Stop the Innovation Wars is the attention-getting title of this month's Harvard Business Review attempt at controversy by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, both on the faculty at Dartmouth, and co-authors of a new book on innovation, due out in November. (See www.hbr.org July-Aug. 2010) What is the Innovation War? It is the battle between corporate operations groups, responsible for ongoing operations and support of existing products and services, and the teams formed for new initiatives, usually given names like innovation team. The authors' description of the powerful, extremely negative reactions to the idea of creating an innovation team with special responsibility for a new strategy and how it gave rise to their research is fascinating, but familiar; readers of Real Innovation and the TRIZ Journal are likely to ask what is the excitement, and what calls for academic research.

The authors rename the operations groups the Performance Engine of the company, and prescribe a partnership modality, in which the Performance Engine partners with dedicated project teams tasked with innovation projects. They present an interesting series of case studies: BMW's regenerative braking team, West's (the legal publishing branch of Thomas Reuters) creation of database products, Lucent's service businesses, and WD-40's new dispenser to demonstrate the universality of their proposed method as applied in a product, a service, and a component part.

Step one of the partnership process is dividing the work between the Performance Engine and the dedicated project team. One insight that I found quite useful was that it is not just the work to be done and the skills of the people that should be assessed, but also the past working relationships of those people. If they have always worked in a hierarchical relationship, they may not be able to work in a flat organization. If they have always worked on projects that have well-defined deliverables, they may not be able to work in an exploratory environment. And, of course, vice versa: one example showed how people who had typically worked very independently, or with a small technical support staff, were not well-suited to working in a large, structured team with complex, interdependent roles. The new organization will also need new metrics of success, new compensation/reward systems, and its own unique culture. Trimble and Govindarajan task management with creating these elements, but I've seen management fail more often than it succeeds as creating a specific culture - - it seems that the best that management can do is be sure that the metrics and reward systems are not contrary to the desired cultural elements.

For a short article, they did a good job at illustrating the kinds of problems that will occur in this partnership. TRIZ readers will recognize the physical contradictions in the situations of loose â€" tight management, team â€" individual metrics, and the technical (trade-off) contradictions in the schedule vs. completeness and new technology vs. traditional methods and new suppliers' creativity vs. traditional suppliers' reliability, etc. Disappointingly, the authors did not use any of the insights available from business applications of TRIZ to propose solutions to these contradictions. Their solutions to the problems of innovation are remarkably un-innovative. Equally disappointing, they do not present any data or case studies showing that their proposed method work. Case studies from which the method was derived are interesting, but obviously are available because they were successful for those companies in those circumstances. The test should be to apply the method to new situations and evaluate its effectiveness, and iterated the method based on both failures and successes. I am particularly dubious about the effectiveness of changing the names of the operations and innovation teams as a key success factor!

Readers are invited to contribute their case studies and observations, and particularly any methods they have found effective in Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal-reading companies.

When was the last time you put air in your tires? Do you have a relatively new car that has an automatic warming light to tell you that tire pressure is low? What did you do? Probably pulled into a gas station, maybe put a quarter or two in the slot, and the air pump turned on and you added air to your time. How did you know how much air to add? Did you stop momentarily after eyeballing the tire, get out your tire gauge (you DO have one in the car, don't you? Or did you run in and buy one from the gas/conveneincve store?), or look at the gauge that may have been attached to the end of the air hose? In case you haven't figured it out by now, that's what I did this morming. In any event, you know you should not overinflate the tire and that's a lot harder to "see" than an underinflated tire.

Next time you visit your local hardware or major discount store, go to the auto parts department and find the new tire caps with automatic pressure readings built into the head. They can even be purchased at various pressure levels (24, 28, 32, etc.) that change from green to red when the pressure is not at or above where it's supposed to be. Are you thinking about what a good business tire gauges are right now? Do you have the same feeling that paint roller pan producers felt when the Black and Decker Paint Stick(TM) arrived on the scene?

These two simple examples are concrete illustrations of an irreversible trend in product development---systems and products are absorbed and integrated into their super-systems, irreversibly, over time. If you're in any kind of business where someone is buying something from you, you need to be constantly asking the questions, "What is my product being used for? What system is it being used in?" "What is its FUNCTION (not what it IS)?" The history of inventions and the study of over 7 million patents tells us clearly that this Will happen, with or without your help. You can either follow the train or get run over (put out of business) by it. In the cases above, the suppliers of the metals and plastics used in making paint roller kits and tire gauges see theitr sales volume drop and probably wonder why. If they're only talking to their direct customer and not watching what is going on one step above their customer, they are due for a surprise. There is no product in existence that someone is trying to figure out how NOT to use. You need to be ahead of this thinking and figuring out how you're going to replace the FUNCTION your product provides. This may be very uncomfortable to deal with as it may mean changing your business, the type of people you hire, the intellectual property you license or develop, and the customers you talk to. NEVER rely on your first direct customer to be the sole driver of your market research because if they are not thinking about how they could be replaced, you are even one more step away from that awareness your self.

How could your product or service and what it does be replaced? Integrated into its super-system? If the answer to the second question is "I don't know", then start thinking about it and how it would affect your research budget, the type of people you hire, and who you collaborate with. Now!

Have you paid attention to some of the new product developments lately and looked for some over-riding trends? Think about Dyson, the i-Phone, and the new electronic book readers from Borders and Barnes and Noble as examples. Dyson is selling vacuum cleaners without bags and fans without blades. Both of these advances eliminate significant parts of engineering systems, and, in theory, minimize parts and maintenance operations. The Apple iPhone eliminated the antenna. And you know what happened next---reception suffered when the antenna, embedded in the frame of the cell phone, was obstructed. Competitive phones began an attack with full page ads describing their "redundant" embedded antennas and Apple had to give away millions of dollars in free cell phone cases to compensate.

What do these examples teach us about "trimming and simplifying"? First of all, this kind of thinking is a great starting point for new product breakthroughs and business concepts. In this context, think about how Amazon has virtually eliminated the book store and book readers have eliminated paper and book marks.

Arbitrarily get rid of a part of a system--preferably one that has significant cost or inconvenience to the user. Then figure out how to get back the "function" that this now eliminated part was performing with the elements in the system that are left. But we can't stop there! We need to think about what might make this new design "go wrong" or not function properly. The antenna could get covered up...what if the dust (without a bag to catch) got into the motor? What if the sunlight interferes with the electronic book reader on the beach? What if sand gets on the screen? Challenge the simplified design and ask yourself how you could make it fail! What could you do in the way of simple redundancy that could make the new system cheaper, simpler, and more robust?

The lesson is not to simplify without also asking the question of what negative things could come out of the design change. Without doing both, you're taking an unnecessary risk.

Two times in two weeks on two continents then twice more by e-mail people asked about TRIZ and open innovation. Sounds like a trend? I honestly had not given it much thought, and before my current exposure I would have said that my impression of open innovation was that companies invite outsiders to contribute ideas in order to get more ideas from a population that is more diverse than their employees, and that if they used TRIZ, they could solve their own problems and not rely on the mob. I was a bit uncomfortable with this, remembering that when I was new to TRIZ, an expert (he thought he was being kind!) said that it was too bad that I had put so much time and effort into QFD, since now, with TRIZ, you can solve all the problems and predict all the customer needs so you don't need QFD.

Regular readers may remeber that at TRIZ India we heard lot about open innovation from the Yahoo India participants.
" http://www.triz-journal.com/commentary/archive/triz_india_summit_day_2.html" One of their unique concepts was conducting 2 hack events, inviting their own employees to one and outsiders to another, creating new applications, presenting them to a judging board (talent show style) and being rewarded immediately for high potential ideas. My TRIZ bias started to dissolve: the participants were not solving a problem that the sponsor had defined; rather, they were solving their own problem, and the judges were deciding both whether the problem was general enough (there would be other customers) and the solution was good enough.

When I got back from India, my accumulated LinkedIn messages included a note from a friend in Minneapolis pointing out a meeting in San Diego (which is 150 km from me and 2000 km from her) and yes, the topic was open innovation. Bright Ideas develops software that a lot of companies use to manage open innovation systems, and the Birds of a Feather meetng is a non-commercial users group meeting. http://bi.brightidea.com/bof My estimate is that a bit more than half the participant were users of the software, a few used other methods, and some, like me, were just there to learn about the topic. Next meetings are in Zurich and in Hong Kong, and I recommend them - - very good speakers, very good experience sharing by participants, very restrained selling by the Bright Ideas people. If you can't get to a meeting, look at the on-line discussions, or do both.

Great big learning that I'm almost embarrassed to admit: There are two different meanings to open innovation
1. Inviting employees to contribute ideas outside their own areas of specialty. This can be everything from the old-style company suggestion box to the current style of campaigns where ideas are solicited for particular projects for a specific time period.
2. Inviting non-employees to contribute ideas. Popular versions of this are Innocentive, Nine Sigma, Idea Connections, and many others such as the recent attempts by BP and the US Environmental Protection Agency to get public contributions of ideas for solving the problem of the oil well catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. They got more than 80,000 ideas, creating a new problem: how to sort and evaluate the ideas, and they also created frustration - - I got many communiques from TRIZ practioners who had ideas but could not get them noticed by anyone in a position to do anything about them.

Jeffrey Phillips from OVOInnovation and John Russo from CCH Wolpers Kluper gave the morning presentations that were actionable lessons learned. Russo's talk stimulated a lot of discussion of how many people in any group will participate, and the conflicting data on the use of incentives to stimulate participation. Philip Horvath from INOS spoke more to the philosophy of communication and knowledge transfer, and stimulated a lot of discussion.

