Inventiveness in Daily Life: Other Way Round Inventive Principle

Other Way Round Inventive Principle in Daily Life Problem Solving

Daily life examples of Other Way Round Inventive Principle and other inventive principles analyzed threadbare to increase awareness of inventiveness.

Goal is to show how a common person can reach an inventive solution without being aware of inventive principle used and thus become conscious about the inventive possibilities in real life problem solving.

Inventive principle Other way round approach

The inventive TRIZ principle of Other way round is,

• Opposite way of acting.

Simply speaking, Other way round is the attempt to approach the problem from opposite direction.

This is one of the abstract 40 inventive principles identified by Dr. Genrich Altshuller who created the systematic TRIZ innovation system.

Let's look at an example in everyday life where the Other way round principle has been used with astonishing results.

Example 1: Use of Other way round principle in everyday life - upside down bottle of honey

Ruku purchased the bottle of honey only recently. I was surprised to see it placed upside down on the tray. Then I noticed the printed label on the bottle. The printing is on the upward direction only. That must mean that the bottle has been designed just that way to be placed bottom up, I understood.

What is the advantage of this new trick?

• Problem addressed: It was always difficult, rather impossible, to get the last few drops of a thick liquid in a bottle.

• Solution: Upside down, there is no visible trace of honey at the empty top. Honey being heavy, it finally accumulates over the cap at the bottom. The cap is specially designed to release controlled drops of honey with each squeeze.

The novel design using the inventive principle of Other way round served two purposes:

1. It is a great attention grabber, and so this upside down property aids selling.
2. And surely the design is not just for show, it solves a long ignored irritating problem with full satisfaction.

At what cost?

• That's the beauty of inventive design, additional cost is nearly nil.

We'll now examine in details how a designer might finally arrive at the inventive solution to a problem on the basis of not one but three inventive principles, the main one being Other way round principle.

This is an observed application, not a case where I have personally solved a problem using the inventive principle.

Example 2: Solving a real life problem inventively without knowing the inventive principles used: Piercing cap on a tube of cream

Years back when I screwed open the cap on a tube of cream medicine, I found that the mouth of the tube is protected by a thin metal cover.

• Problem: I need something sharp to pierce a hole in the protective metal cover, I thought.

• Design of solution at minimal cost: Then accidentally I noticed the cap. It had a protrusion at the back of the cap, obviously to make a hole when turning it around.

• Method of use: Turning the cap around I tried to screw the cap using its opposite end. It fitted perfectly on the mouth of the tube and better still it had screw threads on its head end also. I screwed the cap tight the opposite way using its head end.

• Result: Yes, the protrusion had made a perfectly round hole at the center of the metal cover solving the problem of making a hole on the tube mouth cover.
• Cost: Its additional cost was negiligible.
• Further inventiveness in the solution: Also this problem solving protrusion was placed in an already unused free space. This is an example of free resource use inventive principle.

The production of the extra bit of perforating notch added practically no cost to the cost of the tube and served its purpose perfectly.

Understanding how the innovation was created and which inventive principles used

Problem identification, conventional solutions and constraints

Let us imagine to be the designer of the tube of cream who is bent upon increasing customer satisfaction.

He must have identified the problem of piercing the protective cover on the mouth of a tube of cream,

• Problem identification: For using a tube of cream with a protecting thin metal cover on the mouth of the tube, the user must search for and use a sharp instrument to pierce the metal cover.

It has been a niggling problem always.

With this observation, the designer formed his clear objective:

• General solution: Can we supply a small piercing instrument with the tube to increase customer satisfaction?

He could immediately visualize the obvious constraints:

• Producing an additional item would have its additional cost that too for something that is to be used once only.
• Supplying an additional piercing small instrument with the tube is not a cost effective feasible idea at all.

Lookout for other out-of-the-box possibilities

Can there be any other way?

• This is the gap between the objective and the innovative solution.

• One has to make a jump from the objective to the innovative solution in mind. Perfect solution is not easily visible at all. Out-of-the-box idea is necessary most often.

What would you have done?

Would you, as the designer, start thinking without any strategy for solving the problem hoping that a brilliant idea would pop up surely in your head? Or, would you go ahead and try to break the bottleneck!

Covering the gap between the objective and the inventive solution by Question, analysis and answer technique

• Instead of waiting for a brilliant idea to strike, we would start by asking ourselves the most important revealing question at the point, getting the best answer, analyzing the possibility and then forming the second important question. Repeatedly.

• This is the potent QAA technique of real life problem solving.

Let's see how we can reach the solution of the piercing cap just by QAA technique without knowing the use of inventive principles at all.

• Question 1. What is the most important or critical constraint?
• Answer 1. Cost of production and management of an additional instrument to be used only once is the most critical constraint.

Question 2. How to minimize the cost of production and management of a piercing instrument to nearly zero?

This time it is a small gap to jump across to the answer.

Answer 2.

• The piercing instrument must be produced as a part of producing the tube, not as a separate instrument.

In fact, there cannot be any other possibility you were sure.

Question 3. Which part of the tube can be used as the piercing instrument?

Analysis and answer 3: The tube itself cannot perforate itself. The cap must act as the piercing instrument.

Question 4. But how can the cap be used as the piercing instrument?

In answering this last question, the designer now examines the possibilities by inspecting the cap minutely. This is deeper analysis of the promising possibility.

It takes a short while before he could focus on the head of the cap.

And he realizes,

• The flat head of the cap is the resource waiting to be used.

• This must provide the solution. There is no other way.

A piercing projection on the flat cap head would not only be awkward, piercing the metal cover with it would also be not a smooth, easy and controlled process.

Problem changed to a more focused one

The question now shifts to make the process of piercing as easy and smooth as possible,

Question 5: How can the piercing be done smoothly and easily with a projection on the cap head? It is a question of making a jump across an unknown gap again.

