How To Save Time
Innovation consultant and TRIZ expert Jack Hipple recently sent me a great presentation called "How Are You Going to Survive as an Innovation Champion?," which he delivered in 2004 at the American Creativity Association.
The highlight for me was this quote: “Six months in the lab will save at least an hour in the library."
When I asked Jack to explain, this is what he told me: "Early in my career with Dow, I was asked to do process optimization of a bromine recovery plant. Being 'only' a BS Chemical Engineer, my first thought was to go to the library and see if there was already some work (maybe even answers!) in the published literature. To my surprise, the Russian Journal of Applied Chemistry had just begun to be translated into English (this was 1967, by the way!) and I ran across an article entitled "Theory and Calculations Relating to the Recovery of Bromine from Natural Brines." After reading it for 30 minutes I totally understood why our towers worked the way they did, and how to improve them. I then showed the article to the PhD modeling engineer who had been trying for many months to model the tower mathematically..... and then came the quote. This information then became the basis for Dow's further modeling and design of its bromine recovery units."
Sometimes we get so locked into doing it one way that another, far better solution lies next to us, untapped. But remember, this was before the internet. Now they both probably would have gone straight to Google, and gotten 60 million hits. So would that hour in the library have turned into 6 months sorting out the mess we got by going online?
Hence the question, How can we engage the insights and creativity of the broader world to help us sort through the mountain of information? The insight embedded in that question leads us to look for a way to tap into the global online community of researchers for help.
And voila! There is an online research community called Innocentive, a system through which companies may post technical problems to be solved by any researcher, anywhere.
How to save time? Get the community to do it with you! (Tom Sawyer and the immortal bucket of whitewash live on.)
Thanks, Jack!
(Jack Hipple, Innovation-TRIZ, http://www.innovation-triz.com/ 813-994-9999)