I'll summarise highlights of Jeffrey's paper because it has application to the whole adventure of finding out how (and IF) TRIZ and open innovation can interact. If you want to get more see http://www.ovoinnovation.com

Success depends on alignment of the innovative idea with overall company strategy - - NOT that the idea can't be completely different from past work, but that the death of an idea is most likely to be caused by lack of resources (time, money, talent, attention, ...) and resources are allocated according to strategies and operating plans that support those strategies. We may talk about company culture, but it is an iceberg, with a tiny bit showing above the water, and most of it hiddent below, and in most cases companies only talk about the part that shows. Biggest failure cause for specific idea campaigns is lack of criteria (or clear criteria, well-understood by contributors) and organizers should put a lot of work into creating the criteria before announcing the campaign, to avoid disappointing/frustrating the contributors. Some members of the audience were surprised by one point, and other agreed vigorously: evaluation is a skill, and experience matters, so develop a skilled cadre of evaluators.

Jeffrey and I are both on the program for the Business Innovation Conference in Chicago in October, and I look forward to learning more.

My viewsnow on the role of TRIZ in Open Innovation (two somewhat new, one pretty much expected)
New: Formulate better questions or challenges. Ideality gives a different perspective!
New Don't just select a best idea. Use function and attribute analysis, use feature transfer (or the Pugh method) to hybridize ideas to create better ideas than the best of what was submitted.
Expected: Generate ideas using TRIZ to solve the problems presented in the challenge.

I will be working with people who are now using open innovation in the coming months, and I invite readers to comment, so that I can combine what we are all learning into something we can all use.

Kalevi Rantanen reports from the TRIZ Developers Summit 2010 ------------------

* A non-governmental organization, the TRIZ Developers Summit conducted the conference in Saint Petersburg, July 26-27, 2010.
* Approximately 90 experts from 12 countries participated in the summit.
* First day topics included "TRIZ-based Forecasting Methods."
* Second day topics included six thesis presentations and discussions for a TRIZ Master's Degree; four were accepted.

More information can be found on the website: http://triz-summit.ru/ru. The following includes my personal experiences and feelings.

The forecasting topic was particularly interesting. The audience wants answers to three questions:

1. What will happen?
2. When it will happen?
3. How much will happen?

Last year I wrote several articles about energy technology. People want to know which technologies will be used to generate energy, particularly electrical energy. For example, will nuclear energy be an important part of energy mix or will it fade away? They also want to know when the changes in technology will happen. For example, when will solar power get economically viable in the large scale production of energy? They also want to get quantitative foresight. Most experts agree that we will have more solar power in 2050, but how much? Will concentrating solar power provide ten percent of the global electricity in 2050, as the International Energy Agency's expert group forecasted last spring? Or will it provide more or less?

To answer the first question of what will happen, involves using TRIZ tools. To answer the two other questions it involves conventional forecasts such as using scenarios from the International Energy Agency.

The summit provided a wealth of inspiring material, mainly for finding better answers to the questions of qualitative changes. Here are some highlights:

Simon Litvin talked about a new tool called parallel evolutionary lines and its applications to forecasting. Engineering systems pass through similar evolutionary stages. That's why the evolution of less developed systems can be predicted using the knowledge of advanced systems.

Litvin gave one example, the problem with sealing for leak prevention in oil transportation. A nearly ready solution was found from the submarine industry.

On the question of reliability of forecasts Litvin answered that the solutions are obtained adapting proven technologies from other industries such as parallel evolutionary lines for highly reliable results.

Reliability can be studied by analyzing the successes and failures of earlier forecasts. Boris Axelrod´s paper "Experience of Effective Technical Forecasting" in conference proceedings contains a rare and informative retrospective analysis of a forecast made 15 years ago. Axelrod wrote that the history of TRIZ-based forecasts, "Is still too short to give us a number of real examples that would make it possible to look back and analyze their results." One of the existing examples is a forecast of the evolution of a toothbrush.

Axelrod talked about errors in the project as well as its success as a whole. He stressed: "A lot could be said about successes here, but errors (are of) much higher importance for a researcher."

For example, he identified timing errors. Using technology developments for modifying toothpaste at the precise moment of teeth cleaning was anticipated in about 20 years. Later, however, it was found that work in this direction was already going on. The market potential of some minor improvements at stage two of the system evolution was underestimated. From the other side, some developments of "smart toothbrushes" were overestimated.

Axelrod's work may be the beginning of more rigorous statistical evaluation results. So far the evidence of the efficiency of TRIZ has contained mainly case studies. The history of forecasting by TRIZ has been too short.

Besides statistics of successes and failures we need better repeatability of results too.

Gaetano Cascini and his team have worked to increase repeatability of technology assessments. He talked about the correlations between contradiction evaluation and the law of increased ideality. The paper contains an example of how to assess tablet production technologies in the pharmaceutical industry.

The important problem of repeatability was also considered by Aleksey Pinyayev. He said that his tools have shown good repeatability. He talked about algorithms for defining an application condition and a why-why analysis. They are advanced functional analysis tools.

Functional Analysis Is Progressing
A pleasant surprise in the summit was the progress of functional analysis.

Of the four thesis projects accepted three were directly devoted to functional analysis. The fourth was on the use of phase transitions (also with connections to the functional analysis topic). It contains tools for the transition from the functional analysis results to the appropriate solution standards.

All were of high quality, particularly one. Oleg N. Feygenson presented strong work for, "Improving the Methodology of Function Analysis for Engineering Systems." Feygenson has connected the concepts of space (place of function performance), time (time of function performance) and harmful effects mapping (functional disadvantages) into an advanced function approach. He also implemented the new approach to industrial projects.

The Spirit of the Summit
The summit was friendly and offered an informal atmosphere, connecting strongly critical approaches to work with high respect to the people creating the work. It was pleasant to see the best traditions of TRIZ continue.

In the 1970s Kalevi Rantanen worked in Finnish youth organizations, mainly on problems of education. From 1979-1985 he studied in the former USSR, earned his M.Sc in mechanical engineering and discovered TRIZ. He worked in Finnish industry from 1985-1991 and at the same time conducted TRIZ training. Since 1991 he has been an independent entrepreneur. He has also conducted TRIZ training from 1991-2001. Since 2002 he has concentrated on science and technology journalism. Contact Kalevi Rantanen at kalevi.rantanen (at) kolumbus.fi.

What's so special about this announcement? It says that, after decades of off shore oil drilling, the industry is going to collaborate on safety matters. Do you know what the largest chemical shipped by volume in the world is? CHLORINE--a yellow green, toxic gas that is poisonous in large dosages, but toxic to hazardous bacteria and fecal material, and without which there would be no clean drinking water, nor one of the most widely used plastics for plumbing, house siding, and blood tubing. There are numerous producers of chlorine, which is shipped in tank cars all over the country in huge quantities. The next time you are stopped at a RR crossing, take a look at the stenciling on the side of the tank cars and see how many are labeled CHLORINE. This industry figured out decades ago that there was so much chlorine being shipped into so many different places in the country that it made no sense for each company to be responsible for its own tank cars in the case of rail accidents or emergencies. What made sense was for the CLOSEST supplier with trained emergency crews to respond to a derailed or leaking chlorine car. This rapid response system has been active for over 40 years and has served both the industry and the US citizenry well by minimizing the amount of time it takes for a trained crew to arrive at the scene of an accident and provide assistance.

In a recent headline, "Oil Companies to Create Industry Response System for Deep-Water Oil Spills", we see that a few of the major oil companies have "discovered" this strategy for their own industry: "Four of the world's largest oil companies are creating a strike force to staunch oil spills in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico in a billion-dollar bid to regain the confidence of the Obama administration after BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster. Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips are expected to announce Thursday that they are forming a joint venture to design, build and operate a rapid-response system to capture and contain up to 100,000 barrels of oil flowing 10,000 feet below the surface of the sea".

It continues to amaze many of us in the TRIZ commumity how long it still takes for one well known practice to migrate from one industry to other industries. For the hundredth time since these columns have been written, "Who else has a problem like yours? How do they solve it? Who else knows something that can help you?"

Ido Lapidot from Intel in Israel opened his talk on TRIZ in large companies with the Tetris project's video on the history of TRIZ, and then a charming demonstration of his personal history using S-curves. Since he started with the announcement that the benefit of TRIZ to Intel was many millions, this got the audience very engaged. Then he astonished us by saying that we need Systemic Innovation, not Systematic Innovation - - in other words, if the culture is right, it doesn't matter if we have TRIZ or any other specific methodology. But, the current Intel theme that power is not the goal, power/performance is the goal, makes resolving the contradiction the focus of the whole company, so there is a high compatibility with between the strategy, the culture, and TRIZ.

There was great interest in Lapidot's chart showing the correspondence

Vision - - Ideality

Mission - - Laws of evolution

Strategy - - S-Curves

Targets - - Ideal Final Result

Indicators - - Ideality equation: Functions/(Cost + Harm) He emphasized the need to have multiple factors in the indicators.

Lapidot gave the audience very practical advice while simultaneously illustrating the application of TRIZ to cultural change. He used both the separation principles and the 40 principles to show some of what he does; for example, combining the principles of local quality and self ��"service, have people develop their own examples of TRIZ applicability for their own problems, instead of having an expert supply generic examples. His history of the adoption of TRIZ through the company from 1996 through 2010 was sobering for those who wanted an instant solution, and his statement that they do not use metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of TRIZ was a challenge to those who use conventional management.

