Very cool how different folks look at a situation and think about it, from assessing value to exploring possibilities to drawing parallels to past experiences to drawing parallels to other inconveniently located white substances.

Chappy, interesting honing in on the city’s point of view. Amazing how entities scale from the original sense of community to somehow a city could/would be something separate and placed above the sum of the consituents. Taken at face value that turns around to innovation and solution being located with Frank’s local kids. A smart city could spend a few bucks on some shovels that are checked out from a community center for local kids to go out enmasse and help driveway cleanup with a low cost reward event sponsored for the Shovelling Team or whatnot. Reminds that value is not always a dollar figure.

I’m with the Team Magic representative in the “learn a new process or method,” I probably over-cook my thinking to look for an excuse to learn something new (or by a new tool or substance, heh.)

For those actually interested in Dave’s topic of discussion, there’s an interesting book I picked up over the weekend that has steps for an idea to implementation type of process. So far it’s a nice read, a little over-priced for the size, but I find the author’s voice and point of view interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Machine-Eleven-Ste...
The Genius Machine
by Gerald Sindell

The industrious teenager makes arrangements with those in his neighborhood to clear their driveways with his father’s John Deere snow plow for $15 per driveway….
On mornings he’s clearing snow, the home owners who didn’t wish to participate will be watching the boys work, like
an orphan on father’s day, so he’ll pick up two or three extra driveways per street (extras are charged $20)

Charges were different back when I was a kid, but myself and two other boys who lived in the Raven community made a
killing each time it snowed doing just that! There were 81 homes in our community… mostly working class and a few
retirees (which we done for free, which made the community love us, which BROUGHT ON MORE BUSINESS!… we mowed
their lawns in the summer) we had 60 diveways contracted and we’d usually pick up extras (here’s a $20, do mine please?)
each outing.

Greg, excellent example of how mans hours can add up.
If the time wasted thinking about the situation ever got close to that, then I might tend to believe there is a problem. Now I have to scrape that lovely bird droping off my windshield and go to work. Have a great day

This is the “1) Discovery” phase by the way

Analysis of the situation-
What is the “Lump” of snow? Is it the snow that is pushed to the side by the plow?

It becomes an issue of Domain Ownership and itent. First determine if the Domain of ownership is on the City Plows or property owner. The intent of the city is NOT to clear driveways. In fact the city does not care about driveways. The intent of the city is to drive economics and maintain laws. Clearing roads drives economics by enabling mobility, to work and travel to purchase goods.

What is the domain of the problem? then you can begin with a solution. To make a value proposition one must know how to determine value. To tell the city that it costs the home owner (X) hours per year to maintain their driveway and makes them late for work they will say ‘That is ok, not our problem’.

That’s a great example, Dave, with the plow. It helps pinpoint two things that factor into my sensing of opportunity.

First is someone expressing a belief that something is impossible or impractical that implies only a single view of how to solve the issue.

Second is the value multiplied. I’ll say it takes 15 minutes for a homeowner to clear the pile in front of their driveway, in this case 25,000 times 15 is about 6,000 man hours or 6 man years per plowing.

Combined they scream overlooked opportunity and the ideal solution would be with the plowing device.

Perfect news Frank, I love to hear that.

Frank, That’s nice to hear.

David, I get the impression you are asking each of us what method we use. Most of my ideas are mechanical in nature and stem from a lifetime of wanting to know how things work. This curiosity left me with a lot of knowledge of available processes.

1) I start one of two ways:
a) Learn a new process or method and think of other ways it can be used.
b) See a need and try think of multiple ways it can be achieved. I usually try for 10 but only manage 6-7.
2) I research competition and market.
3) I build a prototype if needed.
4) I enter it in E.N.

The time frame can be quite long on my end. I sometimes have four or five ideas competing for my thoughts.

OOPS! sorry accidentally posted as teammagic. I’m just one member.

I’m doing fine, Charlie, and hope you are too! Lisa’s doing well now; once she zeroed in on what caused the problem, she has adjusted without issues. <:-)

Hi David, I like simple. Can we just wait for the snow to melt? Like with Chappy’s list, I believe only the first three can be translated in my mind. (so thats all I need now) Welcome to EN, and do it how you like, it all works here. Roger has some brilliant forums and ways, with his knowlege to help make it simple.
Frank, how are youmy friend? And Lisa is doing good:)

What are your patents, David?

Sensing – To sense and articulate opportunities and their value. Locate possibilities through disharmonies.

The following excerpts are taken from the local paper; when you read this, do you sense an opportunity and possible value that could be realized with invention and innovation? If you do sense an opportunity, then what are the next step(s) you take from this initial realization of opportunity?

“The City plows more than 360 miles of road in Troy. If we had the means to clear the lump of snow that falls off the plow into the approximately 25,000 driveways, we would. It would take weeks to Clear the roads instead of days. There just aren’t enouigh hours, staff time, money and equipment to do it. We need residents to clear the lump of snow off their driveways after we plow.”

