At our meeting today we continued to go through the five phase cycle of innovation. During our meeting today we decided to try another technique that was presented in the Workplace Innovation class. We brought the 12 sided dodecahedron to the beginning of the meeting. This was a different opportunity for taking turns discussing our project and ideas. It worked very well and there wasn't too many times that people tried to jump in to add something while it wasn't there turn. It was just a different approach that we tried to keep the discussion going and for everyone to be able comment and keep us on track. We are at the point of strategizing our approaches. We need to start to eliminate our gaps and focus on how we are going to innovate this product. During this meeting we decided to explore and actually start looking at some of the key things that are important into the actual make of the snowmobile. With doing this it allowed us to find out where the components of the unit were stored within the snowmobile and what some of our options were with the location of the device. We used our internet research to find models that showed just the inside of the snowmobile. It allowed us to see where the actual components of the snowmobile were located. Based on our research there should be enough room in the front of the snowmobile to house the inflatable device. We are also continuing to narrow down if there is another location for the device or if we should have more than one device deploy. During our meeting we actually tried to create a model using a toy snowmobile to see if we could come up with an idea to test and see what would work best for the floatation device. As a group we felt this was the best way to test our ideas to see what else might come from it and what might be already working for us. During our testing phase we realized that another possibility would be that we could have inflatable tubes come out from underneath the running boards and one in the front of the unit. This would prevent the snowmobile from tipping side to side. It would also allow the track to continue to move to help the driver actually still operate the snowmobile to try to get to safety. Normally snowmobiles can float when the unit is still running; therefore, the floatation device is only in a rare situation when they start to sink and the motor dies. The heaviest weight is toward the front end of the engine; therefore, we came to the conclusion that the tubes on the side of the unit would help distribute the weight of the snowmobile but a tube in the front would hold up the heaviest part of the unit. During our testing process we put two devices on the side of the unit and one device on the front of the unit and tested it in water and the snowmobile has no problem floating. With the testing that we performed we have created our best model of our floatation device. Below are pictures of our model that we tested.
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