Make Sure Innovation is Elegant

Elegant Innovation

Well in our last three article we have seen why we need Innovation, how we can go about innovating. When we come across a new idea how do we judge it to be an inventive one or not? Is the Idea really an Elegant one or not ?

Legend has it that NASA invested millions of dollars in developing a "space pen" that would perform well in zero gravity conditions. At the same time Soviet cosmonauts simply used pencils. Regardless of the fact that we now know this story to be a myth, it provides an important insight into the characteristics of inventive ideas and solutions. It is that most of us prefer simple inexpensive solutions over complicated costly ones. This is also true when we address new product development or for that matter any Innovation processes. Obviously, we favor ideas that are easy and inexpensive to implement over those that require the introduction of new technologies and heavy investment. All this may sound trivial. Yet the really interesting question is: why do we so often come up with needlessly complex ideas, and how do we get to the inventive, inexpensive solutions?

Einstein said that   "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction" and this leads us to Thinking Inside box rather than out side.

The SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking® method contends that there are two sufficient conditions for a solution or idea to be inventive: the Closed World condition, and the Qualitative Change condition.

The Closed World condition stipulates that when developing a new product or addressing a problem, one must utilize only elements that already exist in the product / problem or their immediate environment. This condition forces us to rely on resources that are already at our disposal instead of "importing" new external resources for the solution. Basically nothing new is added to solve the problem.

The wetsuit is a simple example of the Closed World condition. It functions in cold water environments, where body heat loss is a problem potentially causing hypothermia. Solutions that call for external resources, i.e. ones that are far from the Closed World, employ added elements such as external heaters embedded in the suit or thicker insulation layers. Indeed, when it comes to extreme diving situations, such as deep-water or ice-water diving, these types of solutions are in fact required. However, they are expensive, complicated and cumbersome. By contrast, the simple wetsuit utilizes a resource that is abundantly found in the scuba diver's environment – water. The suit's fabric absorbs water from its surroundings and envelops the diver's body with a thin layer of water. The diver's own body-heat warms the water in the suit, producing a layer of warm water insulating the diver's body from the cold environment.

Qualitative Change—which stipulates that when trying to solve a problem, we must search for solutions in which a harmful element (one that either creates or aggravates the problem) becomes either neutral or instrumental in the problem's solution.  In simple word if manage to covert a problem itself in to a solution it will show the Qualitative change.

Lets take a simple example in real life, the barricades used by Police for crowd control. Temporarily erected barricades for crowed control  can be pushed or toppled in the crowed increases and collectively pushes at them. Now the challenge is how do we use the increasing crowed as a solution rather than bigger problem. An elegant solution will be to attach flat plates to the barricade towards the side the crowd is likely to push. The result will be crowed to push at the barricade will have to stand on the foot of it and the more people stand on it harder it will be to topple it. Here we have reversed the adversity in to a benefit by changing the relationship.

If both the CW & QC are present in an Inventive solution it will certainly be an Elegant solution.

For more on what I have discussed readers may visit www.sitesite.com or contact me at shreerang.athalye@gmail.com