TRIZ - Local Quality

Welcome to the Sly as a Fox newsletter. To get your creative juices flowing today I am going to discuss some more examples of the TRIZ lens “local quality” and how it can be applied to your business.
It can be used as a tool to improve your product or service offering.

Local quality, in the simplest sense, is to modify or enhance your product so it matches the environment it is being used in.

Let’s look at the simplest example: an adjustable wrench. You change the size of the wrench based on a specific environment: In this case, the size of the nut. It is a product that can be changed easily depending on what is needed at the time. The adjustable wrench design was created by using the concept of Local Quality. Make the thing change specific to its environment so that it is more useful and adds more value.

Local quality would also be things like skins for cell phones. The concept of “matching the environment” in this sense is someone “personal preferences.” By allowing the “basic” cell phone to be changed to match someone’s specific tastes, it expands the available market for the product and results in broader appeal.

Nature has some wonderful examples of Local Quality. I want to show you a couple of them here as examples that will help you remember what this TRIZ lens Local Quality is all about.

Take a Chameleon for example. He can change his color based on his environment. The “design” of the chameleon by Mother Nature allows this product to survive in a very hostile market place.

Here is one of nature’s best: the Cuttlefish.

Of course it requires a little thought to make the mental bridge between a Chameleon and Cuttlefish when it comes to applying Local Quality to your own business. But it is not that hard of bridge and I hope the Cuttlefish will stick in your mind of an example of Local quality next time you are brainstorming creative ways to make your product match your customer and your customers’ environment more closely.

Thanks again for joining me on the Sly as a Fox Newsletter, until next time.