Blog
TRIZ Prism Example
The TRIZ Prism tool is a powerful way to unlock a team's creativity and discover new solutions to difficult problems. It's a pretty straightforward practice to describe, but actually doing it can be a little trickier than it looks at first. The Elephant-And-Straw...
Tool Profile: Problem Framing & Journey Mapping
SCENARIO: It’s Friday morning. You’re an analyst and just received an urgent request for an analysis due Monday. You are 99% sure a colleague has done this same analysis before, but you have no idea where it was stored. Your options are 1) spend all weekend searching...
INTERVIEW: Melanie Shere
As part of our ongoing effort to democratize innovation across the company, Team Toolkit has picked up a couple of new members and branched out to new locations. One of our new members is Melanie Shere, based in MITRE’s McLean office. I sat down with Melanie to learn...
How To Get Good
The first time you swing a hammer, you're going to bend some nails and probably hit your thumb once or twice. Even though a hammer is an exquisitely simple tool, getting good at using a hammer requires practice (and if you've ever seen a master carpenter use a hammer,...
ITK Podcast Interview
Several members of Team Toolkit were recently interviewed for MITRE's new Knowledge-Driven Podcast. In this podcast series, Cameron Boozarjomehri interviews technical leaders at MITRE who have made knowledge sharing and collaboration an integral part of their...
INTERVIEW: Jen Choi
As part of our ongoing effort to democratize innovation across the company, Team Toolkit has picked up a couple of new members since we started. One of them is Jen Choi, a Senior Multi-disciplinary Systems Engineer at MITRE. Rachel sat down with Jen recently to learn...
Problem Framing 101
Last week. Rachel's blog post looked at the importance of asking Why. This week we'll take a closer look at the Problem Framing Canvas she mentioned. It's designed to be used with a team to establish a clear consensus about what problem you're trying to solve. When...
Asking Why
When we’re given a new assignment at work, the first questions we often ask are: What needs to be done? How are we going to do it? When is it due? Who is it for? These are each important questions that should not be missed, but there's another question that we should...
REDACTED
Using an innovation toolkit can be difficult in a classified environment. There may be restrictions on what information can be shared, where it can be stored, and who it can be communicated with. What do you do with the notes? What if someone says something they...
Lotus Blossom 101
This week's post is about an ideation tool called the Lotus Blossom. This colorful & simple tool is like Mindmapping on a grid. It helps people go deeper / get more creative than a standard brainstorming session. Also, engineers tend to LOVE this one. The photo...