Combining Touch Points to achieve something new.

Here is a Fresh Eyes concept to create something remarkable. Look for an existing touch point and add something to it to accomplish a different goal.

What is a touch point? It is a place in a chain of steps where something touches something else as part of the process to accomplish a goal.

For example, in moving freight around the world, most items that we consume get moved to or from another country. It is a pretty sure bet that the commodity probably spent some time in a sea container. These are the 20 foot and 40 foot boxes that revolutionized sea freight and created the world of intermodalism.

Every container that goes on a ship at a foreign port and arrives in a US port is handled by a container crane. This is a large gantry style crane that lifts the container on and off the ship and places it on a truck or train.

The actual "touch point" is called a spreader. This is the device that latches on to the container and holds it in place until the container crane operator places it where he want's it. The spreader works efficiently because all containers are made to the same standard and they all have the same latch points at the upper and lower corners.

The primary purpose of the spreader and the container crane is to get a container on and off a ship as quickly as possible.

But how can we use a Fresh Eyes approach to use this touch point to accomplish another objective?

A big issue in the USA since 9/11 is port security. To accomplish this, the Department of Homeland Security and US Customs hav spent millions on X ray scanners and other sensors that scan a few containers. These, however, are extra steps in the process of getting a container from point a to point b. The result is they slow down the system. And because of this, this leads to just a few "high risk" containers out of a hundred being scanned.

But what if we used our existing touch point to accomplish our ultimate goal of scanning all the containers for radioactive "dirty bombs" or other nasty substances.

The one touch point in close contact with every container is the container crane spreader. So, for a Fresh Eyes idea, let's attach a scanner to every container spreader and without extra effort, wasted time,, we can scan 100% of all the containers coming into our ports. Just by using an existing touch point.

Using an existing touch point in a process you are involved in, what other goals could you accomplish by using this Fresh Eyes perspective?

The Best is Yet to Come!

As product developers and inventors, we sometimes get discouraged because there is so much stuff out there it is getting increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. But the best of anything has yet to be created.

What? Regardless of the product or idea, the best version of it has yet to be created. The best house hasn't been designed, the best car hasn't been built, the best cell phone is still waiting to be designed. When you look at the world through this lens, you see that the opportunities for creating something remarkable is limitless.

Using this Fresh Eyes perspective, what ordinary product can you best and make remarkable?