Sharing applied - Innovation and Problem solving

Use of Sharing principle

In modern life, to satisfy commercial viability requirements, sharing resources has grown to become one of the major problem solving principles used in varieties of business areas.

Telecommunication

Network sharing

Nowadays most of the communication you carry out in daily life is of “far” nature—communication using or with resources located far away from you geographically. That is Tele–Communication. You don’t talk to people near you as much as you use the Internet, Mobile, TV or the land-line put together.

Many decades ago, by telecommunication we understood talking long distance over wired phone or sending telegraph message. Now we speak and carry out virtually all the tasks in daily life using phone and Internet services. Telecommunication networks are all interconnected and shared for giving you the magical facility to talk from your mobile handset to your dear one sitting on the opposite side of the globe. To reach her your speech may have to span a large number of different networks each belonging to a different telecom service provider. They are called Telco in short.

Same thing happens when you surf the Net. The text, pictures and video that you see on your computer screen come from all kinds of Web-Servers that use services from all kinds of Internet Service Providers (or ISPs in short) spread across the globe.

If these networks remained separated, the services would have remained localized and highly limited in service scope and variety. Connecting globally only meets your true communication requirements.

The telecommunication charge that you pay monthly or periodically is collected by your local telecom service provider. It carries your call, if it is speech, up to its own network boundary and then hands it over to the next network towards the destination of the speech content. This point onwards works the principle of sharing.

Telcos have network sharing agreements between themselves by which they not only share their network resources but also share the revenues generated.

Sharing mechanism makes telecommunication possible in practice. Imagine the power of sharing!

What really does happen here in abstract?

In abstract means: identifying the crux of the process—the crucial aspects of the process without mention of the special nature of the agents or entities involved in the process. This is the mechanism of abstraction—one of the most powerful mechanisms for learning and problem solving.

Abstraction of the mechanism of sharing between two telecom networks for carrying speech or data information:

For data communication:

Scene: you are surfing the Net

a.     Your network A hands over the data requested information to the next network B towards the destination of data requested (for Internet, the data packets can take practically any route, but still each packet contains the IP address of data request source and data request destination).

b.    Now it is the responsibility of the network B to route the data received towards the destination. Possibly it hands over to a third network C. It goes on in this way.

c.     Finally when a network (say network N) identifies the data requested destination address to be in its own pool of addresses, it routes the data requested information to the identified Web Server.    

d.    The Web server responds to the request and generates the requested data packets and packages these with destination address as the address of the sender or requester.

e.     The answer data now flows back to the network A in a similar (but not necessarily following the same route) mechanism; and your computer screen finally displays the information you had asked for.

Clearly specified sharing agreements and data carrying protocols understood by all players in this process make this apparently highly complex process a routine, rugged and commercially viable mechanism.

If we abstract still further:

      i.        An active agent in the process has clearly specified tasks.

     ii.        An active agent may have to deal with home generated task item or foreign task item.

   iii.        The organization owning an active agent will earn revenue share according to what type of task item its active agent deals with—home generated or foreign.

Abstracting once more we may have something like:

Core sharing mechanism A: benefit sharing:

A service owner earns revenue share according to what kind of work load it caters to: for its own work load it earns more, for others’ workload it earns a smaller previously agreed to share. In this case, benefits are shared according to contribution towards a service request fulfillment.

In this mechanism,

                   i.        Work load owner share is significantly higher than other service providers.

                 ii.        Each service provider has to look after managing all its assets and functional requirements.

                iii.        Some special types of services required for carrying out the business as a whole are served by a few special service providers. These are again paid by all other service providers according to the common workload they serve.

                iv.        In fine, in this kind of sharing mechanism, largely each works for its own gains except for the responsibilities required for the services to sustain as a whole.  

For speech communication the process is not much different.

All kinds of business resource sharing follow similar type A core sharing mechanism.

Telecommunication

Mobile infrastructure sharing

When we started rolling out or managing mobile services in a virgin field, number of customers was not large, networks were small with small number of BTSs (Base Transceiver Stations) and accordingly requirement of buildings to house the BTSs was also minimal.  

To give you an idea, in early stages of mobile service maturity (assuming that when one grows old, one gains maturity), number of BTSs in Kolkata was in two digits (less than 100). Now, nearly at saturation point the number is reaching 3000, an increase of 3000% (30 times) over a period of nearly two decades.

