moreinspirationblog.com

We’ve updated MoreInspiration again. Here are the main changes…

1. The site has always been free, but now we have opened up a lot more functionality for users without a login. Registration is only required if you want to use the community functions such as voting, commenting or submitting innovations.
2. We also made it more fun to keep browsing the innovations by presenting a list of related innovations.
   
3. The panel with Properties and Functions has been redesigned to give a better impression of what happened and what’s the benefit.
4. It’s now possible to save your search as an RSS feed! Now you can be notified of any updates made to MoreInspiration.com which are related to your original search.
5. Finally, track comments on your post via RSS.

Making new and exiting products doesn’t always need to be difficult. Using the CREAX Innovation method you can see that some innovations are really obvious. The CREAX methodology helps you to systematically generate ideas for creating new products.

Sometimes adding an existing item or making the slightest of changes can greatly enhance your product or even supply you with a totally new one. Below is a selection of 5 “Why didn’t I think of that” products from the MoreInspiration.com database.

1) Trimmed down flashlight
The Pak-Lite combines two Super Bright LED Bulbs with a 9-volt battery. It uses a patented design to provide a small, lightweight, long running, simplistic, durable, and field proven flashlight that will be with you wherever you go!

2) Self-charging smoke alarms
DuPont’s self-charging smoke alarms are plugged into ceiling-mounted light sockets, and charge up each time the light switch is turned on. You don’t lose your light either, just plug the bulb directly into the alarm.

3) World time clock
A patented desk clocks with 12 slides, each with the name of two major cities; together, the 24 cities represent the 24 global time zones; to find the local hour in another time zone, simply roll the clock so that the city representing that time zone is on top.

4) Cigarette-Match-Stick
The Cigarette-Match-Stick are cigarette packs with a strike strip on the side and the cigarettes are coated with the phosphorus material on it’s tip. So instead of looking for a matchbox or lighter every time you want to light your cigarette, you can just light it up by striking it on the strike strip on the pack itself.

5) Serving tray with finger tips
This tray has five points sticking up in the middle, which serve as holes for your finger tips. This provides better grip for waiters.

Properties and functions are an integral part of what makes CREAX’ innovation method so unique. In a previous post we introduced you to the first part, the properties, in this post we’ll give you some more information about the second part: functions.

As discussed in part 1, we want to change products to be better, nicer, cheaper or greener. For this we need to alter properties of these products. The reason why we alter properties is to achieve either (1) new functions or (2) improved functions. Here are some examples with their functions in bold

• A product can change its surface from flat to protruded so it is easier to grip, has better heat transfer.
• A solid product could be changed to be a liquid so it is easier to mix or dissolve.
• A solid product could also be made into a powder so it is easier to dissolve.
• Other functions include cleaning, transporting, measuring, assembling, connecting, etc…

Note two things about why this is so powerful.

1. Different properties (e.g. liquid and powder) can create the same function
   E.g. Dissolving by making it liquid or powder. The nice thing about this is that the “solution” is no longer related to a specific product. You can take the property/function link and apply it to every product. Great for finding inspiration outside your own domain!
2. Also notice most functions are expressed in the form of verbs
   This opens up new opportunities for automated analysis of what makes an innovation. CREAX continually invests in research into this area. Some of the results can be seen on the papers we publish on TRIZ Journal. E.g. Directed Variation - solving conflicts in TRIZ

The functions can be found in the drop-down menu on the advanced search page: