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12.4.1. Analytic: Identification

How To Invent (Almost) Anything > 12. The TAO Design Process > 12.4. The Analytic Sequence > 12.4.1. Identification

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The first stage of inventing is the same as the first stage of business, which is to find somewhere where you can make a profit.

Fig. 12.3 The Analytic sequence

You may already have an area in mind or you may need to perform a careful analysis of markets, customers, their needs and the products that are currently being sold to them. Some markets are massively competitive and over-farmed to the point where new inventions are hard (but not impossible) to find. In some areas, inventions cannot easily be protected and get rapidly copied.

The ideal domain for an inventor is the green field or undefended hill, where there is clear need and space for ingenious creation, where your expertise is not easily copied and there is not only sufficient window of opportunity to recover your costs, but also further opportunities to invent and grow completely new markets.

Inventions need not be constrained to tangible products: you can also invent around services, strategies, processes, organisations and relationships. Although it may seem that a successful service could be copied by a competitor more easily than a product, in fact the reverse is often true as the subtleties of human interaction cannot easily be duplicated.
 

Other parts of the analytic sequence:

• 12.4.1. Analytic: Identification
• 12.4.2. Analytic: Requirement
• 12.4.3. Analytic: Analysis
• 12.4.4. Analytic: Hypothesis
• 12.4.5. Analytic: Proof

Other sections in this chapter are:

• 12.1. The TAO Process
• 12.2. Not OR but AND
• 12.3. The Scientific Track
• 12.4. The Analytic Sequence
• 12.5. The TRIZ Sequence
• 12.6. The Logic Cloud
• 12.7. Psychological Track
• 12.8. The Dream Sequence
• 12.9. The Creative Cloud

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