From John R. Searle's "Rationality in Action":

...most practical reasoning is about adjudicating between conflicting, inconsistent desires and other sorts of reason...Typically in practical reasoning you have to figure out how to give up on satisfying some desires in order to satisfy others... By satisfying one desire your frustrate others.

Ch.1, p.30.

This is where practical (engineering, economics, business, etc.) reasoning differs from inventive reasoning. One of the core principle of the TRIZ tradition is commitment to Ideal Solution, i.e. a solution that enables us to satisfy one desire without frustrating others. As inventors and innovators, we should be looking for situations where widely accepted trade-offs between conflicting desires become more and more lopsided, e.g. due to new technology developments.

For example, today practically all printed content (books, magazines, newspapers, scientific articles, etc) is produced digitally but distributed "paperly." This tells us that the previous conflict between the two forms of content, digital vs paper, was adjudicated toward the old publishing world. That is, publishers benefited enormously by optimizing the process of content creation to fit their physical goods distribution model. When you go through any airport you see that books and magazines are sold side by side with salted peanuts and souvenir mugs. Even Amazon's Kindle, an all-digital device, is no more than a glorified paperback because its reading content was originally developed to be printed on paper. Paradoxically, this new device and distribution technology proliferate an old trade-off.

Looks like an opportunity for a good invention.

tags: tradeoff, payload, system, evolution, invention, innovation, tool, source, problem