Ideal Final Result – the most fundamental concept in TRIZ
 |
| Free your imagination |
In simple terms, IFR is the target solution to the problem at hand that would remove all negative aspects without introducing any more new drawback while preserving all the advantages of the old system. How much cost for this effort would IFR allow? You and me won't believe this. IFR dictates that the all advantage no disadvantage solution must be achieved at zero additional cost.
Though it seems impossible to achieve, if you set such a goal, you will be forced to reject ordinary easy pathways and strive towards the highest goal that can be imagined. This special effort coupled with the host of powerful tools and concepts provided by TRIZ most times would take you very near to the all advantage zero cost solution. This would be your innovative solution that you couldn't have imagined without this special problem solving approach.
Though it is a little difficult to imagine, deep application of TRIZ in reality have achieved innumerable innovative solutions at cheaper cost and lesser time. Samsung is supposedly the front runner in deep application of TRIZ.
Usually innovation is the concern of market sensitive competing organizations and not a concern of you and me, the common people. But if you continue thinking deeper, you will feel, "Why should it be so?" Power of innovation potentially can create a great improvement in the well-being of an individual. Won't you want your children and yourself to be able to visualize and achieve innovative solutions in every aspect of your lives?
TRIZ concepts and tools were created mostly for products in technology domains, but these are abstract enough to be equally useful in any thought domain that you can imagine.
Ideality
Ideality is
equal to the sum of the benefits divided by the sum of the costs plus the sum
of the harm. To achieve the IFR, the benefits of the concept must be increased
by the solution, while the costs and harm are decreased. The goal of the IFR is an
infinite positive result which is your target. The IFR concept can be explained by the following two
equations:
Ideality = ∑
Benefits / (∑ Costs + ∑ Harm), and
IFR =∑ Good
effects/∑ Bad effects
where
you strive for IFR to reach infinity.
The Ideal Final Result may seem unrealistic, but
it is a powerful tool that gets people to think out of the box for ideas without getting bogged down by technical constraints
and limitations.
The
IFR focuses the creator’s attention
on perfection as opposed to limitations. By aiming for a flawless
resolution from the start, breakthrough thinking is encouraged and less than ideal solutions are rejected.
In many cases,
developing a clear statement of the Ideal Final Result will lead directly to a
solution to the problem, and frequently leads to a solution at a very high
level, since the
technology-independent definition of the Ideal Final Result will lead the
problem solver away from traditional means of solving the problem.
The
Ideal Final Result concept forces you to find ways to maximize the good things
in a problem, concept, or idea, and minimize the bad. One way to apply IFR is
to assume you have zero budget to accomplish a task. This approach forces you
to look at the
available resources you have on hand and brainstorm ways to make
your idea happen without spending any money.
IFR driven solution search requires:
·
Proper formulation of the IFR itself.
· Assumption that you
have to reach the solution with zero budget, it means solution must use available free resources
that you have.
· Identify the invisible free resources
such as gravitation, unused space and so on.
· Focusing only on the
ideal final state and NOT
on the process by which you may reach that state. You have to free your mind from
the bias of existing processes.
Let us
look at a problem to see how IFR can help finding an innovative solution.
Problem example 1: Candy making
In
a candy factory, small bottle shaped chocolate candy filled up with thick sugar
syrup was produced. First the hollow chocolate bottles were produced and then
the syrup was poured into each candy bottle. But as the syrup was thick the
process of pouring in was slow. It was felt that productivity needs to be
increased. This is a classic problem posed first by Altschuller.
If
we consider the final state objectively, we may state our first Final State
as:
· Bottle shaped
chocolate filled with thick sugar syrup
Usual
method of filling up the chocolate body with thick syrup being slow, initial
attempts of improvement were:
·
Heating up the syrup
to make it thin for faster filling up, but it didn’t work as it melted the
chocolate body and deformed it.
· Alternatively, blown
injection molding, where the pressurized syrup provides the propulsive force to
shape the chocolate in a mould, was tried. But that increased cost
considerably, violating the Ideality condition.
These
failures prompted towards looking for a second Final State description:
· Thick sugar syrup enclosed
by bottle shaped chocolate body. This was the only other final state
description left and is an unusual one. It does not talk about filling up,
it talks about enclosing. If somehow we can reach this state at a cheap
cost, this becomes the IFR. In describing this final state, how the state has
been reached is delinked from the state. We are no longer bound to the idea of
filling up that gave so much trouble.
Assuming
this second final state description as the IFR, the challenge is to find out a
way by which syrup comes first and then the chocolate body.
The
ideal innovative solution proposed to freeze
the thick syrup into a bottle shape, dip it into melted liquid chocolate
for a measured time to form the chocolate body around it. In time the chocolate
body hardens and the freezed syrup content becomes liquid again in normal
temperature.
The processes involved
are cheap with no extra harmful effects.
If we examine the
process of arriving at the solution against the list of 40 Innovative TRIZ
principles, immediately we find the principle: Other Way round – principle no.
13 in action here. Any other? Yes we have used Change of State or Parameter
Change principle. Any other? Time separation also has been used.
In any new solution, always
examine the process and the solution from every angle possible, try to find new
processes or solutions and also link the principles with the process of
arriving at the solution.
Remember, process of thinking in arriving at a
solution is more important than the solution.
As always I would suggest that you absorb this IFR concept and start trying only the IFR definition activity on objects or concepts around you. It should be possible as, potentially all things are improvable. Though it is only definition activity, this will force you to analyze the defects and drawbacks closely. This deep analysis itself would be a strong learning.
Read my main blog on Innovation & Problem Solving and the other related blog on Innovation - Basic Principles
No comments:
Post a Comment