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From the article: "A good, defensible manufacturing strategy is one where you’re applying and protecting (ideally via patent) a faster, cheaper, more reliable way of doing something in your industry, by borrowing a proven approach from a parallel industry."

If you're looking for a formalized system designed to help with some of this, take a look at TRIZ[1][2]. I'll just steal one note from the "What Is TRIZ" article - "Somebody someplace has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it.) Creativity is now finding that solution and adapting it to this particular problem."

A big part of the basic tooling for TRIZ is the results of people going through a huge mass of patents looking for patterns of problem categories and how they were solved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ [2] https://triz-journal.com/triz-what-is-triz/

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I read the wikipedia page and that "what is TRIZ" article, and I still don't understand what it is. At times, it sounds like an automated program (especially with statements like "More than three million patents have been analyzed to discover the patterns that predict breakthrough solutions to problems"). But at other points, it seems like a human-centric problem solving strategy, but without the strategy. It describes problems and then solutions without any discussion of the in-between.

Do you have experience with TRIZ? What "is it" to you?

They teach you this stuff in product design classes.

TRIZ is a way of breaking down an engineering design problem into the thing you want to change, and the thing you can't change (a "contradiction"), then resolving it. A "TRIZ Matrix" is a reference tool that suggests ways of resolving conflicts between common design parameters (strength, weight, durability, manufacturing tolerance, etc.) based on a number of principles that have been validated over the years, like "nesting" or "prior action". Over the years, 40 standard principles (and 39 parameters) have emerged. They all have somewhat cryptic, consultant-handbooky names but make sense when you see some examples[1].

E.g., you have a beam and you want to make it stronger, but can't make it any thicker. You consult your matrix for "strength" vs "area" and get some suggestions such as "use composite materials". Or, applying the principle more generally, you try to extract techniques from the patent library or publications that resolve the problem.

[1]: https://www.triz.co.uk/files/triz_40_inventive_principles_wi...

This reminds me of Brian Eno's "oblique strategies".

Thank you, this explanation made a lot more sense to me.

I had some exposure to it and a few classes more than a decade ago now, but it didn't really end up being anything that was a good fit for me and I never got into the group of folks trying to do TRIZ for software development.

Probably in part because of the background of the creator and the problem datasets used for the traditional contradiction matrix it always seemed to me to be a better fit for manufacturing and physical goods.

The "Interactive Contradiction Matrix Beta" linked at the top of the TRIZ Journal site may be worth looking at, but it's kind of cryptic. Basically you pick out a few areas of concern - as an example I picked (on both axes) 1: Weight of Moving Object, 9: Speed, 15: Duration of Action of Moving Object, and 27: Reliability. Based on that, the recommended areas that I should be looking at for possible improvement potential would be 35: Parameter Changes (turns up 6 times), 3: Local Quality (5 times), several others at 4 times, etc. Hitting the Analyze button on that tool will give expandable examples for the various areas - for example "Parameter changes" includes a lot of changes to temperature, state (solid/liquid/gas) and consistency. An example might be making liquid-filled chocolates - do you have to fill the chocolates? Can you have frozen chunks of filling that you coat with chocolate instead?

In your opinion, is manufacturing in general one field where patents are a net positive (to innovation, economic efficiency, etc.)?

If so, do you think it's because manufacturing is a more well-defined and mature field than software engineering?

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