Lamborghini x Callaway
Conventional Brainstorming fuels ideas for your customer/consumer problem solving during the fuzzy front-end phase of innovation, a good brainstorming session requires a creative mindset, intuition and knowledge from the team involved.
A strong contrast to brainstorming is Triz, a relatively unheard-of philosophy that provides innovators with a systematic approach to problem solving.
TRIZ is the Russian acronym for the "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving," an international system of creativity developed in 1946 by Russian inventor Genrich Altshuller. It is based on research covering hundreds of thousands of inventions across many industries to produce generalisable problems and related solutions that can be applied to solve your customers/consumers problem. In simple terms, Triz relies on the fact that whatever problem you are trying to solve, somewhere else it has already been solved.
Triz is transferable, because problems and solutions are common across industries. By representing a problem as a general contradiction, you can then leverage solutions that are applied in other industries.
Lamborghini and Callaway, two non-competing innovators that dominate their respective industries with ranges of high-performing products formed an R&D collaboration to pursue solutions to their common paradox of identifying stronger, but lighter materials for their products when manoeuvring on the road or golf course.
The toolkit provides various approaches, firstly Triz recommends to investigate solutions in the below 4 (of 40 available) principles that best fit the Lamborghini and Callaway situation.
Principle #1. Segmentation
Modular body materials, strength only where needed. Where the stress concentrates under cornering, braking, acceleration, bumps etc.
Principle #8. Anti-weight
Body shape that becomes lighter as the car/club gets faster in motion.
Principle #40. Composites
Fiberglass, carbon fibre, kevlar, honeycomb design, plywood, bamboo etc.
Principle #15. Dynamics
Body structured to move and strengthen under rotation.
The second available Triz tool is the Effects Database which outlines solutions that can be investigated (in the tool). 63 solutions appear under the search “increase strength”, “composites” and “carbon nanotubes” identified as potential solutions. The final solution out of the partnership was a new material called Forged Composite which encompassed 500,000 intertwined turbostatic fibers per square inch, creating the lightest, strongest, most precise material ever used by the two companies. The material inspired the innovative Callaway Diablo Octane driver, which delivered a 7-meter advantage on the golf course over its Titanium predecessor. The material was debuted by Lamborghini in 2010 on the extremely light, Sesto Elemento hypercar and the more recent track-dominant Huracan Performante (turn your speakers up!).
Find out how you can fire-up your innovation front-end Like Lamborghini and Callaway! eutopos consulting applies Triz to steer idea-generation and solve customer/consumer problems in team-based sprint sessions. Make contact today contact@eutopos.co
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