For installing a new BTS where can we get a suitable house now! It has become next to impossible for a mobile service provider (all mobile service providers would desire to roll out as many BTSs as its competitors, and there are at least four such major mobile service providers at Kolkata at any point of time now) to find a suitable building to house its new BTS all on its own.

Out of this severe constraint (constraints or barriers are useful: in generating new ideas and solutions: some methods deliberately create constraints), were born the common Infrastructure Service Providers.

These organizations acquire, prepare, sell rights of use of part infra resources and also manage a large number of BTS buildings across the city. They specialize in infrastructure. The mobile service providers hire these infra resources from the Infra service providers and share a roof for antennae, rooms for equipment housing and also share the common power supply of the building. All these resources are managed by the infrastructure service provider in lieu of hiring charges. It has to bear all the headache of managing the infra resources. The mobile service providers need to worry about only their own specialized functions.

This is not only sharing, but also principle of specialization at work.

Principle of specialization:

In a large scoped operational or project environment, not every person will do all kinds of jobs. Tasks will have to be analyzed according to requirements, task carrying out agents specialized in doing a particular type of task need to be identified and allotted their specific tasks and all of the active agents need to be coordinated and managed together (like a master conductor of an orchestra performance) to move towards a high level of overall task fulfillment satisfaction.

So as a mobile service provider, you share a building with three or four other competitors for locating your BTS and transfer the worry of managing the infra to the infra service provider. If the infra service provider were not there, one of the competitors would have acquired a particularly good building first (BTS locations are specific in an area, technically recommended by a complex software), and all subsequent service providers would have had to forego the specific location, thus leaving a hole in their networks.

As no service provider can hope to be the first one in acquiring all good buildings, sharing a good building with other service providers becomes the only feasible practical choice.

This is kind of: enemies at war sharing a bed!

Telecommunication

Mobile Exchange

A mobile telephone exchange is a highly complex combination of modules of software and hardware. Each software module is specialized for a specific set of tasks and carries out these tasks for ALL the task loads (for all mobile calls) absorbed by the exchange. In other words, All Calls share a specific hardware or software module for part fulfillment of their requirements.

Don’t you think this is sharing?

Levels of Sharing

A.    Global network sharing happens at global level. All players in the global domain get benefited and total gain in this case is maximal.

B.    Infra sharing for BTS housing happens at local level. All players in the local city domain get benefited and gains limited to the local domain.

C.    Software module service sharing by all calls in a mobile exchange happens at the micro level and enables a specific mobile telecom exchange to perform satisfactorily.

A solution to a problem can be addressed at various levels. The following figure represents the concept.

Levels of Sharing

Introducing the new powerful technique of zero-based problem solving

The new powerful technique of zero-based problem solving

 

Zero based solving

We tend to start a problem solving process with previous biases. Admitting that we can’t be totally free of biases, it is of great importance to start a new problem solving process from as much neutral a standpoint as possible. It will enable me the problem solver to analyze the new problem in its own merit. After this analysis, if need be, old known techniques, methods, principles and approaches I will use just as it is required to be used for solving the specific problem.

At the very beginning, before analyzing the problem well, I should have no opinion regarding how I will go about solving this problem.

I will start with a clean slate, a zero base and an alert and bias-free analytical mind, prepared for anything. As I proceed towards the solution step by step, gradually I will start forming rules and patterns that I think will be effective in solving this specific problem.

This is what I call the Principle of zero based Problem Solving.  

We know what is zero based budgeting and some of us have heard about zero based thinking. Here we have used the abstract idea of zero based approach in problem solving to form a useful principle. The important concept here is the idea of zero based approach. It simply means, start fresh.

It is a powerful approach and can be used in situations in our lives when we are in dumps, want to forget the past but cannot escape remembering.

The link below possibly contains some useful insights:

http://www.wikihow.com/Use-%E2%80%98Zero-Based-Thinking%E2%80%99-When-Making-Hard-Decisions

Now we will discuss solution to our Four Square Problem. I hope you have solved it already.

Learning from solving Four Square Problem

Problem restatement:

Question 1: Divide the light grey unshaded area in square A into two equal pieces.

Question 2: Divide the light grey unshaded area in square B into three equal pieces.

