Week 3

 Chapter 3:

SCAMPER and Feasibility Analysis

Welcome back to our blog fellow readers. Glad to see you continuing the journey with us from chapter 2. Well now let's continue this journey shall we?

 

This week's lesson is focused on generating products from our ideas from the previous weeks lesson from chapter 2 through the use of SCAMPER, a important tool to generate ideas from existing products. After generating the ideas for new products we have to process their feasibility through a feasibility analysis table to see if they are realistic to be made from their cost and current equipment, materials that are available to us.

As the first activity of the lesson, we started off strong with our second week idea generation complete. Through the slides, we learn about SCAMPER. Being the use of substitution, combining, adapting, modifying, putting the product to other use, eliminating and reversing the product to create a new innovative product. We were assigned to find a already existing product. When Mr Ting mentioned about SCAMPER it rang a little bell in my head from me relearning SCAMPER from my year in the polytechnic foundation program (pfp) MS9500 fundamentals in innovative design.                                                                                                Next up is our usage of SCAMPER, after going through SCAMPER with us we had to find a similar product that is able to clean cooking oil and perform SCAMPER on it.

We had to first find a product similar to our idea being able to clean cooking oil to a reusable state which sounds like a problem as we all thought that the idea was quite unique as we had never seen it being used in a commercial way. However, to our surprise we found quite a number of products with the same purpose as our idea being a clean cooking oil and make it reusable. We found one that could filter the rancid oil another that could use centrifugal force to separate the rancidness from the oil and so on. In the end we chose the filter machine as our product to SCAMPER on.

When performing SCAMPER a table is set up with a a section for each of us in the group to put our  ideas for each section of SCAMPER, we all thought of some reasonable ideas and some ridiculous ideas to put into the table. After the fun of reading each others ridiculous ideas we had to start our feasibility table.

On the briefing of the feasibility table, we had to put our ideas into the table and option out how viable of product is being practical. With many ideas we came up with and not being able to come up with a decision on which idea to choose, we decided to combine each of our ideas together to create a product for each feasibility table. With our lack of experience in the current market, we researched the prices of the equipment used in the product to make our ideas more viable in the feasibility analysis.

Man that was quite a lot done in one lesson. In my opinion, I feel that my team has progressed quite a lot in this lesson and we would be all caught up in the next lesson with my teammates being resourceful and helpful I am sure we will make it through this module. Well, we will look forward to the next lesson, hope you are too!

About author: Hendrik is one of the founding members of Group 2 of

                           CP5065: Introduction to Chemical Design

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