Commentary by Guest Commentator

Report From The TRIZ Practitioners Exchange: Day 2

Herbert Roberts is reporting from the inaugural TRIZ Practitioners Exchange.---------

The second day of the TRIZ Practitioners Exchange (TPE) continued with open discussions surrounding two additional areas of interest selected from the pre-meeting topics of interest listings were selected for discussions: 1) non-technical applications of TRIZ and 2) integrating TRIZ within a company's existing culture and initiatives. The TPE concluded with a review of the lessons learned over the two sessions.

The non-technical application of TRIZ was a leading point of interest for all of the practitioners. The TPE followed the World Cafe approach provided the necessary infrastructure to keep the discussions on time and kept the user exchanges inclusive in nature. The non-technical discussions were productive enough to expand into two of the allotted discussion time segments. Leading points in this discussion indicated that business managers relate better to business-based solutions than technical achievements.

Within the TRIZ community, non-technical approached to TRIZ are often viewed with skepticism by some TRIZ masters. The view is that non-technical solutions lack the statistical validation than more traditional technical solutions. Some researchers and authors have approached investigating non-technical solutions, and in some cases, some have defined non-technical parameters and expanded solutions to include other forms of modeling to capture non-technical based contradictions and system weaknesses. Several practitioners shared first-hand experiences using TRIZ to address non-technical solutions during the double session, which provided insight into what defines a successful non-technical approach, the process outcomes and the management teams perspective of the processes results.

The discussions about integrating TRIZ in to existing business cultures and initiatives were also supported with discussions of the first-hand experiences of the participating practitioners. Leading the take-aways was the recognition that developing hybrid solutions was common and useful to help build a bridge between the "us and them" separation that TRIZ can develop as a "competing" tools to other more tradition forms of idea capturing and creativity generation tools. A wider discussion focused on the shared perspective of management's "real" level of interest surrounding TRIZ.

The last session of the day focused on recapping the leading points of each of the topics discussed during the exchange. The attendees agreed that the event was useful and supported a level of knowledge exchange that was useful beyond more traditional one-on-one discussions. The information presented and discussed was viewed as compatible to the wider exposure to TRIZ gained at wider open-invitational conferences which can provide a unique perspective on TRIZ's application in the commercial and educational markets. The TPE session ended with plans for at least one more future event and the goal of increasing the participation level to include more active practitioners from other realms of businesses and TRIZ backgrounds.

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