Question 3: Divide the light grey unshaded area in square C into four equal pieces.

Question 4: Divide the light grey unshaded area in square D into seven equal pieces.

The original square is shown below for convenience.

Answers to the first two questions are easy.

The red diagonal line divides the unshaded area in square A into two equal pieces and it is immediately visible to you.

While looking for the second answer, you perhaps imagined or visualized the empty area as a collection of three equal squares. Basically in this case, you have imagined square B in terms of a square made up of four smaller squares. For this answer you didn’t have to wait long. By visual inspection, the answer comes easily.

Perhaps the third question gave you some trouble. At least it gave me a little trouble. By previous bias I tried to think square C as a square made up of four squares – no, that won’t do – within a few seconds I found this. Basically the unshaded portion here consists of three equal squares. We need to divide it into four equal pieces.

How can we divide a three unit piece into four equal pieces?

Can we break down each part of the three part piece into four smaller parts? If we do that we will get 3x4, that is, 12 smaller parts. These parts are equal squares. Oh yes, we have got the solution now. Take three such adjacent squares each. Do it suitably three times and you will get your solution (when you do three, the fourth will automatically be created). The breakdown of the three small squares is shown below.

 And now the final solution.

I don’t know how you have got the solution, but if you look at this method, don’t you feel this is a more sure and systematic way of solving at least this problem?

Which principles did we use? In the question 2, we straightway divided the empty space into three equal parts. That method we can’t follow here we have tried and found out. This learning was through analysis and application of Principle of Fresh Start.

This step of problem analysis is vital in learning the nature and anatomy of the problem. At this step we have also discovered that we need to divide a three unit area into four equal pieces.

As we are not using any fraction concept here, the new derived requirement implies that we need to breakup each of the three units into four equal smaller units. Do you find any similarity of this concept with anything you know? Think over.

As soon as we know what is needed to be done, we examine the smaller squares, and decide that it is easy to break each up into four still smaller squares ending up with 12 small squares.

Now it is easy for us to get to the final solution. First we combine three squares together four times to get four collections each containing three equal squares. And last but not the least: you need to actually implement this abstract solution, which is in your mind, into the physical square domain.

Does it remind you of any school level knowledge? Remember the concepts of divisibility and factorization. This is nothing but application of those early basic concepts into another domain.

This is beauty of using abstract principles and concepts in problem solving. A school level basic concept you have now used for solving an entirely different kind of problem. Here division of space was the core activity and required ability.

In the same way, in future if your MPSF finds some similarity in a different problem situation, it will recommend use of this abstract principle and will lead you to the solution.

By the way, can you say which is the abstract principle we are talking about? Give it a thought.

We have used two highly powerful principles here:

      First we have used: Principle of Segmentation (or dividing or fragmenting), and

      Next we have used: Principle of Merging (or combining similar things).

These are two of the leading principles in the set 40 inventive principles of TRIZ which we will discuss in later sessions. These principles have very wide applications.

Let us come back to the four square problem again. First we finish answering the fourth question.

What was your experience in answering the fourth question?  Either you know the answer instantly or you find it difficult. If you get the solution instantly, you have used your intuition. Intuition is also a powerful mechanism towards problem solving, no second thoughts about it. Intuitive problem solving is fastest.

In emergent situations such as fire-fighting, front-line battle in a war split second decision making is the necessity and that kind of decision making is mostly intuitive based on experience and training.

Unfortunately for me, I was stalled for about 10 seconds trying to segment the totally empty square D using complex methods I had used in question 3. That was bias. This is one example of the need to start fresh without any bias. The more you move along the earlier path, farther away will you move from the solution. 

In about 10 seconds I recognized my mistake and started to think fresh from a zero base. It became immediately apparent that I can divide the fully empty square into any number of equal pieces by just dividing one of its sides into equal portions by drawing side length lines parallel to its perpendicular sides.

This is another kind of segmentation. It is segmentation, but used differently. You are segmenting a space by segmenting a length.

This is more versatile, as by applying this concept you can actually divide the square into any number of equal portions. We say application of this concept here is more general in scope.

