Coaching practices for Is it Appropriate That My Boss Patented My Idea
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Is it Appropriate That My Boss Patented My Idea, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’ve been treating this like a problem nobody’s ever solved, pouring original effort into it
- I have a hunch somebody, somewhere, has already cracked a problem shaped just like mine
- The first decent idea shows up and I grab it and call it done
- I’m straining to invent something brand new when I have a graveyard of half-finished ideas I abandoned years ago
- Every idea I come up with is basically a tweak on what someone’s already done
Practices that may help
- Calibrate whether the problem requires invention or just search
Determine whether your problem is already solved elsewhere before investing in original invention.
TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions - Adapt
Ask: what could be adapted or borrowed from another context, industry, or era to solve this problem?
SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique - The obvious veto: reject the first three ideas before keeping any
Force yourself to generate more by vetoing the first plausible ideas — they are almost always the most obvious ones.
Deliberate Constraints, Made Practical - Repeat, loop, or return to an old idea deliberately
"Use an old idea" — something already in your history may work now that it could not before.
Oblique Strategies, Made Practical - Reason up from the parts, not by analogy
Build the solution from the fundamentals you kept, rather than copying an existing template.
First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable - Use a mediator or neutral frame to bypass reactive devaluation
Floating your idea through a neutral third party — or framing it as your own — makes it more likely to be evaluated fairly.
The Flinch and Reactive Devaluation, Made Practical - Bring a proposed solution when you bring a problem
Describe the problem and your recommended path before asking for a decision.
Managing Up: Practical Skills for Working with Your Boss - Run low-cost experiments on intersectional ideas
Test cross-domain ideas quickly and cheaply before investing in them fully.
The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection - Combine and build on others’ ideas
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Put to other uses
Ask: who else could use this, and what problems could it solve if applied somewhere entirely different?
SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique
Related concerns
- Altshuller Inventive Principles
Determine whether your problem is already solved elsewhere before investing in original invention.
Calibrate whether the problem requires invention or just search
- How To Use Others Ideas
Step into a named other’s perspective to access approaches you would not generate as yourself.
Ask what a specific other person would do
- When Scamper Scamper Adapt
Ask: what could be adapted or borrowed from another context, industry, or era to solve this problem?
Adapt
- A Developer Is Re Using Code From His Old Workplace
Break your creative output into small, reusable units — outlines, summaries, frameworks — that can be combined and repurposed.
Express work in reusable intermediate packets
- Innovation Frameworks
Frans Johansson’s Medici Effect argues that the most original innovations occur at the "intersection" — where concepts from different disciplines, cultures, or domains collide and combine in unexpected ways. The framework is consistent with research on analogical reasoning and the value of diverse knowledge networks for creative output; the book itself is a practitioner synthesis rather than a research study.
- Inventive Principles Examples
Apply one or more of TRIZ’s 40 inventive principles as generative lenses, even without the full contradiction matrix.
Sample inventive principles to generate solution directions
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