Topic of the Month: Stop Converting!!
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"That's a conundrum, isn't it?"---Tea Party supporter commenting on the contradiction between wanting to cut government spending and keeping her Social Security (Newsweek Scope and Perspective column). Note that "conundrum" is a newly discovered word to describe what we in TRIZ have been calling a "contradiction for over 50 years.

Those of you who remember your high school or college physics may recall a fundamental law of physics that says that every time we convert one form of energy to another (electricity to heat, burning gas, electrolyzing water to make hydrogen, using waste combustion heat to heat something else), we lose some of the energy. Another way of saying this more simply is that water runs downhill. Even when we pass falling water through a turbine to generate power, some of the energy is permanently lost. The corollary to this is that the more times we convert energy from one form to another, the more energy we lose.

One of the TRIZ Lines of Evolution says that systems evolve in the direction of reducing the number of energy conversions. If you're having trouble envisioning this, think about the differences between taking solar energy, absorbing the heat into water, using the hot water to generate gas, using the gas to turn a turbine, which in turn generates electricity, which finally reaches your appliance and spins a motor. Each of these conversions loses energy. The most efficient way of doing this would be to use solar energy directly to produce hot coffee or dry clothes. We don't do either one of these very often due to neighborhood zoning laws or just the time it takes. So we run several energy conversions in order to speed up the rate, which we trade off for efficiency. TRIZ teaches us that the number of these energy type conversions will drop with time as we become more efficient. So what should you do?

First, make a list of the starting energy source that you use (mechanical, thermal, chemical, electronic, electromagnetic, optical) and then list how many times is it converted to another form of the same energy or into one of the other forms. We have seen cases where this number is 4 or 5, indicating a huge opportunity for improvement.

A normal engineer would look at this as a productivity and efficiency project. A TRIZ person would go beyond this and plan a long term project to reduce the number of energy conversions in half, and ultimately to zero. This may mean a total redesign of the product or service and may even mean a totally new business concept. (Our recent commentary at http://www.realinnovation.com/commentary/jackhipple describes this from the standpoint of the recent bankruptcy of Blockbuster).

Don't stick your head in the sand and think that someone isn't going to replace your business model by reducing the number of energy conversions to get to the ideal result that your customers want. They really don't care about the details of how well you convert one thing to another--all they care about is the function that your product or system provides them.

If you can't figure out how to reduce the number of energy conversions, you don't have a broad enough breadth of skills in the room. Get a hold of some people with different pedigrees and then arbitrarily remove one or more of the energy conversions and run a TRIZ session with them, asking how to get the same result with one less energy conversion and then figure out how much money you're saving. You'll surprise yourself and point the way to new intellectual property.