Lapidot then became a member of the panel for the discussion of embedding TRIZ in large enterprises, with Jagdish Ramaswamy, Chief Quality Officer from Wipro (Software and IT services), and T. Mukhopadhyay, Senior VP and head of R&D for CavinKare(shampoo and other personal care products.) (Picture, Left to Right, Ramaswamy, Lapidot, Bhushan, Mukhopadhyay) All panelists agreed that there is no one formula for introducing TRIZ throughout the organization, and that they used methods similar to Intel's for different people, different departments, and different jobs within their companies.

There was an extensive discussion of what constitutes innovation in software, which extended to innovation in systems and applications as opposed to the innovation in the software tools themselves, and potential areas for TRIZ applications. The audience questions then returned the panel to practical issues of the time spent on training and on projects when introducing TRIZ into a company. Navneet Bhushan gave a very complete description of an experimental approach, in which the people learning TRIZ are encouraged to experiment with it, not just treat it as training, over a 9-month period. The message from day 1, that TRIZ software / hardware / systems / services all benefit from TRIZ became much more concrete for the audience as they heard the commonality of approaches and results at Wipro, CavinKare, and Intel. Both Wipro and Intel have extensive Six Sigma deployments, and there was considerable interest in the TRIZ/Six Sigma hybridization (building on what I talked about yesterday, but with real examples from the 2 companies.)

After a short break, a second panel convened to discuss intellectual property. Krishan Prasad, inventor of global warming solutions and founder of Carbonda Global, Prof. Mary Mathew from the Indian Institute of Science, and Pinaki Ghosh, head of IP at Infosys joined Navneet Bhushan to discuss the methods used by inventors now, and the potential for TRIZ. Ghosh and Bhushan both emphasized that TRIZ is useful both for evaluation of ideas as well as for generation of ideas. Karthik Iyer asked the challenging questions: my favorite was, since TRIZ is successful for patent circumvention, will inventors be discouraged and will they stop generating new patents? The panelists had a vigorous discussion of the difference between the legal, ethical approach of patent circumvention and the improper use of patent information that results in infringement. (Ask your lawyer about this!)

The next paper built on the interest in patents. Priyaranjan Mishra from Philips India teamed with N. Bhushan to show how they search for relevant patents using TRIZ and the patent citation analysis method that was presented yesterday afternoon. Mishra emphasized the financial benefits of a good, fast, accurate, high confidence search system. Bhushan showed a case study using Perfusion Imaging, which combines MRI with cellular metabolism measures. There is a fascinating correlation between the high-ranking patents in their system and high level of invention, using Altshuller's 5 level scale.

Prasanna C. from Infosys Technologies reported on the use of TRIZ to determine qualitative parameters for estimating IP value of intangibles. They start by analyzing the contradiction that is solved by the invention, using D. Mann's business parameter matrix and the principles of invention that are cited by the matrix. The strength and frequency of use of the principles becomes the foundation of the analysis.

Bala Girisaballa, Director of R&D for Yahoo India, opened the afternoon session with a broad analysis of innovation in business models as well as technology, leading to discussion of open innovation methods. Yahoo's view of innovation includes business system patents, mostly from a defensive point of view, since the lifecycle of innovation in their business is 1 week-3 months, and innovative patentable ideas are published, not patented, as a business decision. The scale of Yahoo! is mind-boggling: 9 billion advertisements per day, 600 million people… They have a strong discipline for deciding what areas will be innovative, with a hierarchy of employees, partners, network associates, and their ecosystem. Yahoo! has an extensive suite of methods for engaging and rewarding employee innovation initiatives, some familiar to all readers of the innovation literature (reward fast failure, communicate cross-functionally) and some unique (internal hack days.) The need for common vision, trust, and open communication is the same for both employees and for partners, but very different in details of application. The network and ecosystem relationship are much less close, aimed at long-term relationships that will result in future partnerships. The challenge is to create a system that promotes the diffusion of new ideas from the outside layers to the inside, where they will be developed into implemented concepts. In parallel, they have a concept called radiation, in which problems go out through the layers, to the people who have the most interest in solving it.

Bala Ramadurai from MindTree spoke next about a unique what /if and function /attribute /analysis method to generate exhaustive system test case scenarios. The method was developed for a complex system, where classical analysis produced 80 scenarios, then WI ��" FAA produced 300 scenarios for a much more comprehensive test set. The deceptively simple method uses standard TRIZ function analysis: A does something to B, then ask what happens if the action is effective, missing, insufficient, excessive, or harmful, and what could cause an effective action to transition to one of the other modes.

Bala Girisaballa, Navneet, Venkatesh VR (Sr. VP and head of external innovation at Wipro) and I were the panel for a discussion of open innovation and TRIZ. My view was that TRIZ could be used to refine the definition of problems, and to focus the solutions, so that the mass idea submission approach of open innovation is unnecessary (I'm not sure thatI was a real contribution to the discussion!) The audience had a lot of questions about the technicalities of open innovation and IP, and a very vigorous exchange began, which will continue outside the conference hall.

The final presentation of the conference was planned to be Darrell Mann by remote connection from the UK speaking on TRIZ: Evolution to Revolution for Innovation. Technical difficulties caused cancellation, so Ido Lapidot, Isak Bukhman, Bala Ramadurai, and I did a quick panel discussion with the audience on high points of the conference, and next steps. Summarizing, the challenge is to DO TRIZ, don't just talk about it and don't just study it, DO IT! Second challenge is to keep the momentum going after the conference using all possible mechanisms. There's a live blog of the conference at http://trizindia.org/profiles/blogs/live-updates-trizin-2010 for those who would like a different perspective. Then there was lots of thanking each other and hugging, and people started for their next adventures.

Ninety people enjoyed the beautiful (cool in July!) weather in Bangalore at the opening of TRIZIN, the TRIZ India Summit 2010. Navneet Bhushan, founder of Crafitti Consulting and organizer of the conference, welcomed us with the challenge to develop a country-wide initiative to "define the new world that we want to inhabit," using TRIZ both to define the new world and to solve the problems that are preventing us from getting to that new world. I was impressed by the diversity of companies sponsoring the conference: Airtel "Impatience is the new life, live it with Airtel Broadband" and Micro Technologies, Yahoo R&D India, and Management Next Publications.

This will be a semi-live report to the TRIZ Journal and Real Innovation - - I'll post several times a day, as the conference progresses. Readers: please post questions or comments in the comments area at the end of this post, and I'll pass your input on to the conference. There will be several panel discussions and networking sessions to make this easy. For the agenda, see www.trizind.com

Isak Bukhman greeted the convention on behalf of the Altshuller Institute, and gave a 90 minute tutorial, to give the whole group a common vocabulary of TRIZ and his observations over his career as a TRIZ student and TRIZ Master in many countries about the diversity of applications of TRIZ. Isak's extensive collection of examples of the Laws of Evolution were appreciated by the audience, who also challenged him to use examples in the software and IT services area, which is the focus of much of Bangalore's business.

I gave the keynote speech on the topic of the global innovation revolution and the role of TRIZ in the revolution. The participants asked a wide range of useful questions, giving me the opportunity to talk about TRIZ with Six Sigma and Lean, and TRIZ for school children, among other topics.

The pre-lunch speaker was Mrs. Urmil Satya Bhushan, who is the Hindi translator of Darrell Mann's 'TRIZ Companion' book. She told the audience about her history as a teacher and social worker, and how learning TRIZ had changed her perspective on the kind of creativity that she had used all her life.

The after-lunch program started with Ramkumar Subramanian's exciting series of case studies of application of TRIZ to User Interface Innovation (Ram is a past TRIZ Journal author, and a TRIZ leader at Wipro.) He developed both graphical and tabular methods to help other software developers identify the areas where they can use TRIZ beneficially. There was vigorous discussion with both his colleagues and his competitors.

Karthikeyan Iyer (one of the hard-working and creative conference organizers from Crafitti) and C. Gajra presented "Endoscopy: Evolution and Future Directions with TRIZ" based on Dr. Gajra's experience as a biotechnology research and innovator. Her medical systems insights, and the applications of the laws of evolution to both medical and non-medical endoscopy, were very useful to the audience, judging by the questions and dialog. The application of the laws of evolution to the requirements as well as to the subsystems and the whole system resulted in a very thorough exploration of the possible futures of the endoscope.

Next on the agenda was a "debate" (we changed it to discussion) with Isak Bukhman and me, nominally discussing classical vs. modern TRIZ, but actually agreeing that TRIZ is developing and evolving, so there is no debate. There was a vigorous discussion by both the panelists and the audience about how to get TRIZ started in an organization, should it be introduced top-down or bottom-up (universal answer: it depends), relationships between TRIZ and Six Sigma, TRIZ and blue ocean strategy, TRIZ and blue sky thinking, etc. Thanks from this panelist to the audience for great questions, and thanks to Isak and Navneet for great teamwork!

"Innovation in the security industry" was a brief presentation by Aditya Sekhar from MicroTechnologies, who got the audience thinking about the fact that the harmful elements of society are always innovating, so the guardians must innovate both reactively and proactively.

Karthik Iyer explained the new social network analysis method developed at Crafitti being applied to widely diverse networks, such as influence of people in organizations, influence in governments, influence of suppliers, etc. They then extended the analysis to the network relationships between patents, using the citation indices as a starting point. Karthik's tutorial on social network was fascinating to the mostly engineering-oriented audience, which then easily saw the connections to patent citations; strength comes both from being cited by many others (your idea is strong) and from citing many others (you are connecting many ideas.)

