One of my earlier posting talked about using “resources” for developing innovative products. This week BusinessWeek article showcased an emerging trend (that’s what they call it), Cloud Computing!! Interestingly, the article talks about Google, Yahoo etc letting to open up their huge computing power and storage space to the world. Analogy is “it's the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities”.
Amazon has pioneered in this and even making money out of it. Now that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo coming to market this may even get commoditized. I wouldn’t surprise to see Intel and AMD manufacture high–end processors only for handful of companies across the world, setting up huge data center and we would buy computing power from them..! Anyway, that’s futuristic. It could even be “Other way” around; each one of our personal computer, mobile phone work as a part of Google data center (Remember SETI!)
From the TRIZ angle, I see the concept of using “Existing, cheap/low cost/underutilized/free resources” is a definite opportunity for innovation. We have resources all around us, but we don’t know; we have resources inside our system, but we don’t consider that for other activities which they are not originally intended for. At times even the harmful elements in the system are resources for solving our problems. Then the question boils down to; how do we identify them?
- Draw a 9 Window, and identify your system-present
- List everything you can think about in your sub-system present
- Look everything in your super-system present
- Identify resources unused, not effectively used, cheap/low cost. Even “people emotions” are resources!
- Think about the future – What do you going to do with these resources in the future? Can you use them for something else?
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2 comments:
Thanks for article about "Google Cloud." But it concerns not only Google, and it has a long history.
Transition to the centralized function's carrying out if this function is enough widely required: a central heating, water and electric power supply, postal service, aviation, even legal system in the state, etc.
Subsistence farming --> centralization (mass production) --> centralization + customization (mass customization). Or in slightly different form: “person-to-person” links --> “person-HUB-person” links, where HUB provides function with lower cost and/or higher reliability.
From TRIZ point of view, it's “transition from system to Supersystem level”. So, you are right, when talking about "9-windows" tool use.
Thank you for the new insight. Transition to super-system sounds the direct map to TRIZ trends. Your explanation is also educating me to think the combination of more than one techniques, like resources and trends together..
Prakash
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