IBUS 841 Final Project
Fall 2013
I. Executive Summary
This paper aims to provide a feasible transportation option to relieve the last-mile problem in the Las Paz/Los Altos region, Bolivia. While nearly 80 percent of its people are relying on public transportation, development of the system has been greatly deferred by the local economy, the lack of proper infrastructure, the difficulty in building related structure due to geographic location, and the lack of respective regulation and planning. By utilizing Mind-Mapping and Morphological Forced Connections, we are not only able to identify the root causes of the problem, but we also managed to come up with the most feasible solution from a pool of 25 possible alternatives. Despite various limitations that might come with our final solution, we firmly believe that our solution will make a great difference in the region by promoting economic development in the long-term.
II. Problem Description
II.1 Background
In recent years, Bolivia has been making highlights for having the largest deposits of lithium, its production of coca leaves and its leftist president Evo Morales — the first president …show more content…
Our primary objective is to come up with a mode of transportation that is suitable to the political, economic, social, and technological environments in Las Paz, Bolivia. Obvious enough, the first attribute we came up was “Type of Transportation”. Following the logic, we began searching for attributes around the key word “transportation” by asking questions such as “What is it made of?”, “What is powering it?”, and “How do people pay for it?” The process of asking questions with a key word in mind has allowed us to brainstorm alternatives/attributes that are closely related to our current situation, and it indeed provided us with three more attributes in 5 minutes: “Material”, “Source of Power”, and “Method of