactions, combustion, composting, cryolysis, decomposition (biological), deflagration, desiccant material, desorption, electrical discharge machining, electrolysis, electron beam, electron impact desorption, electropermanent magnet, enzyme, erosion, espresso crema effect, fan, fermentation, ferromagnetism, filter (physical), fluid spray, fractionation, friction, froth floatation, gettering, Halbach array, hydrodynamic cavitation, hydrogel, hydrogen peroxide, hydrophile, hydrophobe, ion beam, ion exchange, ion repulsion/attraction, jet, jet erosion, laser, laser ablation, light, liquid–liquid extraction, lotus leaf effect, magnetic field, magnetism, mechanical force, molecular sieve, nap, oxidation, ozone, phase change, photo-oxidation, plasma, purification, pyrolysis, radiation, radioactive decay, redox reactions, reduction, resonance, solvation, sonochemistry, sorption, sound, sponge, sputtering, sublimation, suction, supercritical fluid, supercritical fluid extraction, superhydrophilicity, surfactant, tribocorrosion, triboelectric effect, turbulence, ultrasonic vibration, vacuum, vacuum plasma spraying, vibration, wear, weathering.
4. Translate conceptual solutions to real-world solutions. In this case, many, many solutions exist. Some will be relevant, some less so, depending on your specific situation. Working through them to see if they suggest interesting and unlikely solutions is worthwhile.

The Effects Database will suggest a number of types of solution:

• The ones you would’ve come up with anyway: ‘Fluid spray’ and ‘jet’ both suggest conventional ways of cleaning, and ‘amphiphiles’ and ‘surfactants’ suggest using detergents.
• Solutions you may know about but have forgotten: ‘Lotus leaf effect’ is one of the self-cleaning glass technologies that you may or may not have come up with.
• Solutions beyond your knowledge and experience: These are the most valuable because they will take you beyond what you know to what the world knows: drawing upon a much larger pool of knowledge than any collection of experts you could assemble in one room.

The solutions you’d normally come up with depend on your expertise and field of knowledge. A mechanical engineer, for example, will tend to suggest mechanical solutions (fan, friction); a chemist will use chemical effects (solvents); a biologist will focus on biological solutions (enzymes); and a manager will delegate. The Effects Database will give you access to all these solutions and more: all the ways that have been discovered to clean a solid (so far!). Other solutions such as using vibration or ultrasonic vibration may not be obvious, but as they’ve made it into a toothbrush as a cleaning method, maybe they’ll also be useful in this application. Lots of other solutions are suggested by the Effects Database, and if your business is making car windscreens, it’s worth looking at them all!

The Effects Database gives you the answers that are most likely to help you. They direct you toward existing, proven solutions – both within and beyond your own knowledge. You must then use all your creativity and brainpower to turn them into practical solutions by stepping through your Prism of TRIZ, as shown in Figure 6-4.

Strategies for analogous searching

If you have a technical issue to solve, you can look to the Effects Database for the function you need.

However, when you can’t access the Effects Database because you’re looking for a non-technical solution, you can search for analogous solutions using the strategies in the following sections. You look to other industries to see who’s developed solutions that could become your X-Factor.

Matching needs and systems

All problem solving is about matching needs and systems.

A problem is just a gap between your needs – everything you want – and your current system.

Invention is problem solving because it means meeting previously unmet needs. You meet currently unmet needs with old technologies put into practice in new ways or in new combinations, or with new technologies you discover and develop.

As invention with TRIZ is simply a case of matching needs and systems, you need to understand both. You can then apply TRIZ tools and strategies to improve, as shown in Figure 6-5.

Understanding functions

The bridge between your needs and your systems is your functions, as shown in Chapter 5. Your systems have functions, which deliver benefits. Your benefits are delivered by functions, which are delivered by systems.

When you’re inventing you can start with either needs or systems – making sure you’ve fully understood both – and the functions that could or should deliver them. Invention can start either with a system or a set of needs, but you must understand both the ideal state and the current state in order to problem solve and deliver a better invention – with clever functions. You can identify the functions you need and then see how you can achieve them using existing technologies (perhaps by consulting the Effects Database) and your resources.

For your water system, you may identify that the functions you need are:

• Kill microbes
• Capture sediment
• Hold water

Figure 6-6 shows how by identifying the functions you want (which deliver a benefit), you can then look for technologies or existing systems that can deliver these functions, one by one, and create a real invention.

Uncovering unmet needs

These needs may be obvious – we clearly need new solutions to meet some of the world’s largest problems such as sources of water, food and energy – or they may be previously unarticulated or unrealised. Henry Ford famously said, ‘If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse’. Check out the following examples!

Applying existing technologies to create novel inventions

When you’re trying to find new applications for technology, whether you’ve uncovered something new or want to find new uses for your existing technology, you start at the function level.

You then need to go up to benefits, to work out what needs could be met, and down to systems, to work out how you can turn them into reality. It’s also worth looking at how functions can be put together to create a synergy, and potentially a new benefit, as shown in the real-life situations below.