The afternoon's final presentation was "Data and Internet Connectivity Solutions for Emerging Corporate Needs" by R. Vineeth of Bharti Airtel Ltd. He emphasized the need for multiple levels of connectivity within and between companies and within India and between India and other countries.

The rest of the group has now adjourned for networking and dinner, and I plan to join them as soon as this posting is up. Please send any questions that I can pass on to the group.

The annual meeting of the World Future Society was held in Boston this past week and I attended to teach a short TRIZ Futures Course and listen to a few speakers address future issues of concern. It was interesting that 1/2 of the TRIZ Futures class were from the military. Military atttendees and government contractors, charged with future strategy and planning, represented 6-7% of the 700+ attendees. Next to the US, major countries with attendees were Canada (50), Mexico (13), South Korea (11), UK (9), and Finland (8). Major segements of attendees were from academia, insurance industry, entertainment, and the food industry

Some highlights of presentations I attended:

"The City Sustainable"--a presentation by Jennifer Jarrat and John Mahaffey (Leading Futurists LLC) illustrating many examples from around the world of communiites integrating sustainability concepts into their strategic planning. One of the more interesting illustrations was from Greensburg, KS, a town almost totally destroyed by a tornado some years ago. The city, able to build from scratch, incorporated many "green" and information infrastructure aspects that would never have been doable while trying to maintain an existing infrastructure. This raises the question we should all think about and that is, "what would be do if we started all over again?". Total water recycle, use of vertical and 3D geometry, and alternative fuels were all part of many of these examples. That's an interesting think to think about, isn't it? If everything around you went away tomorrow, what would you replace it with? The same thing?

"Keep It Simple Stupid: Energy and Environmental Strategies"--a stimulating presentation by Ysvi Bisk (Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking) about simple and obvious solutions to the energy crisis. He made the analogy to the monopoly enjoyed by salt traders for food preservation to the current stranglehold that oil has on the US economy. He made a passionate plea for the electric car (to be generated by the vast coal and natural gas reserves the US has) to replace the oil infrastrucure. He pointed out that Mexico and Indonesia were now importing oil, and serious shortages of welders, mining engineers, and civil engineers were being seen. He said that we now use the energy equivalent of 1 bbl. of oil to produce 3 bbls where it used to take only 1 bbl to produce 100 bbls. and that the average age of technical personnel in the oil industry is now 50, and the knowledge and skills required to replace this deep knowledge was simply not happening. He broke down the use of a bbl of oil to be 23% industrial (chemicals and materials resources), 68% transportation, and 3% electricity generation. Eliminating the use of oil as a transportation fuel, he argued, was the best way to free ourselves of the current day "salt" monopoly.

"Oceans and our Global Future"--lunch presentation by Susan Avery, President and Director of the Woods Hole Institute. Susan made an impassioned plea to pay attention to our ocean resources that provides 20% of the aninal protein and 5% of the total protein in the human diet. The challenges in possible global warming, drought management, and eco-systems. She had great concern about global warming stratetgies that did not directly take into account the impact on ocean systems which represent 71% of the earth's surface and contain 97% of the planet's total water.

"Navigating the Future: Moral Machines, Technosapiens, and the Singularity"--keynote by Wendell Wallach from Yale University's Center for Bioethics. Wendell highlighted many of the future challenges that we have faced over and over again with increased knowledge--how will we use it? A skeletal bone can be used as a tool or a weapon, the Internet can provide information or invade privacy, etc. One interesting statistic he mentioned was that by 2050, 1/3 of all weapons in use would be unmanned (I.e. drone missiles as an example). He suggested that we have not begun to think seriouisly enough about the extension of the average life span (it was 46 in 1900 and is now 78 and rising). A population with significant perecentages of those over 100 and 110 years of age has significant consequences to society in terms of costs, medical care, indirect employment impacts, etc.

Other topical tracks were focused on the Future of Education, a look back at Brasilia after 50 years, the Future of Terror, Humans in 2020: The Next Ten Years of Biotechnoloogy, Future Military and Civilian Policing, the Changing Landscape of Nonprofit Organizations, and the Unemployment Conundrum

Website for additional information and purchase of particular presentations is at http://www.wfs.org. The 2011 conference will be in Vancouver, BC, Canada in July 2011.

How many of you are old enough to remember some of the original cast episodes of Saturday Night Live? There have been several famous ones including the mimicing of Julia Child's cooking show and bleeding all over the food she was cutting, as well as hundreds of spoofs of politicians from every party and political spectrum. One of my favorites was the one where one of the actors (Rob Schneider) went into an office area and asked someone at the copy machine and asked what they were doing, and the famous reply came back (sorry I can't imitate the accent, etc.) that he was "making copies".

Why do we make copies? Buy copies? Ever thought about this for more than a second? Well, they're cheaper is the simple answer. Could we afford to pay for an original performance from one of our famous actors or actresses every time we went to a movie? Could we afford to hire Neil Diamond to come into our house or car to sing for us every time we felt like hearing one of his great songs? Have the NY Philharmonic set up on our lawn on Friday night? No, we just buy a record, CD, DVD, etc. and pretend they're with us. Could we afford to have original copies of every handout and invoice in our organizations? Sometime we even "lip synch" because we're too lazy to sing in real time. Making copies is a commonly used inventive principle usually used to just save money or effort. But sometimes it gets to be a more serious endeavor with a little bit of serious science behind it.

Many of you are familiiar with what we call the "placebo" effect. Someone gives you a pill and tells you that it's a medication for what ails you and, amazingly, a small percentage of the time, the individual actually feels better because they think they have taken a new miracle drug. This happens in new drug pharmaceutical trials all the time and has to be figured into the data analysis. Let's see how we see this "making copies" inventive principle is used in a pro-active way. Along the 440 mile stretch of Interstate 40 across Tennessee over holiday periods, the state police would love to have manned police cars every ten miles or so to pursue speeders. But that's expensive, and besides, police like to be home with their families over the holidays just like the rest of us. If you make this drive some time, you may see lots of state police cars, but fewer than 10% of them will have people in them. But by the time you get close enough to actually notice this, you've slowed down because you're not sure. Even the radar guns can be turned on randomly without people being there. Making copies of the policemen. People trying to take advantage of multipassenger express lanes frequently put dummies in the passenger seat to make it look like there are two people in the car. Making copies of passengers.

Now, let's get really serious about this inventive principle. Let's make copies of antibodies. Antibodies are the proteins in our bodies produced by the immune system to recognize and neutralize foreign threats like infections, allergens, viruses, and bacteria. Our body makes them all the time, but occasionally in inadequate quantitities, so that our natural system can be overwhelmed. Producing them artificially is not easy nor cheap though being able to do so would be a breakthrough in the treatment of many diseases. In the latest issue of Popular Science (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-06), we see a fascinating article about the development of PLASTIC antibodies by a research team from the University of California and the University of Shizouka in Japan. This involves creating plastic anti-bodies 1/50,000th the size of the human hair by molecular imprinting antigen shaped craters into the particles which then attached themselves to the real anitgens in the blood. Our rapid development of nano and micro technology now allows relatively inexpensive duplication of what would otherwise be extremely expensive biological materials. These articifical antibodies tracked down threats and allowed mice to have a much higher survival rate. This is molecular imprinting and using the inventive principle of "making copies" (for the TRIZniks out there with your contradiction table, this is inventive principle # 26, resolving the conflict of wanting to improve "manufacturability" (system parameter #32) vs. "device complexity (parameter #36).

Rob would be proud of us--we're "making copies" and possibly saving lives at far lower cost. We'll have to watch and follow this development. Where and how can you use "copies" instead of expensive originals?

I'm in the beautiful suburban environment (all the trees are in flower!) of Washington DC this week for the 2010 DoD Performance Symposium, which is the USA's Department of Defense Six Sigma meeting. People from all services present their projects(for feedback, for sharing, and for bragging), attend workshops, and get the opportunity for in-person networking. iSixSigma Live, a division of CTQ Media which also owns TRIZ Journal and Real Innovation is the organizer. For the full program see http://live.isixsigma.com/dod2010

The incorporation of TRIZ into LeanSixSigma has been well-documented in articles and commentaries, so I'll focus this report on how the DoD is working at real-time improvement. The live Innovation/TRIZ networking element is very active - " Phil Samuels (BMG) and Dana Clarke (RACE) are familiar faces to TRIZ Journal readers. The emphasis throughout the day was on the need to innovate to meet the every more stringent improvement goals.

Leadoff speaker was Mr. J.D. Sicilia, director of DoD's Lean Six Sigma Program Office. He used a lot of humor (some military, some just human) to set the theme of performance excellence - " not just one time, but for sustained benefit to the military and to the taxpayers. He called attention to more than 40 storyboards that documented success in projects in all areas of process improvement - " the organizers considered skipping this element because formatting the presentations takes a lot of time, but the participants wanted it, so they used a very TRIZ-ish "local quality" solution -" the presentations are in any format that works.

Eric Fanning, Undersecretary of the Navy, gave the keynote address, and surprised the audience by saying that he had changed the talk he planned to give, because of Secretary Gates' speech last week about the importance of efficiency to achieve the same mission with $28billion less cost. This is THE opportunity, THE "game changer" for continuous process improvement/Lean SixSigma. Fanning said that this could make it easier to report savings, and will be a challenge to distinguish between cost avoidance and cost savings. His distinction between the "tail" and the "tooth" of the organization applies to non-military organizations as well; the goal is to save a lot on the "tail" (support) processes and move those savings to the "tooth" (mission).

