It’s Honey on Tap — In Search of Innovative Problems
This week on Indiegogo, the popular crowdfunding site, a father and son from Australia set out to raise $70,000 to help them launch a new product they had spent the last decade developing and perfecting. Three days later, they found themselves with pledges for over $3 Million for pre-orders for their solution to the Innovative Problem they had uncovered.
Harvesting honey has always been a real labor of love. Put the process up against the 10 Signposts of Innovation that we identified in In Search of Innovative Problems and you pretty much had a perfect match. To get to the honey, you have to protect yourself from stings by dressing up in protective gear from head to toe; fire up a smoker to sedate the bees; crack the hives open; lift heavy boxes; pull out the frames while trying not to squash bees; brush the bees off the frames by hand or with a leaf blower; stress out all the bees; transport the frames to a processing shed; spend all day in the shed cutting off the wax capping, filtering the honey and cleaning up all the mess; and then return the frames to the hives to start the process all over again. Eleven arduous steps in an age old process.
The father and son team from Down Under saw all the Signposts marking the path to their honey and then did the unexpected — they came up with a system called the Flow Hive that eliminated all eleven steps. They developed flow frames with clear ends so that it is easy to see into the hive to make sure it is healthy, to know when the honey is ready and to watch the honey-making process in real time. You can tap individual frames to gather honey that was made during a particular time of year or when the bees are pollinating a particular plant or tree, allowing you to gather specific flavors of honey from a single hive.
The flow frames consist of partly formed artificial honeycombs. The bees complete the combs with their wax, fill the cells with honey and cap them off with wax. A crank handle splits the combs and forms channels that allow the honey to flow down and out of the hive without disturbing the bees. Once the honey is drained, the crank is turned again, moving the combs back to their original position and allowing the process to begin anew.
Professional beekeepers who have tested the system call the Flow Hive mindboggling and amazing.
You can see the Flow Hive in operation and follow the progress of the fundraising campaign at the Flow Hive Indiegogo page. Please join us at our Innovation Nation page on Medium, where you can learn more about Innovative Problems and our process for making everyone problem seekers.
© Brian Leitten & Bradley Strock 2015
