Commentary by Ellen Domb

Report from the 2nd IberoAmerican Technological Innovation Congress

Tuesday was the opening day of the Congress, in Monterrey Mexico, at the conference center of the University Autonoma de Nueva Leon. Amazing view of the city! More than 40 people participated in the tutorial sessions, with the distance prize going to Sedigheh Khorshid from Iran (she’ll present a paper on day 3). The tutorial participants came for a wide variety of reasons—university professors of management and industrial design and engineering, university intellectual property managers, representatives of government agencies for the promotion of innovation and technology transfer, industrial experts in various improvement disciplines (six sigma, theory of constraints, quality management) and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines.

I conducted an interactive workshop on some lessons learned about how to teach TRIZ to beginners—the photo shows a team working on the Titanic game. I emphasized the importance of the interactive learning model popularized in Ken Blanchard’s work:

• Tell them
• Show them
• Let them try
• Give feedback

The class caught on very fast, and concluded the morning by making plans for how they will apply what they learned when they get back to work at the end of the conference.

Frequent TRIZ Journal authors Professor Noel Leon from Monterrey and Professor Edgardo Cordova from Puebla conducted the afternoon tutorials on applications of TRIZ for processes and an overview of TRIZ for beginners.

Last year the entire conference was in one session, so I was able to report on the whole program. This year, there are many more papers, so there will be 2 or 3 tracks at various times. I’ll try to sample all the activities to let the Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal readers get a view of the exciting approaches to TRIZ in IberoAmerica.

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