• Whenever the problem solver confronts such an unknown gap to jump across, essentially out-of-the-box thinking is needed to make the jump.

Not used to random thinking, you try to actually imagine the action of turned around cap head with its newly added projection for piercing the metal cover. By habit you always screwed the cap tight in the normal case, but the turned around cap you can't screw in.

Or can't you really?

Enlightened idea: Realization: There surely is a clear space between the tube mouth and the cap head when the cap is screwed tight in the normal way. What if the flat head is embedded in a cavity?

• The gap to cross is a short one and with persistent efforts to find a way out by examining closely all the elements involved, it is not before the perfect solution you could see in your mind's eye.

• Making a cavity with screw threads, and adding the sharp projection while matching the depth of the metal cover and the head of the cap properly were just a few formalities to be completed.

• The threaded cavity ensured fail-safe piercing without any chance of the needle head sliding off the metal cover, and it actually needs to be blunt, not sharp.

• While the projection is screwed in, it applies continuously increasing pressure on the metal cover at a single point and can break through a stronger cover. No need for it to be sharp at all.

• Production becomes easy as well as the blunt needle head eliminates any chance of breaking the needle head while piercing. Bluntness makes it strong and sturdy. All these goodness because of the threaded cavity.

Examining the inventive principle used in the threaded cavity

• The threaded cavity ensured the cap head to be screwed tight thus breaking the metal cover uniformly without any jagged edge as well as without any chance of the blunt needle head breaking off.

• The process is smooth without any need for extra force.

Isn't it an inventive idea?

Surely you would agree that this must be so. But which one among the 40 principles?

This inventive action cannot readily be found among the list.

This again is a truth that you must know,

• The 40 inventive principles are not the all inventive principles that can be and are used knowingly or unknowingly. If needed, create your own useful inventive idea.

Let us examine in a little more detail, what the action of screwing in really means.

• The screw motion is basically a rotating motion along with a forward movement, it is not a simple one.

All the hundreds of different types of drills boring through a thin plank, the wall of your house or through a mountain to make a tunnel use this compound rotation plus forward motion.

How can we express this motion in its simplest and most abstract form? It can simply be,

• Compound motion.

Still we would be missing the valuable property of the screwing motion,

• In addition to rotating motion with a forward movement, the threads provide no other path than the threads and keep the compound motion under full control. The screwing motion of the cap is a Rotating, Forward and Controlled motion.

• We'll name it in a more abstract manner as Principle of Controlled Multiple Actions, potentially a very powerful principle to use.
  

Summary: Inventive principles used as a whole in the piercing tube cap

To use the protrusion, the inventive principle of other wau round is used.

• Turn the cap around and screw it tight the opposite way.

Any other inventive principle used?

Truth is,

• No worthwhile innovation in real life happens based on only one inventive principle.

• Always a number of inventive principles are used together to achieve an inventive solution.

What are the other inventive principles used?

Remember what we said,

• The flat head of the cap is the resource waiting to be used.

The cap head and a space, still invisible, the space below it provided the free resources where only the threaded cavity with the piercing projection could be made. This is a great use of the powerful free resource use principle.

Truth is,

• Free resource use principle is behind most of the innovations.

• When in a problem situation, look around for a useful free resource, and if you find one, you would have your inventive solution assured.

On the whole three inventive principles supposed to have been used in the solution,

1. Other way round principle, the main principle,
2. Inventive action provided by the screw thread - Principle of Controlled Multiple Actions, and,
3. Free resource use principle.

Getting additional benefits out of the main solution: Value addition

Any other problem solved by the piercing cap?

• As the size of the pierced hole could be precisely controlled by the protrusion and the depth it would go in, you would get just the amount of cream needed with each squeeze. No more accidental splotches of wasted cream and discomfort.

• In the process of solving the main problem every opportunity is to be used for extracting as many benefits as possible without any extra cost of course.

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Awareness of inventive principles increases the ability of your real life problem solving inventively

We are now well-aware of what the Other way round inventive principle is, and how it can be applied for inventive solutions of real ife problems.

Being aware, it is time to actually apply this powerful inventive principle in our real life problem solving.

Truth is,

• The idea of any inventive principle needs out of the way thinking, it doesn't come naturally.

• Being aware of the possibility increases chances that you will apply a suitable inventive principle in solving a real life problem.

Here, I leave you with the picture of a special object with innovative use and a brief idea on what its normal use is. Find its innovative use.

Example 3: The classic basalt stone mortar and pestle

After a rather long research, Ruku purchased the solid basalt 25.5 cm by 17.5 cm mortar along with the heavy imposing pestle. Such a beauty of a mortar and pestle I had never seen. Any hard nut can be cracked and ground to dust with this surely and effortlessly, by now I know.

Analyze the object and identify its special qualities and which inventive principles will be in action in its use in various ways.

Suggestions for you

1. Click open the list of 40 inventive principles with examples.
2. Go through the full list with examples just once at first.
3. Choose a few principles that you find interesting. All principles are not used with the same frequency.
4. And look for objects and ideas around you where at least one of the 40 principles has been used.
5. Finally when in a problem situation, try to use an inventive principle first in the process of solving the problem.

Make it a habit of examining the objects with something apecial around you that you have taken for granted all these years.

• Put yourself in the position of the person who first created the object with the special quality from scratch. Ask revealing questions and analyze to get answers and analyze the answers to form the second important question. Repeatedly.

In the process, identify which inventive principle is acting as a basis for solution.

• This drill is not boring, rather it is highly creative and you learn about the highly valuable and elusive inventiveness to solve your real life problems all by yourself. After all, any real life problem solving needs an element of inventive thinking.

Happy inventing to solve your real life problems.

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