TRIZ
Fungible.farm uses TRIZ/TIPs and can be visualized as either a complex rube-goldberg machine(s) built as systems in a small-to-bigger russian nesting doll projects. Starting inside out with some early tooling & meticulous planning in preparation for a fast delivery cycle, but ultimately building systems that could deliver 'aircraft carrier' or larger marine or aerospace vehicles requires planning for scale, and refining good simulations.
The system & approach is informed as a TRIZ/TIPs "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving" pattern. TRIZ uses many small experiments (often concurrently) to build intuition and inform on the better & best design approaches prior to scale. TRIZ (pronounced "trees"), is a metholody originally developed for soviet era rocketry and innovation programs globally known for it's high reliability and low cost pragmatic approach. TRIZ is suitable for breaking down big 'insurmountable' challenges into a series of black box research steps & prototype designs to be validated. Each experiment informs the final system, where it is reasonable (based on academic inferrence) that one or more experiments will produce the desired result(s). TRIZ is known as the most successful method for "invention" & application of discoveries rather than pure-academic doctoral research which is generally done without plans for a specific application.
A significant portion of my vocabulary & approach relates to anti-fragile 'planning' toward identifying R&D opportunities suitable for commercialization. The method to my madness "TRIZ" - includes how to identify opportunities where research is likely to be profitable (therefore sustainable), & how to learn from failure(s), to identify factors & develop intuition of future success(es). I come with a distinctly US task-oriented pragmatic approach, but I'm also using a non-US soviet era planning/de-risking 'toolkit' (formalized method) known as "TRIZ" (pronounced "trees", sometimes less frequently called "TIPS"). TRIZ is known in some domains (not commonly agriculture afaik) to induce superior strategic planning & data-driven decision making abilities. Regrettably TRIZ is also mostly unknown/untaught in western schools due to it's socialist origins, though it's popularity is growing in the EU - so maybe it's made it to the AU and I just don't know! (so if this explanation of TRIZ is repetitive, already known/understood then I sincerely apologize, that is very uncommon, please - skip to the blue section below if you already understand why I'm using TRIZ approach).
To explain TRIZ in a 'twitter sized' soundbite: TRIZ is how the Russians were able to field a 'better' (still operational) space program for significantly-less than half of the US NASA budget!
(TRIZ was originally designed by/for the Soviet space program as a way to predict which outcomes would be successful, wereas . TRIZ enjoys popularity within the field of systems engineering, anti-fragile business planning, and is especially popular within aerospace startups such as SpaceX and those attempting to mimic their capabilities. Overwhelmingly I am the first person to mention TRIZ to all non-Rocket scientists I encounter (who are often specialists in their respective fields, whom are all smart, but aren't building rockets - which have a high cost of failure), usually those specialists are making small incremental advancements to a important but well-studied field. TRIZ was originally developed to create "new fields" of science such as ballistic rocketry. In most situations TRIZ is overkill - for most researchers - the ultimate goal is publishing small incremental papers where the principal audience is other peers 'within their field'. I am interested in exploring the 'knowledge-gap' between those specialized fields, and also integrating intellectual obscura (roughly "forgotten knowledge" of humanity). It's not quite Rocket science, far less glamorous, but the knowledge that exists between specialized science domains that are "less studied" areas of the venn-diagram of modern science & 'accepted' human knowledge. I'm a US person, we are brought up to be ambitious, I don't suffer from the Australian fear of "tall poppy" syndrome and since I'm a self-funded researcher, fear of failure, fear of funding loss doesn't really intimidate me either - so I'm sort of an odd-ball, able to pursue research across fields that would be academic career suicide (which generally encourages specialization in a domain). So TRIZ is my most useful tool, because it allows me to identify the factors of success & failure - and to do whatever I can to mitigate the failures, but to design many small experiments as a way to validate a bigger project.
anti-fragile.
- https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/74949
- https://fronterablog.com/thinking-in-bets/