Dave

Back around for an evening after a long week of sick people and a decade relevant birthday for the wife, then off for the weekend.

The value proposition thing is a pulling together epiphany I’ve recently found helpful. Its funny I backed into it, because its the core tool I used for process evaluation and software improvement in past jobs. As in what can be done to bring the right value to others.

Done rightly, discovering value is a pretty empathic sort of thing. Worse thing about great ideas is how often one articulates them and the expectation is that you become the soup-to-nuts owner of it. The person with innovative insight is not always the same person who can bring something to fruition.

So to the question, the answer is questions. Asking the right questions can help others co-discover value-added solutions. Being curious and inquisitve by nature makes it a pretty sincere process for myself.

If I understand you correctly, perhaps this can be the beginning. The steps for ideation that I use are vaguely as follows.
To serialize anything is to segment the whole throught the following steps:
How do we process information from our existence?
A 5 step process:

1. Discover
2. Quantify
3. Qualify
4. Correlate
5. Potentiate

Measurable successes and failures are the key to duplication and an innate ability to recreate the same results. With enumeration comes quantifiable metrics that can be controlled and tweaked for better results.

I was looking for conversation on these lines when I came in too… Does this sound like the conversation what you are talking about? It is to create standards of ideation and Greg R (Corsaire) has great insight on value propositions that I really wanted to get into.

Hmmm… Standards, Processes and Protocols… This will turn out to be a great conversation. Some may not like it though. :-D I will be right back… I know exactly what you are getting at.

David, if you looked at the majority of issued patents you would wonder why they even pursued the patent. Most don’t make it to market because they did not look at it to see if it was marketable before they filed for the patent. An example I like to use is " you can patent edible sneakers, but would anyone really buy them?"

James, US business surveys reveal 4% of company innovation initiatives meet their financial objectives, US Patent & Trademark Office statistics show that 0.2% of patents make a return on the inventor’s investment, the National Research Council demonstrates US gov’t track record of promoting innovation through University research is less than 25% of innovations are connected to published research ideas. Given this backdrop of scant innovation success rates, I am interested in knowing what process in real-world terms is most efficient in developing an innovation. My definition of innovation is adoption of new practice in a community. I realize this is a question in very broad terms, but there are a number of serial innovators that seem to have the process down to a routine and a more standardized process protocol.

For Example, There are those of us that are the type to serialize a situation, product and understand the entire product before making the change and there are those of us that will throw 20-30 ideas at the wall to see if something sticks. There are others that will look at a product and reengineer a simple part of it so that it works better. Then there are others that look at something and say “It would be cool if we could…” Then there is the intention/manifester, idea matrix, concept hash tables, Serialization, Eureka! and many other “Types”. Some are audio, visual, digital…

Are you trying to figure out the type you are or are you enquiring as to other’s method?

It all revolves around your personal background, your experiences in life, how you approach everyday problems that needs solutions, are you a fly by the seat of your pants type person, a analytical study it to death before you move forward type person, are you insecure and feel everyone is out to steal your idea. Do you have a good intuition or eye for what makes sense when you see a product. Can you think of things in simplified terms that are easy to understand or do you like to break things down to its atomic structure a write a thesis on it? All of these things and more determine how you approach a problem and how you get to your answer. It is different in each person according to what has worked best for them.

David,
Hmmm… Interesting… It seems that it depends on what your objective is. Is it to acheive break-through or incremental success? There are a number of routes that we have been discussing. I would ask first; what does sensory perception mean to you? How many senses do we really have?

“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”

Welcome David!

“Think It”

David, Chappy is a master at jamming a conglomerate of thoughts/words into one pile! LOL

Reply to James Chapman. Apologies if the originating sentence attempted to jam the conglomerate of thoughts into one pile. In essence, the question refers to our sense that a product or process could be improved and then at that point of sensing, how we typically capture the issue. Do we write it down, think about it for awhile, is it a eureka! moment and the problem is resolved with an immediate idea and invention or does it take awhile, months, years to resolve? It is this sensing process that I find most fasinating and wonder what your take is on it.

David,
There are a lot of great thoughts on this that can be accessed with the green search button, top right.
However, it may appear as a little bit of B.S.; http://www.edisonnation.com/forums/creativity/t...
Welcome to this awesome community!

LOL Greg! :) Too funny!

David~ I’m probably not the norm around here. I became fasinated with a particular product, so much so I started being creative as I could be with it and an explosion of ideas came to me. They don’t help save the world or anything spectacular like that. They are just really cool projects.

David meet Chappy. His avatar is an illustration of what his brilliant mind does with just the decision of what to eat for breakfast.
: ) no offense Chappy, just having fun. How are you?

David,
Welcome, and WOW! That is quite the sentence… I am not sure exactly what you are asking. Is that a question of HOW we identify and articulate? How we do it going through our day? How we bring value? To the world? To our local community? By addressing an issue? What issue? By seizing an opportunity? What Opportunity?

Are you asking how we do it or how we make the time? Are you trying to get into it?

I am so confused… lol