"How do we show the value of continuous process improvement to the Navy?" Fanning proposed aligning problem selection with the Secretary's commitment to dramatically reduced energy use. His statistics on the cost in money and in casualties of delivering one gallon of gasoline to the front line were persuasive, and the benefits to the improvement community of working on projects that the leadership is pre-committed to.
Audience questions dealt with specifics of the DoD's organization issues, which got the audience some interesting answers to difficult questions.

General C. Robert Kehler, Commander of the Air Force Space Command, gave the second re-structured presentation, focusing on how to apply the techniques of Lean Six Sigma to make operations efficient and effective, regardless of the technologies involved. He had a very strong focus on the functions of the users of the systems that his group (46,000 people world-wide) provides. He made the point very dramatically that "we have been on this road before" recalling both the successes of Total Quality Management, and the failure (which was proliferation of a TQM bureaucracy and emphasis on procedures rather than results.) "It was doomed because of how we went about it." His claim to being a "card carrying skeptic" was greeted with good humor by the audience, and his openness to try again, with awareness of all the lessons learned from earlier efforts, was very positively received.

General Kehler's story of work in progress emphasized the cultural and business change from spot inspection by outsiders to rigorous, continuous self-inspection and improvement. The objective is making sure that leaders have clear view of the capability, rather than the enthusiasm, of their people and their systems. He handled the delicate question of inspection (bad in Six Sigma, good in military history) quite nicely, challenging the audience to find the careful balance of people and achieving process excellence in difficult situations.

120 of the 450 attendees participated in my TRIZ workshop after lunch. Thanks to those who pointed out that TRIZ is now in the official DoD "Lean Six Sigma body of knowledge" document!

The entire group reconvened to hear from Elizabeth McGrath, DoD Assistant Deputy Chief Management Officer. She did an eloquent job of explaining the new orientation of DoD improvement as well as the elements that are frankly re-used from earlier initiatives. She used her 22 years' government experience as a basis for lessons learned from past experience as well as explaining plans for change in 10 significant areas ranging from energy use to acquisition processes. McGrath concluded with an announcement that www.defense.gov will feature requests for innovative solutions to the problem of taking cost out of DoD business operations.

David Tillotson III, Deputy Chief Management Officer of the Office of the Undersecretary of the Air Force spoke on "Shaping the Air Force Future through Business Transformation." For a TRIZ perspective, he focused on the contradictions in the present environment ��" a traffic jam due to construction is bad, but people having jobs is good. He showed the alignment of the Air Force's strategies with the overall DoD strategies of the previous speaker. Priorities are now assigned to projects that have measurable ROI, that are desired by the commands, and (surprisingly) where anticipated resistance to change is low. The results of benchmarking commercial organizations were another set of surprises which resulted in an initiative called "Clean Audit" that Tillotson pointed out is no fun at all, but absolutely necessary as a precursor to realigning spending (in TRIZ terms, he really emphasized ideality -" more benefit at less cost with less harm/waste.) He concluded with a strong message, backed up by numerous cases: Mission effectiveness is dependent on business efficiency.

"American Freedom Festival" was a unique video presentation by Jack L. Tilley, the retired Sergeant Major of the Army. The American Freedom Foundation helps military members and their families. The Festival is a series of concerts that raise money and raise awareness of the need and the campaign.

Chairman J. D. Sicilia returned to the podium to present awards to the winners of the DoD Performance Bowl which was a Six Sigma contest held yesterday. The Air Force "Team GD" were the winners.

A wine tasting featuring the Six Sigma winery followed, with plenty of opportunity for networking and learning.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (well-known management author and Harvard professor) presents her observations and challenges to CEOs who are embracing innovation during the recovery in the article "Block-by-Blockbuster Innovation" in the May 2010 Harvard Business Review. See http://hbr.org/2010/05/column-block-by-blockbuster-innovation/ar/1

I agree with many of her points, but I also noticed that with a bit of TRIZ orientation, much of what she says would be a lot stronger--they would stand as part of the database on human innovation that is the foundation of TRIZ, rather than as the observations of one person (although she's a very well-qualified observer.)

Prof. Kanter starts with the observation that some company leaders are ignoring risk, calling for breakthrough innovation, and even denigrating incremental innovation. She sees the positioning of continuous improvement as the opposite of breakthrough innovation as a false dichotomy, that increases the risk of innovation. I disagree with her contention that innovation must be risky, while agreeing with the other points. She is in complete agreement with the classical patterns of evolution in TRIZ, pointing out that breakthrough systems are the result of many incremental changes in product, processes, and the environment (including the customer!) that make the breakthrough possible.

She proposes an innovation pyramid with multiple ideas from many sources at the base (TRIZ concept "somebody, someplace has solved your problem"?) a portfolio of ideas in the middle, competing for resources, and a few strategic ideas at the peak, given dedicated attention to develop future directions for the company. This could be seen as a business example of the separation principles (the parts have different characteristics from the whole) or even an example of multi-dimensionality.

Did this article stimulate your thinking about innovation? Comments are welcome.

Do any of you use water in your processes? Why? How much? Most likely it's to cool something or to dilute something. Clean water is becoming more precious all the time as a Florida resident such as myself can testify. Though we are surrounded by "water", it's salty seawater and unusable for drinking or most crop irrigation. In fact, Tampa, FL has just (finally, after a year long struggle) brought on stream the country's largest water desalinization plant, supplying 10% of our county's water supply. This water is far more costly than the ground water typically used, but its raw material source is reliable.

Water (fresh water) is not going to become any cheaper. All the inexpensive sources such as dams and lakes are, for the most part, already committed. When a resource, whether it be water, energy, or air, becomes scarce, the processes that rely upon it bvecome very expensive and ultimately unstainable. An interesting book that I purchase every other year or so, Vital Signs,2010, published by the Worldwatch Institute, has a number of very concise graphs and summaries of the world's resource use. One of these that caught my eye was a table (p44) showing the water required to produce selected foods, in cubic meters of water/ton of foodstuff:

Beef 13,500

Pork 4,800

Poultry 4,100

Soybean 2,750

Eggs 2,700

Rice 1,400

Wheat 1,160

Milk 780

Now, I was aware of some of these discrepancies, but not to the degree that I see here. If we're in the innovation business, what does this tell us? First, there will be a crying need for more efficient and effective means of desalinating water, treating brackish water, and recycling used water. This will not be easy since fundamental thermodynamics tells us that water wants to be with salt and it will always cost energy to separate the two.

But more importantly, where do these numbers say that we should focus our food research efforts? Soybeans and eggs are both sources of protein, just like beef, but use 1/5 as much water. The opportunity to make these foodstuffs more palatable to meat eaters is clear. We have seen some of this over the years in the form of soy burgers.

Right next to this chart is another chart showing the water consumption by various energy types:

Solar .0001

Wind .0001

Gas 1.0

Coal 2.0

Nuclear 2.5

Oil 4.0

Hydropower 68

Biofuels (current) 178

More interesting data. Wind and solar have continuity and power density limitations and hydropower is limited by natural locations (and is for the most part already used), but the driving force for natural gas is very clear as well as the tremendous incentive to increase the power density of solar power. Processes that use energy that is both readily available and not as highly dependent upon water as a resource to make and use will have a natural long term advantage.

It's amazing what two simple charts can tell us about where to focus our innovation energy in the water and energy areas.

Comments are welcome!

Theme for the Day: Moving Beyond the Core: New Business Model Creation, Keynote: Vijay Govindarajan, Professor of International Business and Founding Director of the Tuck Center for Global Leadership, gave a fascinating presentation highlighting the ignorance of many in the West about global markets and totally unique concepts for new businesses that escape the mind of someone trying to do business in India.

He summarized the the basic breakthrough new business thinking process as:

1. Manage the present
2. Selectively forget the past and
3. Create the future.

The future needs to be at least 2030 in the thinking.If #3 is to succeed, it is critical to succeed at box #2. #1 is linear thinking as typified by Six Sigma and operational excellence. #2 and #3 have major discontinuities where the fundamental business model shifts. Box 3 is easier than box 2. It's hard to forget.

Strategy is business model innovation. In emerging markets such as India and China, one can't use US models. He cited a classic example of Ford's first attempt to penetrate the lower cost Indian market by taking a basic $20,000 US car and removing features. One of these was removing the power windows in the passenger seats, forgetting that most Indians who could afford a $20K car had a chauffeur and easily opening the back windows was an essential element. The alternative approach, of scaling up and making a $2,000 car by scaling up two wheelers will disrupt the rest of the world. Strategies such as this will transfer back to the West and cause major disruption.

Change the customer, change the value, and change the architecture. He cited Dell computer as a US example.He emphasized this "doing the impossible" (I.e. $2K car) by reminding the audience of the original goal to get to the moon, originally considered unrealistic. (Note to TRIZniks: the Ideal Final Result!). Without a serious challenge goal, we rarely exceed our ambitions. If we are rewarded for meeting goals, that's what we do. We need to focus on "next practice", not "best practice".

He described another Indian business success where a company was founded whose strategy was to lend to the poor (Another TRIZ note: Do it in reverse). Strict small dollar limits were set, women (vs. men) were the primary borrowers, no collateral was demanded, and the "bank" went out to the people (people did not come to the bank). With no bailout money, they lent over $10B in increments of $15 each along with self help groups. 99% loan repayment was experienced and the concept is being expanded to loan money to beggars after asking them what they need. They can get another $20 by repaying. It is estimated that Mumbai has 500,000 beggars and half are now salesmen. This business opportunity could apply to 130 countries globally.

