Methods

The Problem:

Optimization inherently produces diminishing returns.
Innovation is a focused, individual act, but problems hide within complex systems understood only by large teams of people.
Domain knowledge provides powerful insight but also barriers to innovation.
Innovation can greatly improve products, processes, business operations and intellectual property. To be valuable, innovation must often take a compound form that includes more than one or even all of these areas simultaneously.
Some tools exists that address product innovation or innovation with business processes. Few or none exist that support compound innovation and team innovation. Naturally, for team innovation to span products, IP and business processes, it must be integrated into the culture of the firm itself.

The Need:

In technology businesses, optimization is very useful, but innovation is necessary. What is needed is a way to support several critical tasks and criteria related to technical innovation within a business. First, problems must be identified that are opportunities for innovation, especially 1) those within complex systems or 2) those that cannot be solved with traditional engineering or optimization methods. Then the task is to promote team innovation (in addition to individual innovation). Domain knowledge should be integrated without tying the solution set to previous points of view. The best innovation spans products, processes, business operations and IP. The vision for innovation within a company would be one that exists at three critical levels; single domain innovation, compound innovation and ultimately the creation of a culture of innovation.

The Solution:

Pretium has created a method, a software package, a consulting practice and training programs that together serve this need. The key to the method's success is the integration of 1)an ability to map product, manufacturing, IP and business issues in the same mapping language and 2) the innovative expertise of over 2,000,000 patents distilled into 95 fundamental innovation patterns and most importantly 3)our success in making our clients the innovators. We provide tools, they solve their own problems. We propose The Pretium Method and Structured Innovation™:

As a foundation for innovation (The Guided Innovation Toolkit Software)
For large and complex problems (which could include Pretium Consulting Services)
For creating a culture of innovation (that might be supported by Pretium Training Programs)

The core element of Pretium's products and services is an innovation method that is built on a novel integration of extensive experience, three well established problem solving methods and ongoing research. These components are:

Experience: Over 125 years of experience in business, product, process and intellectual property innovation is represented by the Pretium Team. We have integrated this experience into the Pretium Methodology. The projects Pretium has completed since 2001also serve as a dynamic and growing resource.
The Function Analysis System Technique (FAST): A visual, mapping technique developed by Charles Byetheway in 1965 to deconstruct complicated problems and reveal cause-effect relationships.
The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ): A method originated by Genrich Altshuller in 1946. Mr. Altshuller discovered related patterns of innovation in patents describing unrelated technologies. He worked to distill from these patterns, elemental principles of innovation. Over two million patents have now been analyzed and their innovations reduced to combinations of 95 principles, which are integrated into the Pretium Methodology.
Brainstorming: Though the word is now widely used, it refers to a specific idea generation technique set forth in the 1950s by Alex Osborn. Brainstorming (the method) greatly amplifies creativity through focus and synergism (ideas triggers other ideas).
Research: Ongoing university research in product development, technology commercialization, intellectual property and venture creation supports further development of the method and related educational materials.

The core Pretium Method is designed to support General Innovative Problem Solving. The core Pretium Method consists of two phases: 1) Characterizing the situation and distilling the core issues and 2) Creating ideas, concepts and finally an action plan.

Getting Started: The first step is the identification of a problem. The Pretium Method is especially useful in addressing problems that cannot be solved via standard engineering or optimization practices due to complexity or the problem being inherently part of an absolutely critical function. We recommend the formation of a team that combines depth in the specific problem area with breadth spanning the major roles within a company. If we were to address a product problem, we would recommend building a team that consisted of several product experts and also representation from operations, marketing and manufacturing as examples. It is also important to have access to qualitative and quantitative data.

Assess Situation: The problem, team and access to data support the first task in the Pretium Method, Assessing the Situation. The purpose of this task is to frame the problem, the expectations, the constraints and the most valuable direction for innovation. The Ideal Vision is a very important concept. It is simply the ultimate purpose of the system, which is often challenging to understand, isolated from the costs, waste, time constraints and other value-negative functions associated with the system. It is important because is establishes an ultimate goal, the most valuable direction for innovation to follow.

Understand Cause and Effect: The next critical concept in the Method is that of a function. A process flow diagram is a tool designed to maintain and control a process, to limit variations. Innovation requires the opposite activity. The trick is knowing what can or should be changed.

Guided Brainstorming: Once the function model is complete, system performance can be enhanced in three ways: 1) improving useful functions, 2) reducing or eliminating harmful functions and/or 3) resolving contradictions between useful and harmful functions in the system. Inventive principles from TRIZ are combined with system resources to generate ideas to improve system performance in these three ways. This combination comes to fruition in a Guided Brainstorming™ session facilitated by Pretium’s expert facilitators and TRIZ Masters.

Creating Concepts and an Action Plan: The ideas generated in the Guided Brainstorming™ sessions can now be evaluated and combined into solution concepts. The best concepts can be selected for implementation. If the technical means to implement a selected concept require further development, these subsequent problems can be addressed with additional Structured Innovation™ sessions.

The Pretium Method provides a comprehensive tool for innovative problem solving. To this core, we have added specific tailored method variations that directly support innovation in products, intellectual property, manufacturing processes, business processes and also support strategy development across all of these areas.