Now notice how we have used the same concept of Segmentation in four different ways to answer the four different questions. In the first question we have used simple observation. In the second question, we have mentally broken up the space into three equal pieces straightaway at the first attempt itself. To answer the third question we faced some difficulty, but finally we reached the solution by first segmenting the squares into still smaller squares and then merging them into required number of collections. In the fourth question we have not used any of these techniques but took resort to segmenting a side to segment a space.

Before anything let us see the fourth solution.

Concepts and Concept structures

How to segment is an abstract concept. We may think of this as a standalone concept. It can briefly be described as: a process of dividing something into smaller pieces of same something.

This process of segmentation can be applied on practically any physical thing that can be segmented without breaking it and destroying its property. But before going down to a physical object we might discover that the characteristics or properties of physical things form an abstract concept layer higher than the physical things but below the concept of segmentation.

What are the physical characteristics on which segmentation principle can be applied? What did we segment here? We segmented space in the four square problem. From a general abstract concept of dividing into smaller pieces we became more specific and learned how to divide space into smaller pieces. The four different questions led to four different ways to segment space. Each of the ways forms a specific variation of the concept of segmentation.

The following shows the relationships between various layers of the concept segmentation in the form of a structure.

Concept structure of segmentation - in four square problem solving

But in addition to Space, we may further consider applying the concept of segmentation to Distance (divide a distance in kilometers), Time (divide a day into hours), or Weight (divide a quantity of sugar into kilograms).

We segment many characteristics of tangible or intangible things during our daily lives. Think of some examples.
How do we segment? In many cases we have units and measuring instruments that help us in segmenting, but in many other scenarios, we need to use our estimation.

For example, we may need to answer the following questions with respect to an empty room.

      How many students can be accommodated in this room if used as a lecture room?

      How many workstations can be put here to form a computer lab?

      How many office desks can be placed in this room if used as an office room?

To answer these questions, we need to estimate space requirement for students, workstations and office desks with sitting chairs respectively. For each we will use the concept of space segmentation, but suitably modified according to the problem. Carrying out the actual segmentation, we need to estimate, each a different type of estimation.

Thus from the abstract concept of segmentation we become more and more specialized and specific in segmenting as depth of level increases. Following is a representative concept structure.

Versatile Concept Structure of Segmentation

This is a vertical segmentation starting with the abstract concept or principle Segmentation at the Level 0. At the next level 1 we become more specific with the idea of Segmenting Space. It could have been, Segmenting Time or Distance as well at this stage depending on the problem model. At the next level 2, we become still more specific with the concepts of Segmenting an office room, a class room or Segmenting a lab room depending again on the problem definition at hand. If I know how to segment Space, with a little more thought I should be able to segment any kind of space. I would need the capability of estimation to effectively do that.

This is what we call Structure, rather a hierarchical structure. We will just state here that Structures are the skeletons that hold all knowledge. It is sufficient to know here that clearly defined concepts and their inter-relationships form a structure. When solving a problem, the very first thing that you may do is to form a problem model in the form of a structure. It may not be explicitly drawn on paper, but nevertheless forming such a structure in your mind makes the problem solving much easier.

Interestingly, most real life problems are inherently ill-structured. It depends on the problem solver to create some kind of structure of the problem after due analysis of the problem.

Isolated concepts are of little value

When we start learning about a concept, we may learn bits and pieces of it in the form of concept components. At the very start, these constituent concept components may not have many relationship links between them. At this stage of unrelated concept components, we cannot use the components well. Once we start relating the components and gradually establish a structure (it may be hierarchical or a network or of other forms), it becomes highly effective and usable knowledge. This form of inter-related concept structure makes retrieving the whole structure from memory and using it effectively much easier. Load on your memory decreases as well as power of knowledge increases.

Cramming facts about a subject creates unrelated pieces of concepts of little overall value, whereas well structured and connected concept structures represent effective and usable knowledge.

Why are these ideas on concept structures important for our purpose?

The reason we are discussing concept structures at length is: to solve real life problems of any new type, not only you have to use well-formed already existing concept structures in your mind, but also you have to create such structures by analyzing the new problem and only then you will have proper control on the problem.

Building powerful and effective concept structures is a continuous process and this process speeds up if you are aware of existence and importance of such structures.

Look where we had started and where we have finally landed. This is again a process. We call it Idea linking and Exploration. We discover new areas of knowledge and new possibilities by consciously using idea linking and exploring and Problem solving needs continuous learning and exploration.

 

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