Vijay also went over the top 11 things to deal with a dead horse (http://vjaygovindiarajan.com/newlsetter.html) as abstracted from his newsletter site. A few were quite humorous:

1. Maybe the horse isn't dead,
2. Hire a consultant to study the horse, and
3. Replace/fire the jockey.

We need the VOO, not the VOC. VOO is the voice of the outside. In the Hindu religion, there is the god of the present, the god of destruction, and finally the god of creation. We have to follow this (be born, be preserved, be destroyed. Doing this in our personal lives has value as well.

Presentation: Deb Mills from Corning discussed their recovery from the "valley of death" in 2002 when their stock price went from $110 to $1 in one year. They started a major new business and innovation effort with the goal of doubling the number of breakthrough products and businesses. These new activities were "fire walled" from the rest of the organization until their revenue stream could be said to be predictable.

Presentation: George Glacking from P&G (85,000 employees, operating in 160 countries with 300 product lines) reviewed their box 2 and 3 successes, including Tide and Pampers. Gillette was added in a major acquisition. In 1996 came Fareze and Swiffer. Many of there new businesses were the result of ad hoc activities where team leaders came and went. Not clear to P&G whether it is better to separate these types of ventures as opposed to embedding them. Many teams has 50% representation from outside the natural business area. Staffing choices are critical. The key early stage question in not whether it is possible to do something, but is there a way to capture value. Without a "yes" to that question, a project does not proceed.

"Fishbowl Commentary" Nine Sigma is working hard to change their business model from a transactional one to one where they take ownership of the goal and result for the client. As an outside resource provider they are free to use all tools (not just the clients' ones) as well as to work with the competition in a way the problem owner cannot. Alcoa commented that they used a joint venture approach when the new opportunity does not align sufficiently with their core business. Corning is looking at contract manufacturing much more than in the past. In general, these firms commented that a shortage of the right people, not money, was the primary barrier.

Keynote: Teresa Amabile (Harvard Business School) presented her latest case study findings on morale within organizations as it related to innovation by contrasting a two company study done on outstanding and poor new product development performance. Her findings bottom line finding was that business issues such as ownership form, incentives, personalities, and whether Stage Gate type processes were used were not the key distinguishing difference--it was quality of work life. This study covered238 professionals, 26 project leaders and the analysis of 12,000 diaries! None of the findings were not new, in my opinion, just further reinforcement fo the things we know we should do, but seldom do. Collaboration is one of these. Joy and pride in one's work vs. a culture of anger and fear coupled with project and personal support for individuals play key roles. Frequently goals change and management does not listen. Desired needs from management (again nothing new here, but certainly reinforcement of what know is critical) include recognition, clear goals, support for progress made, providing mentors, and extra personal support. Mundane events matter to people. One bad day has a much more negative effect than a single good day.

Presentation: Bob Wolf and Sandy Linetta (Glaxo Smith Kline) described their efforts to ignite the innovation fires. These included many fairly convention items including hiring some "weird" people, hiring of expert out side consultants, changing organizational structures, basic creativity training, book reading, etc. They did not set up an "innovation center". They felt that inclusion of marketing people with R&D was a excellent "fusion". They took action to move from a functional to more brand siloed groups, moved to a more ext external focus, and had more face to face vs.virtual interaction with customers. Their building of new facilities with "hubs" that included all functions raised key matrices such as "easy access to colleagues" (50-90%) and "easy access to decision makers" (40-80%)

Keynnote: "Innovation is Successful Only When it is "On Code" (Clotaire Rapaille, Archetypes Discoveries Worldwide and Author: The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do

Clotaire made an extremely interesting presentation on the internal "coding" of our thinking and brains, meaning why people do what they do and why they frequently say one thing and do another. An individual's "code"is defined as why they accept or reject new ideas and types of innovation. An example he started with is the difference in approaches to the challenges and opportunities in airline travel. The airplane builders, in trying to improve the qualitry of the air travel experience are thinking in terms of leg room and food service where the big issue in the mind of an airplane user is the time involved (travel, security, etc.) getting on to the plane much more than the flight itself, which in many cases is much shorter than the comiing and going from the airport. No airport at all is what would be desired. He also mentioned the different strategies employed by Boeing and Airbus with Boeing's smaller, but longer range 787 providing more non-stop capability. He suggested that we go beyond getting out of the box and get rid of the box (airport?). (TRIZ folks: Ideal Final Result: Something performs its function and doesn't exist!). Clotaire says that our code of analysis and reference is imprinted early on from our experiences and there's no second chance for a first experience. He pointed out his surprise that in the US conference rooms usually have no windows vs. lots of windows elsewhere. He pointed out the most important code within us is the one related to survival. In this regard, we have 3 brains: reptilian (both an inside version relating to food, care, etc. and an outside, and emotional one). He used the example of the very sucessful PT Cruiser from Chrysler as an example of a product appealing to both inside and outside codes of our brains. The exterior design was very round, shapely, and "feminine" (appealing to our emotional side) while the inside was more like an Al Capone escape vehicle. It was an example of a love/hate car crossing two codes in our brains. Digitial watches vs. hand watches in another example of appealing to different "codes". Then we have the cortex analytical part connecting with other people and facts, data, reality, statistics, and prices. This last part ontrols the other two functions and cleans the plate ccasionally (men and women very diffrent about this). Men tend to react to the aroma of coffee vs. its taste and a mother relates it to breakfast and feeding the family. An innovation in this area must be "on code"--aroma. He related this to the eleimination of the PT Cruiser when Chrysler was taken over by Daimler Benz who did not see the need for a "feminine" code product. He also speculated about the changes in store now that Fiat, an Italian company, was the owner. Chrysler employees must feel very schizophrenic! The American "code" is that they do not want smaller cars. From Geneva in Europe you can be in Italy, France, etc. within 30 minutes or at most 3 hours. In America we can drive for a week and still be in one country. Space and efficiency are both important. That's the "code". In Japan minimal space is the norm--there is no word in the Japanese language that we would interpret as "privacy".

Innovation has to make life simple. Adding one step of complication causes a 20% loss in market. No cables for anything! Approach a car and it starts!

Corporations have cultures and replicate themselves without awareness and then cannot adapt. Terrorists have no structure (vs. the Panzers in WWII Germany). With little investment, big results are achieved. The 9/11 incident involved the purchase of 10 plane tickets.

We don't use outside resources enough to break our "codes". Having seven engineers on a "brainstorming" team is 6 too many, he says. Find a priest, a baker, a car dealer, etc. Multi-cultural diversity to understand "codes" is important. The Japanese perception of cleanliness in a bathroom is different than a Chinese perception since Chinese bathrooms are so much smaller and the focus in on how clean the celliing is since that's the only thing that can be seen. (When was the last time you looked at your bathroom ceiling?). The Japanese and Americans have very different "codes" about time.

It takes only one second to create history. December 6 and 8, 1945 were distincly different for both the US and Japan. He made other comparisons of Japanese and American "codes". Doing things right the first time in the US is "boring. Americans don't read instructions--they make mistakes. The Japanese read the instructions 500 times. We frequently don't use the additive strengths of the different "codes" in people. Be suspicious of any CEO who only knows one language.

In the US we are only interested in what's impossible. That's what we need to ask our teams to do (Note to TRIZniks: the Ideal Final Result)

Jim reviewed his research in the use of collective random intelligence highlighting a study done by placing an oxen on display and asking all passerbys to guess its weight. After collecting hundreds of ballots, the "average" guess was 1197 pounds vs. the actual 1198 pounds. No one guess was correct but the average was. We need to tap into colective intelligence and reach across all inputs. He pointed out that studies have shown that crowd predictions on elections are more accurate than Gallup polls 75% of the time. How do we make sure we "reach across"? Use diveristy (multi-cultural, age, gender, type of training) and expand the range and type of diversity you're considering. Everyone is not making the same mistakes!

Most meetings are echo chambers. He related how the term "devil's advocate" came about. In the early days of the Roman Catholic church's practice of naming "saints", there was great concern about the significance of this decision and a single dissenter was always included in the discussions and just as importantly, the "dissenter" was constantly changed. People dissatisfied with their "team" experience tend to be ones who like consensus and prefere homogeneious teams that can reach consensus easily. Good decisions arise from conflict. This needs to be made explicit at the start (Personal input here--if we made more proactive use of psychological assessment tools, this would be much easier). Imitation and group think are potentially dangerous in innovation. He mentioned a study done in Times Square where one person looked up at the top of a building and 5% of the surrounding crowd looked up. When 5 people looked up, 20% of the crowd did. When 8 people looked up, 45% did.

Be careful about oral responses and talkative people in group decision meetings. Knowledge and incites come from unexpected sources and people and leaders cannot dictate this in advance.

This group discussed their individual company approaches and processes for corporate wide idea collection. Avery Dennison has an "idea bank" which collects employee input and ranks against business needs. Award systems are used but not strictly related to dollar impact. There are special rewards for ideas relating to REPLACING current products and businesses. (Personal note: that's a great idea!). Motorola has an inventory of 16,000 ideas via an Open Idea Market. No special rewards, relying on WIIFM, helping, sharing. Clorox makes heavy use of both internal and external social media.

