The Skills of Solution Development

Solution development for creating inventions involves a discreet ability to envision many solutions in rapid-fire order. This, in some ways, resembles a chaotic approach to alternative analysis of many different ideas laterally—all at the same time. Try this, try that, keep thinking of different ways to solution the problem, and there is no possible wrong way to consider it. Then, step back and think about which solution makes the most sense and how novel that solution is.

Two major keys are exhaustive analysis of various solution design points and contrasting the points to specific functional needs in the solution. This type of thinking is done in parallel, and often times some degree of reasoning in uncertainty is involved—uncertain in terms of if I change the way I am thinking about this now, will the outcome be different? This line of reasoning is important to exhaustively exploring the conceptual design space in lieu of the scope of the problem trying to be resolved.

Effective listening is key here since one needs to fully understand where the problem barriers lie and what the boundaries of these barriers are. Understand how to foster and manage innovation, intersecting intellectual property (IP) with other elements of IP. Strengthen the solution to the most practical level and describe it in terms of problem, solution, and novelty.