Nonetheless, there is standard the exhortation to "think outside the box," but, that's not always easy to do, nor is there a systematic approach taught for determining what might be physically possible in conventional educational systems. This is what TRIZ does, regardless of what you might have heard, or been told by TRIZ "consultants."
The TRIZ text that I got in class had a simple example of "thinking out of the box."
[italic]A small town Siberia wanted to lower something from a tall pedestal (I forget what), but the there was no crane (which would take weeks to get there), and not much in the way of typical construction approaches. A small boy suggests something the town had plenty of, ice blocks. So, the people stacked blocks of ice next to the pedestal, until the ice was level with the object. They then slid the object onto the ice, and simply waited for the ice to melt.[/italic]
A contrived example, to be sure, but it illustrates a "thinking out of the box" approach, since ice is rarely considered to be a method for moving large objects vertically.
The actual basis of TRIZ is simply a compedium of the physical principles to thousands of different problems, aggregated and distillated into a relatively small number of basic physical principles. I don't have the text handy, but each of the techniques are what most people iterate through to arrive at specific solutions for everyday problems:
Iteration in time (microcoded processors are an example)
Iteration in space (array processing are an example of this)
Microcoded processors were considered to be a significant advancement in processor design, yet, it was a limited number of individuals who recognized that "programming" could be applied to different levels of the processing hierarchy. Array processors are now commonplace, but there was a time when the notion of splitting complex problems and sharing them across multiple processors was a foreign thought.
There is some "art," but most of the time, inventions are not hampered by the lack of "art," but by a simple knee-jerk reactions, "we CAN'T do it THAT way." And yet, months or years later, we see the invention, and say, "I thought of that," or, "Why didn't I think of that?" The bulk of progress in development is not from "lightning strike" solutions, but from evolution of existing solutions.
The microcoded processor was a solution to the fact that there were limitations on how many logic gates could be implemented in a processor, so spending more time with the same transistors allowed for developing computationally powerful processors. We tend to forget that in the era when 10 million logic gates per chip is a routine product, there was a time when having a few thousand gates in a processor was extremely difficult to produce.
Solutions come from everyday, normal people, every day. Our secretary, at a previous company, proposed a car navigation system, back when the most powerful processor around was the 80286, and 12-inch monochrome monitors wer the norm. She was pooh-poohed, because there wasn't the technology to store the maps, and GPS was just getting started. Guess what, she was right, and we were less than visionary (to be polite). There are thousands of patents issued yearly, and probably millions of inventions that don't get that far. These are not Edisons, they're normal people that "think outside of the box," occasionally.
These are the people that could possibly be substantially more productive, if they could systematically trade possible solutions to their problems, since they are amenable to non-conventional approaches.
TTFN
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