Shipulski On Design

With innovation, novel solutions pay the bills – a new solution provides new value for the customer and the customer buys it from you.  The trick, however, is to come up with novel solutions.  To improve the rate and quality of novel solutions, there’s usually a focus on new tools, new problem-solving methods and training on both. The idea is get better at moving from problem to solution.  There’s certainly room for improvement in our problem-solving skills, but I think the pot of gold is hidden elsewhere.

Because novel solutions reside in uncharted design space, it follows that novel solutions will occur more frequently if the problem-solvers are pointed toward new design space.  And to make sure they don’t solve in the tired, old design space of success, constraints are used to wall it off.  Rule 1 – point the solvers toward new design space. Rule 2 – wall off the over-planted soil of success.

The best way to guide the problems solvers toward fertile design space is to create different problems for them to solve. And this guide-the-solvers thinking is a key to the success of the IBE (Innovation Burst Event), where Design Challenges are created in a way that forces the solvers from the familiar. And it’s these Design Challenges that ARE the new problems that bring the new solutions.  And to wall off old design space, the Design Challenges use creatively curated constraints to make it abundantly clear that old solutions won’t cut it.

Before improving the back-end problem solving process, why not change the front- end problem selecting process?

Chose to solve different problems, then learn to solve them differently.

Image credit – Rajarshi MITRA

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