Power of Principle of Sharing in Innovation & Problem Solving

During the olden days Sharing was commonplace and not such a great thing to talk about

Principle of Sharing

Today it is not so. 

Having seen the classical times and been forced into the modern times, we realize with some surprise that today we do not share often. Sharing is not commonplace custom now—at least not in personal life.

Rather, to me Sharing needs to be given a pride of place as no less than:

The 41st TRIZ Inventive Principle.

But as noted TRIZ experts such as Ms. Ellen Domb confirm in their article that even after about 70 years from the time when Genrich Altshuller first identified 40 Inventive Principles of TRIZ as the basis of all inventions past, present and future, they have not been able to find any evidence of existence of a 41^st TRIZ inventive principle, I hold back. Instead I classify Sharing as a Basic Problem Solving Principle in our Problem Solving Armory resources or Mind Power Techniques that combine all the principles, techniques, methods, methodologies and approaches that have been practiced and prescribed by various authors and problem solvers through ages.

Story 1: Knowledge increases with sharing

In a recent workshop, while deliberating on various principles of Innovation and Problem Solving, I took up the Principle of Sharing. I asked my audience, "I believe knowledge increases with sharing. Can you tell me in how many ways does it increase?"

There was a brief silence. The members of the audience were from knowledge dissemination community. Then slowly responses started to come. Two suggestions were first offered.

1. Teacher's knowledge increases because she has to prepare well for a particular lecture session, and in the process not only organizes her thoughts, but also brings in new knowledge into her discourse. Her quality and extent of knowledge thus increases.
2. The knowledge of the listeners increases as they directly absorb new knowledge. I asked, "Is that all? Any more ways?" Usually we do not think more than this. But if we are practitioners of principle of exploration and principle of persistence, we may further find:
3. Not only does the individual knowledge of the students increase, collective knowledge of the learner group also increases. The mechanism behind collective knowledge increase is—the students tend to discuss their new found concept amongst themselves thus gaining new insights. Also they look for instances of application of the new concept in their environment and then start applying the concept thus going up the stages of learning.

Here I would request you to look for applications of the principle of sharing in your own environment. You will find that the awareness of instances of application of a concept in your environment significantly enhances your awareness of the concept. We have already mentioned this method earlier. If you actually practice a technique, your understanding of the technique will get still deeper.

Is that all? Any more ways the knowledge increases? 

4.     Well, it may so happen that some of the students decide to share their new knowledge further down a chain to their own friends and students and a situation of avalanche mechanism may well arise. 
Any more ways you can think of? It seems there is one more at least. 

5.     When a lecturer delivers a lecture and gets the students fully involved in deep interactions, questions and answers start. In this process of deep interaction, many times students either pose a difficult question forcing the lecturer to break new ground on the go or suggest a new solution or a new process of solution directly. This enriches the whole group of the students and the lecturer.

If you are very curious, you may find the existence of further ways knowledge increases on sharing. If you do find please let me know. I love to learn.

Just now I happened to notice the +Share button at the top right corner of my blogger post editing window. 

I am really taken aback. All those sharing mechanisms of the wonderful web come to my mind. Google plus, Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, AddThis and so many others devote so much efforts to improve mechanisms of sharing the content created by millions of content providers. The content creators in turn are intensely involved in using these mechanisms with the intent of reaching as many readers and generating as many clicks as possible.

How could I forget that! Sharing is of critical importance today, tomorrow and the day after. Isn't it?

I can now say the only thing that can be said:

Please share this post with as many fiends of yours as possible. Only take care to choose the person with whom you share to be as much patient as you.    

Read my other blogs on Innovative idea generation and its basic principles and Get smart, get innovative usingTRIZ