Commentary by Ellen Domb

Report from Zacatecas: Innovation and Quality Day 1

The First National Forum for Organizational Competitiveness through Innovation and Quality convened Sept. 26-7 in Zacatecas, Mexico, a World Heritage city and a growing center of business and academic innovation. The conference was organized by Dr. Cuauhtémoc Lemus Olalde (“Temo”) and the staff of CIMAT, the mathematics research institute; they brought together an impressive cross-section of research, business, education and government resources to learn from each other’s experiences. The government of the state of Zacatecas was strongly represented: Secretaries of Education, Commerce, and Technology participated in the Forum personally, and staff members from several other departments were present.

The business community of Zacatecas is primarily small and medium-sized enterprises, with a heavy concentration of software and systems engineering business, and the applied research at CIMAT focuses on software development that enables and enhances enterprise functions—I had enlightening conversations with researchers working on strategic planning, decision making, failure modes and effects analysis, and balanced scorecard systems (and several projects that incorporate TRIZ elements!) About half of the presentations and workshops at the Forum are specifically oriented to the software-centric businesses, and half were more general.

This is a personal report, not a comprehensive summary of the conference, limited to the sessions that I attended (and my moderate ability to listen in Spanish while thinking in English) or what I heard from other participants. For the complete program, list of sponsors and organizers, see http://www.cimat.mx/Eventos/primerforoinnovacion/ The morning session started with brief welcoming addresses by the government officials, business and academic leaders, on the general theme that we know that innovation and quality are both important, but we don’t always know how to get from the general sentiment to application and implementation, and we welcome the Forum as an opportunity to advance our capabilities.

Roberto Saco, President of the American Society for Quality, was the lead speaker. His presentation “Innovation from Within: The Soft Power of Positive Deviance” emphasized that all innovation—hardware, software, organizational structure, operational systems—requires behavior changes. The theory of positive deviance emphasizes using the resources of the community to solve its own problems by finding the unusual (deviant!) members of the community who are thriving, and learn from their solutions to help the rest. Roberto had a pointed and emotionally moving case study to illustrate his points, showing how the Save the Children program in Vietnam used the creativity of 2 world-wide staff, local community participants and the parents of the children to make radical improvement in the problem of low-weight children using only the local resource (the nutritional value of the same vegetables that are in the ordinary diet can be dramatically increased when they are cooked in different combinations, for example.) Positive deviance was a new concept for me—look for more “commentary” columns as I learn more about it.

“Why Business Needs to Innovate and How to Do It” is my translation of the title of the talk by Rodulfo M. Rodriguez Gutierrez, visiting Zacatecas from the Polytechnic University of Catalunya. He emphasized the increasingly rapid cycles of product introduction, and the increasingly global competition in all fields, which combine to make innovation the only survivable business strategy. He gave numerous examples, emphasizing that service businesses need the same emphasis on innovation as product businesses.

Manuel Liñan is a six sigma master black belt and business consultant from Monterrey, with projects in Spain, France, Poland, US, and elsewhere. His talk, “TRES: The strategy for competitiveness” used the model of Technical, Alignment, Structural, and Social elements (TRES in Spanish-trust me) for understanding customers, your own company, and the environment, in order to decide how to be competitive. He showed the extension of the principles of lean process improvement to the lean enterprise as an example of how it might be necessary to change all 4 elements of a company’s operation to be competitive in a changing world.

I was the concluding speaker for the morning. “Enhance Business Innovation with TRIZ” was a 40 minute TRIZ introduction, emphasizing the universality of TRIZ for small and large, local and global, hardware and software, and emphasizing that the audience members who are hearing about TRIZ for the first time can start using it, and can learn by using it. Fortunately, Darrell Mann will be speaking tomorrow on TRIZ for software, and will have time to give the software participants some specific guidance.

The speakers were then organized into a panel for questions and answers. Most of the questions were about how to start innovation initiatives, and the panel differed widely, from the strongly traditional (reward systems, measurement systems, traditional bonus systems based on following the rules, etc.) to the radically un-managed (create a positive environment then let things happen, don’t try to control it.) Questions about how to improve the competitiveness of Mexico, or the competitiveness of Zacatecas, were mostly answered at the global level, with the emphasis on doing what your customers need, and taking advantage of your local resources (for example, the strength of the software industry in Zacatecas is due to the local university and research centers) and using government agencies to build infrastructure and reduce inhibiting factors.

After lunch we had 6 workshops, then a cultural evening. Zacatecas was originally a mining center, and the miners used the rhythms of their work to create very rhythmic music. Somehow, this became a festive event Callejoneada Típica Zacatecana where musicians walk around the town with a donkey who carries the drums and the supply of mescal, followed by all the participants in the event who sing, play the drums, and drink the mescal. (OK, the donkey is a myth. We carried the mescal, and the musicians carried the drums and we danced and walked and drank and danced.) AFTER that is dinner!

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