This session used a very interesting format which may be of value to you. The speakers were on a small stage in chairs, and after their brief oral (no slides)presentations took questions. The person asking the question was invited to join the panelists and participate in the Q/A, providing a "build" on the idea inputs. It suggested to me a possible format to replace the management lecturing presentations followed by Q/A in many companies. The employee asking the question would join the management group, replacing a manager who then beome part of the "audience". Might provide some interesting dynamics!

Sony described their efforts in future scenario planning, primarily based on bundled functionality and bundled services. As a service provider, Pitney Bowes uses the concept of a "challenge architect" in thinking about the service process they provide. They see the "democratization" of innovation. This is a reinforcement of trends mentioned by many other speakers. They use a RGB framework to categorize ideas (red--now, green--procede, blue--blue sky concept). They listen to the "voice of the retailer". Sony pointed out the change in photography trends as an electronic camera allows the user to take many more pictures and then delete them later (Personal TRIZ note: cheap and disposable principle). This is a miniature version of the information age challenge of having too much information and trying to sort what is valuable.

Dr. Vandebroek sumarized Xerox's corporate strategy as combining the customer's wishes and wants with Xeroxx capabilities to produce breakthrough products, services, and $$. She also mentioned their partnership with Fuji in Japan and mentioned their R&D budget was $1.5B and having 50,000 patents and generating them at a rate of 10/day. Xerox sales are $22B and it employs 130,000 people.Business focus is documents, document management, and business proffess outsourcing.Their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), formally an only internal Xerox research center now gets 50% of its revenue from outside Xerox. Their R&D budget is split approximately in thirds: exploration, incubation of new businesses, and current commercial product lines. They use Customer Innovation Councils with P&G, cited as an example. They collaborate on space design, types of printers, solid ink waste. One of these efforts reduced printer power use from 400kwh/day to 70. She mentioned that there are 3 TRILLION pages/yr. being generated and less than 5% has been digitized. There are 9B times more electronic data than is in books

Internally, employees are required to participate in their "dreaming" process. They observe and categorize opportunities by remote knowledge workers and mobile knowledge workers.

They have recently purchased Lulu self-publishing. A book can be published in 5 minutes and downloaded within 20 minutes.

This talk highlighted the importance of platforms as an innovation engine. A picture of the original Sputnik satellite in 1957 was shown but the point was not the satellite (and its repercussions in the West) but the fact that the signal from this satellite was not hidden. Now satellite signals are use to accurately locate submarines and form the basis for GPS navigation. GPS is now a platform, not just a signal. Ideas are also networks. They start as a network of neurons firing and then making new connections. The history of the Philadelphia Coffee House where Ben Franklin and other early American inventors gathered to not just drink, but to exchange ideas. Platforms build and cross pollinate. We now have Google maps, Twitter, SMS cell phones, HTML, http:, etc Four Square is new business concept using all of these. Clusters, not corporations, are what is important. These are not necessarily exclusive.

The disruption was the flash microchip, but the challenge was culture barriers and roadblocks. In 1975, the first digital image was captured on a TV.The charge coupled device in the late 60's allowed the exploration of image capturing in an electronic fashion. Initially there were no specific business goals. The first digital camera has .01 megapixels, only B/W, and a 120X160 mil active area, and required a custom setup. There was no budget (he had to personally buy the CCD), they had no dedicated space and only 1 technician. The prototype was the size of a toaster, had a digital cassette, and used 16 batteries. With the Kodak "culture" of perfect image quality, the quality of the picture at that point was a major barrier. In 1977, a technical report was written, a patent filed in May 1977, and the first digital camera patent issued in Dec 1978 (#4131919)

The internal reaction was curiousity and caution and there was hesitation to show around. It generated more question than answers (no film? no paper? It's too far out). People don't want to view an image on a TV! How to store the images? (No mass market PC's at that time) How to make reliable? The paradigm is the paper picture is reliable almost forever. The PC, the Internet, wide bandwidth, photoprinting in the home were all paradigm changes. The context of its use was not imagined. In 1976 the question was asked, "when will it impact consumer photography?" In 10-15 years, they went from 10,000 to 1 million pixels and 200X improvement in resolution. There was zero interest in memory cards. There was much more support outside of Kodak than within. The development of digital circuitry in terms of speed, power, and size were just not imagined. Image compression (.jpg) was another enabler. It removed 90% of the image that the eye couldn't see anyway and allowed the introduction of artificats. The D5000 camera introduced in 1989 ran into significant cultural issues ("you can't change film sales", "call it in an image accessory, not a camera"0. The bottom line issues are to understand the corporate culture and view your innovation in their context, have friends (they're had to find!), and be honest and positive with your internal PR. Don't make yourself the issue. Remember all roadblocks are temporary and plan for what's next. Be patient, persevere, and be persistent. The key learning was the need was an image, not the film. Now the internal gospel is "no more film projects"! This was a fascinating presentation by someone who has more patience than anyone I have ever seen make a presentation since Art Fry's Post It Note story.

For those of you who are not aware of or don',t shop at Target, you are not aware of the concept of the "Guest" in the store. At Target, the guest (not the "customer") is at the center. It's an ethos vs. a process. Open innovation is part of Target's DNA along with the emphasis on diversity of intellectuality. Challenges they have been dealing with include balancing the Target store brands vs. the brand names. Their market demographics are getting older and more diverse.

They encourage teams to share results across the company, and strive to diversify the interests and include critical thinkers. Some time ago, they arrived at what they called the "Moment of Truth" and that is that the guest comes first and the vendors/suppliers are second. "Speed is life"--need to learn quickly. "We must not forget what we learned" as the economy gets better--don't let up!

Target now has a Director of Guest Insights to ensure they continue to gather information from the "guests'" perpective.

This division of GE sells CT and MRI machines and has a very engineering focused R&D team. Their challenge is in selling their technologies and products and bringing ethnographic research into their planning. 90% of the time the product technology is there but the design aspects come at the end They have sent a number of their engineers to a design course at Stanford to try to improve the understanding of the product/customer interface to their engineers. In other words, what is the customer "experience"? It's usually not very pleasant, frequently requiring sedation, especially for children under 6 and adults who are claustrophobic. They have made some interesting changes in the design and the experience to try to change the perspective to one of an "adventure" for a child (make it a spaceship with stars projected for example), and introducing comforting sounds and smells, as well as decorations. "We need to get away from the image that we're "torturing people"! Part of the Stanford course involves teaching some basic creativity skills to their engineers to improve their ability to be more right brained in their design thinking to hopefully produce a more user friendly experience, not just a better product.

Day 3 tomorrow!

I am attending the Front End of Innovation conference in Boston and would like to share highlights with RealInnovation readers. This conference was started many years ago by Joyce Wycoff, a creativity consultant in California, primarily for her clients. It was originally called the Fuzzy Front End conference and blossomed into a fairly large conference over time, was merged into the IIR conferences, and has morphed into the Front End of Innovation. IIR's business model, as a profit making conference provider, includes many "paid" speaking slots and workshops, so the material being reported on is a little biased, but valuable nonetheless.

Day 1

Workshop: Increasing Value through Continuous Open Innovation Improvement

This theme of open innovation has greatly permeated this conference over time, recognizing the value of incorporating outside perspectives and resources to improve and accelerate the front end of innovation. Participants included Sealed Air, Hallmark Cards, Philips Consumer Lifestyles, and Nine Sigma (sponsor). Key advantages of open innovation cited by this group included more thorough benchmarking, acquiring talent, and the learnig of how to emotionally connect with consumers on products. Hallmark highlighted their positive experiences using the talents of the MIT Media Lab as well as the acquisition of Crayola that allowed them to successfully commercialize sound cards at an appropriate cost and with an emotional connection with the product. There was significant resistance to a traditional "art"design company to the the use of electronic and digital technology. All the participants cited the importance of high level management involvement and support, including regular reviews and support for external technology search. Hallmark discussed going beyond sound to recordability, and how to use the desire of suppliers to help them as opppsed to telling suppliers what they they (thought they) needed. Sealed Air talked about the advantage of putting out more general inquiries that generate more "serendipitous" outside in ideas. They also discussed the challenge of maintaining excitement for this effort and their partial solution of having quarterly meetings with their CTO and regular weekly conference calls. Their use of an organization such as Nine Sigma helped them to identify technologies and capabilities from totally different markets and very different solutions.(TRIZ practitioners take note!). Hallmark discussed how they targeted the music greeting card by clearly defining the goal as 3 pages of paper plus music at low cost, and clearly identifying the cost of the sound module as the cost breaker. Now the innovation challenge is to go "beyond sound" (recordability, dual sounds). Sealed Air discussed unique challenges in licensing technology from small firms outside the US. Small firms don't think like large firms and don't understand their processes. Language barriers need to be dealt with as well as the inability to accept delayed payments from large corporations. The observation was made that open innovation can actually take longer, but in the end usually is justified.The group, when asked about the future of open innovation, answered by saying that better VOC was needed, product linkage with a company's web site, and forcing the organization to be more deliberate as well as more flexible. Blaine Childress from Sealed Air described a coporation as an aircraft carrier trying to deal with attack boats of smaller, more agile competitors. Graham Mott said Philips hade condensed their learnings into a "cookbook" globally available across 40 different sites, put short time limits on CDA's, and the use of third parties for outside assessments.

