Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Engineer Process

I am an engineer so I need to make the chaos work in my world. I know what I have (an idea) and I know where I want to go (to market). So I am going to use an engineer’s solution process to make this work
Given:
Find:
Assumptions:
References:
Solution:
The Given here is my idea, or any idea. The Find is Marketable Goods, with the Solution being the path or my Road Map.
Assumptions are used by the engineer to simplify a problem. If I was calculating the weight of a 2000 linear feet wall, I could look at a one foot slice of that wall and then multiply it out at the end. This would be an assumption that the wall is similar throughout the 2000 feet. A common assumption that I make every day is that is reinforced concrete weighs 155 pounds per cubic foot the actual weight could be a little less or a little more, but when doing calculations on a building or foundation this assumption suffices. If it was discovered later that the reinforcement steel was going to be much more, the calculation could easily be redone by changing the assumption.
The first assumption that I am going to make for this project is that my idea is a great one and it will sell. Will it? I do not know, only time will tell. I could spend years and lots of money trying to figure this out and never proceed any further. At some point I do have to fill in an answer for this assumption, I will need to know if my idea is marketable, but I can figure that out later.
References for an engineer may be a design standard, test method or building code; for this project it will most likely be patent law, the USPTO and others.
So I plan on breaking the solution (Road Map) into smaller problems each with their own assumptions, and references then reconstruct the whole package back together at the end.

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