Managing the Exploration Process
The classification tree and combination tables are tools that a team can use some\ flexibly. They are simple ways to organize thinking and guide the creative energies of team. Rarely do teams generate only one classification tree and one concept combinaritable. More typically the team will create several alternative classification trees and ey
concept combination tables. Interspersed with this exploratory activity may be a refining of the original problem decomposition or the pursuit of additional internal or external search. The exploration step of concept generation usually acts more as a guide for further creative thinking than as the final step in the process.
Recall that at the beginning of the process the team chooses a few subproblems on which to focus attention. Eventually the team must retmn to address all of the subproblems. This usually occurs after the team has narrowed the range of alternatives for the critical subproblems. The nailer team narrowed its alternatives to a few chemical and a few electric concepts and then refined them by working out the user inte1face, industrial design, and configuration issues. One of the resulting concept descriptions is shown in Exhibit 7-14.
Step 5: Reflect on the Solutions and the Process
Although the reflection step is placed here at the end for convenience in presentation,
reflection should in fact be performed throughout the whole process. Questions to ask include:
• Is the team developing confidence that the solution space has been fully explored?
• Are there alternative function diagrams?
• Are there alternative ways to decompose the problem?
• Have external sources been thoroughly pursued ?
• Have ideas from everyone been accepted and integrated in the process?
The nailer team members discussed whether they had focused too much attention on the energy storage and conversion issues in the tool while ignoring the user interface and overall configuration. They decided that the energy issues remained at the core of the problem and that their decision to focus on these issues first was
justified. They also wondered if they had pursued too many branches of the classification tree. Initially they had pursued electrical , chemical, and pneumatic concepts before ultimately settling on an electric concept. In hind sight, the chemical approach had some obvious safety and customer perception shortcomings (they were exploring the use of explosives as an energy source). They decided that although they liked some aspects of the chemical
solution , they should have eliminated it from consideration earlier in the process, allowing more time to pursue
some of the more promising branches in greater detail.
The team explored several of these concepts in more detail and built working proto types of nailers incorporating two fundamentally different directions: (!) a motor winding a spring with energy released in a single blow, and (2) a motor with a rotating mass that repeatedly hit the nail at a rate of about 10 cycles per second until the nail was fully driven. Ultimately, the multiblow tool proved to be the most technically feasible approach and the final product (Exhibit 7-1) was based on this concept.