Presentation: "Bringing Innovation to a Technology-Enabled Service for Seniors" (Bill Prenowitz, Philips Healthcare)

Bill Prenowitz talked about selling the integration of a product and interactive service to seniors. The fundamental difference is the person needing help can describe symptons to a trained professional vs. just calling 911. The service can also provide follow up calls. The system includes monitoring, calling, and response--all of which need to work to provide a great service. They have achieved 50% market share with only 20% total market penetration for such services. They learned early to hide all the complicated electronics and interfaces---this complexity (how it works) is irrelevant to the consumer. In this area it was critical to provide real product prototypes and not just concepts, as well as to triangulate market input. Their market research showed that seniors WANT to receive calls (they're lonely). Device design is critical in this area. Shrinkage of buttons on a phone makes it more difficult to use for seniors, but large buttons hurts their self-esteem. Large buttons with more space between requiring lower pressure is the compromise. They also discovered that slides on the side of the phone to control volume was preferable to dials.Vision and hearing impairments must be taken into account as well as providing response to varying strength and range of voice (TRIZ folks: Dynamism). In designing the software, functional mapping was used with embedded dynamism if a wrong response is detected.

Keynote: "More Meadows" (Robin Chase, Founding CEO, Zipcar)

Robin reviewed breakthrough products and services (in addition to the idea of Ziipcar, a car rental service with no large storage area) on the Web. Chat Roulette is an interactive web chat that started out with an old computer and in 3 days had grown to 30 million users! Web 2.0 where users are providing the content (TRIZ Folks: Do It In Reverse). Bed sharing in private homes vs. hotels now has 70,000 rooms. The analogy to Skype was made. The I-Phone now has 150,000 apps with 3 BILLION downloads.She pointed out that there are a lot more people outside the room of any ideation or innovation session. The wide availability of information and resources on the web is now allowing a person who used to do just one job to do seven and soon seven jobs at the same time. The paradigm is shifting from ownnership to sharing as the path to success.

Keynnote: "Unreasonable Behavior: A Driving Force for Innovation" (Mark Harrison, Innovation Director, Diageo and Eric Wilkinson, Cambridge Consultants)

Diageo is the parent of Bailey's Irish Creme and other premium liquors. Mark reviewed their long term business journey from growth to acquisition to cost reduction and finally to innovation. He reviewed one of their liquor breakthroughs--Bailey's Irish Creme, a blend of creme and liquor that no one thought would be viable. Significant technical challenges had to be resolved to keep the liquids separated until appropriate. He also reviewed a new product concept of frozen mixed drinks on tap whose major cost constraint was the large cost (80%) in the scraping system to clean the dispensing system. Details were not provided but one design parameter, which had originally ruled out the use of plastics because of low thermal conductivity. However, surface chemistry properties had not been considered and more than made up for the conductivty property. Need to be careful to consider all aspects, properties, and resources in the system. Other words of wisdon: Don't wait for a crisis to innovate. Think how your technology can provide the unthinkable.

　

Anyone old enough to remember that song? "Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You..." Well, I am still in a state of amazement and it took 4 days of contemplation to write a column after seeing the article, "Can GE Still Manage?" (Business Week, 4/25/2010, p27-32). As most of you know, Jack Welch thought long and hard about which of his senior executives would take his place and he chose Jeff Immelt, then head of the medical products business. He's had a rough time with GE stock half what it was before, selling long standing businesses, and people beginning to question his strategies and plans.

I don't have enough information to make a total judgment on someone like Mr. Immelt and I doubt that I could run a corporation as global and as diversified as GE, but there are some fundamentals that apply no matter what the business is or how big it is. One of those is having an intimate relationship and thorough understanding of your senior executives and direct reports who, after all, are the ones that actually run the company for you. In this article, Jeff, in an admitted attempt to "bond with this team", invited each over to his house for a Friday night conversation (I'll bet his wife was happy with 150 of these!), and then off to a hotel, only to return on Saturday for a more comprehensive discussion. The article further goes on to discuss his putting his own management style "under the microscope". The perception is that too much "warmth, wit, and attention has been beamed outside the GE family. Inside ...he has been less visible and less available".

What's wrong with this picture? Waiting ten years to have a serious down to earth conversation with the people who run your company? How can you run a company and not be available to the people who make it happen for you? Who are you? What motivates and excites you? What do you want to do ten years from now? How else could the company use your talents? How could we do things differently? What talent do you have that we aren't using? And on and on. Isn't this a conversation that should occur within months of someone taking on a job like this--not ten years later when the seeds of possible mediocrity have been sowed? How in the world can someone expect to achieve corporate goals if he doesn't understand the people who not only work for him, but on whose capabilities and interests rest the success of the company? Shouldn't this conversation take place on a frequent basis? Before you say 300 days divided by 150 is every other day, what else could possibly be more important? I can assure you that over a long period of time Six Sigma, the Crotonville Academy, the price of oil, and the competition in network television pale in comparison.

The questions for you are:

1. Do you run a business with people reporting to you? What do you REALLY know about them? What motivates them? What do they do in their spare time? What do they (really) care about?

2. Do your people wait to be invited to a sleepover to say what is on their minds? If so, why? What kinds of barriers to communication have you set up and don't even recognize?

3. When was the last time you spent talking (not Emailing) with the people you work with for several hours?

4. Do you know what is the most important thing your employees would change if you asked them?

5. What kind of a feedback loop do you have that tells you that you aren't spending enough time with your people? Or do you find it out when they tell you they'er leaving?

Get to know your folks---NOW!

Those of you who are not chemists or chemical engineers probably don't read Chemical and Engineering News which, once a year, reprints the acceptance speech from the recipient of the American Chemical Society's most prestigious award, the Priestley Medal. Dr. Richard N. Zare was recognized for his work in laser induced fluorescence and the study of single molecules in solution that assisted in sequencing the human genome. In his talk, he discussed none of that, but instead chose to discuss creativity. His focus was on the teaching of creativity vs. the learning of it. As most of us in the TRIZ community would agree, creativity CAN be taught and LEARNED. It is a teachable skill and science and not a mystery based on our DNA. This article is on pp 19-21 of Chemical and Engineering News (http://www.cen-online.org).

Dr. Zare says that creativity is the intersection of three things:

1. Your capacity to think outside the box and putting together existing ideas into new combinations (Amen!),
2. The knowledge and information you have (without that you have nothing to put together), and finally
3. Your motivation to think about something different.

All of this requires passion, resources, and daring to play with ideas and concepts that risk that what you are doing may completely fail.

He showed an example of how difficult it is to think outside the box by using the 9 dot illustration that many of you may have seen where you are asked to connect nine dots with only four lines and the recognition that the only way to do this is to go outside the geometry of the nine box. He goes on to show how the assumption that we must put the lines through the center of the boxes prevents us from seeing how to do this with only three lines and finally, by using a spiral, it is possible to connect all the circles with only one "line". (We assume the line needs to be straight, but no one told us that!). The only way to escape the original biases we have about this it to break the inertia in our minds and move on to irritation and the desire to solve a problem (does this sound like resolving a contradiction?). Then we move on to imitation--has someone else solved this problem before? The more and different problems you solve, the easier this is. Finally, he says we move to "intuition"--a thought process he describes as the balance of wild hypotheses and evaluation, requiring one to be a balanced schizophrenic. Finally, inspiration arrives when you see a connection you did not see before. The ability to do this once leads you to try a more difficult problem, and so on.

At a high level, the two key ingredients are confidence (you can solve this problem) and passion (it is important to solve this problem). This again should resonate with both general innovators and TRIZ practitioners. Interesting perspectives on innovation from an industry leader in creativity. What does it say to us?

1. Take off the blinders in both how you analyze and solve problems.
2. Keep your creativity and innovation genes active. They will atrophy just like bones and muscles if you don't use them. There is no shortage of problems in your organization or in the world around you--lots of things to practice on.
3. Keep the balance between analysis and hypothesis. I have been in too many "brainstorming" sessions where the judgment about success was how many ideas were generated, not whether a practical solution was obtained.
4. Look around you for people and industries with similar problems and use their solutions.

A great recipe to follow!

Technology Review magazine's listing of the world's most innovative companies has just arrived (see www.technologyreview.com/tr50). For the first time I am not going to rant about lists of "most innovative" that don't have the criteria for selection or the definition of innovation! You may disagree with the TR editors' definitions, but at least they have them.

Innovative companies: demonstrated superiority (that implies some measurement method that is not detailed) at inventing technology and using it both to grow the business and to transform how we live.

I'll take issue with the dual requirement, and use trivial cases to demonstrate the point:

1. Suitcases with wheels transformed how we live, and put a whole class of porters and baggage handling people out of business. The "technology" involved was nil (using skateboard wheels) - the big change was in marketing, using (male) pilots to show male business travelers that wheeled cases were acceptable.

2. Curved shower curtain rods have, in a modest way, changed the comfort level of our bathing experience, and the "technology" change is nil. This is a nice demonstration of the TRIZ principle of migrating a technology from one field to another, but not of creating a new technology. It is a favorite TRIZ teaching case because curving the rod uses 2 of the 40 principles (17- dimensionality change and 14 - increase curvature) and demonstrates how one improvement can cause the need for others (attachment to the wall has to change, for the early designs)

In both cases, there was technology development, 10-30 years previously, in another industry, for another reason, paid for by another company for its own reasons. And yet there was impact on the way consumers live, and creation of profitable business.

The article has a fascinating selection of companies and technologies, and businesses ranging from some of the biggest to relatively small. I suggest reading it with the idea that the technologies being honored are usually doing one specific thing for their customers...how could you migrate that technology to a different field, and do more things for different customers? Thermoelectric SI chip cooling, integrated photonic circuits, superconducting power cables, yeast that makes biofuel (didn't we have this 3000 years ago, and called it wine-making?)...

Let me know what you think.

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