Ideality in a Business Context
We are living in a time where everything becomes tailormade, customized or more individual. At the same time prices for standard solutions have dropped by realizing scale effects.
We have so many demands for “ideal” products:
- high-end smartphones at low costs
- performant cars without pollutants
- Tasteful food without impact on people’s health or the environment
Also, in business we have many demands for ideal services or products:
- Customized software at low cost
- Highly efficient processes with high flexibility
- Products who complies to all regulations and show no errors
- Supply chains who guarantee maximum productivity without stocks
- Etc.
So, we can summarize that achieving ideality is a driving force of our current economic system as it usually goes hand in hand with an increasing degree of value for the customer or user.
Basically, the ideality of a system follows the rule:
∑ Benefits
Ideality = _____________
∑ Harms
Benefits are the performance, functionality of the system and advantages over similar or neighbor systems. So, the bigger the benefits, the bigger the value or ideality of the system.
All those advantages are usually achieved at the cost of something else. An innovative product usually has some limitations and from a business perspective they need to be transparent. All those harms diminish the value of the system.
An ideal system would have unlimited benefits and no harms (Ikovenko et al. 2016).
Ideality and a maximum value are obviously not achieved in one single step. An engineering system evolves over time so that its total value always increases. Typically, the increase of value follows the s-curve. Depending on the phase, the product is either increasing in performance or is reducing harms, so that in total the value over time is higher (Ikovenko et al. 2016).
How to use “Ideality” for innovations or business improvements?
The concept of ideality can be used to brainstorm when a new generation of a product or service shall be developed. In a very structured way, all benefits and harms can be listed, and ideas can be collected how existing benefits can be increased further and which harms or costs can be eliminated. This is a very useful tool to break out of the current limitations of a system (Mann, 2001).
As an example:
The ideal learning management system
Benefits:
- Cloud-based system with low operating costs
- High security level
- User-friendly design
- Integration of e-learnings and video tutorials
Harms:
- Not adoptable to individual needs
- Difficult change process during implementation
- Not fitted to branch-specific demands
(List is fictitious)
Now based on this list, a second brainstorming can start asking:
“How to achieve ….(benefit) without …. (harm)”.
This is nothing else then formulating a contradiction, such as:
IF a cloud based standard system is used THEN costs are low BUT the solution is not adoptable.
Such contradictions are a great way to formulate a challenge to the business team. There are ways to resolve these contradictions and find innovative solutions.
Along the s-curve, different decisions must be made. Depending in which level of maturity your system is, you need to take different approaches. They are summarized in the attached figure.
Contact the author in case you want to learn more.
References
Mann, D. (2001). An Introduction to Triz. Blackwell Publishers.
Ikovenko, Sergei ; Jantschgi C&R ; TRIZ Consulting GROUP. (2016). Triz Level 3 Certification Training. Jürgen Jantschgi.