Commentary by Ellen Domb

TRIZ-Future 2008 Conference Day 2

Day 2 of the TRIZ-Future conference started with parallel sessions on Teaching TRIZ and on business models for innovation. Since I am speaking in the session on teaching, I will refer our readers to the proceedings (available from www.etria.net after the conference) for the very interesting papers in the parallel program.

Robert Adunka from Siemens opened the day reporting on his experience teaching TRIZ within the company. Robert had fascinating stories of the internal politics of the company, and how workshops focused on problem solving, innovation, and patent development helped overcome resistance to TRIZ as a new method. He had extensive data from the classes, and showed how the student and management reaction to the early classes were used to develop the current curriculum.

Gaetano Cascini presented on behalf of a large group of co-authors who collaborated on an EU-sponsored program TETRIS=Teaching TRIZ at School, which is part of the Knowledge Society EU initiative, which has a goal that each individual can use and develop knowledge independently. They have developed an extensive curriculum, supported by animation and on-line resources, which will be tested in high schools in Italy, Austria, Latvia, and Germany.

I was the chairman of the next session, with 3 papers that got considerable audience enthusiasm and controversy. Iouri Belski challenged the group with his views of the cognitive foundations of the TRIZ problem-solving tools. His challenge to experts to lose their expertise to “loosen” their thinking was particularly interesting.

Phil Samuel from BMGI presented a system developed with Rajesh Jugulum that uses parallels with the TRIZ methods to create a taxonomy of inventive principles for achieving robustness in the concept design phase. Nineteen strategies were developed, based on the analysis of 200 inventions, and organized for use by developers, clustered in 4 groups based on the 4 aspects of the P-Diagram (input, output, noise factors and control factors.) Phil showed one example each of a strategy for improving robustness by modifying each of the 4 aspects. Very exciting work—lots of research yet to be done, but very exciting at this point!

Hongyul Yoon from S. Korea showed his approach to non-technical problem solving, working by analogy to technical problem solving, with particular attention to the “effects” methods. It was necessary to develop specific models for function analysis and for the pointer to the effects and for the effects themselves in order to extend the methods.

Karel Bolckman’s keynote talk after lunch brought the TRIZ audience into the world of biology and bio-mimicry. Karel is both a TRIZ and biotechnology pioneer. He showed us spiders that control mosquitoes, worms that pollinate tomatoes, and methods that people have for persuading the bio-entities to do useful (human or mechanical) work. A growing area is developing bacteria that can sense chemicals—drugs, explosives, or anything that the designer wants detected. He showed us many crossovers between the studies of bio-mimicry and TRIZ and pointed out ways to expand the research to take advantage of both fields. Karel concluded with a proposal that we can learn from natural systems for better engineered systems by redefining ideality to include all harmful and wasteful effects at all stages of system lifecycle.

We then returned to parallel sessions—reminder to readers to go to www.etria.net for the full program. My reports are on the sessions that I saw!

“Early Experiences Employing the Matrix Principles Modified for the Communications and Electronics Domain” was presented by Paul Filmore, based on work done with his student Nasir Ayub. Paul invited the audience (and our readers) to send comments on the cases and examples that they presented with the help of a large number of industry experts who are not TRIZ experts, to help develop a systematic method of expanding TRIZ into other disciplines.

Ives De Saeger’s “Strengthening the 40 Inventive Principles” extended Paul’s theme, both by asking questions about the definitions of the principles, the circumstances of their use, and the problems he has observed with people using them. Examples include sticking with the first solution that is found, filtering the solutions when found, not exploring outside one’s area of knowledge. Ives’suggestions to strengthen the 40 principles is to change the language to a more uniform vocabulary, and to start each principle with an action verb. Another suggestion was to split the 40 principles into resource parts and recommendation parts. He’ll have these posted on www.p41.be in a few weeks and invites comments and suggestions from people who are willing to test the new way of formulating the principles.

Shuo-Kai Tsai reported on his work at the University of Sussex and G. Maarten Bonnema from the University of Twente reported on complementary work. Both identified the barriers preventing industry from adopting TRIZ and found that uncertainty of how to begin, and which tool to use for which problems are significant issues. Tsai’s BRIGHT system guides engineers in selecting specific tools in a TRIZ project, and Bonnema’s 8 guidelines help engineers pick among QFD, TRIZ, SIT and FUNKEY (Function-Key Drivers Architecture method.) We will be awaiting results on what happens as people start using both of these systems.

Professor Fred van Houten from the University of Twente delivered the concluding keynote address on the research in design engineering in the Netherlands, which is extensive, and deeply involves industry with academia. Photos: Keynote presenters Karel Bolckmans (r. with Boris Zlotin) and Fred van Houten

A very elegant dinner capped off the day. There were two surprise announcements:

1. Next year’s TRIZ Futures conference will be in Romania.

2. A special award for outstanding paper was made to Searching for Similar Products through Patent Analysis by P.-A. Verhaegen, J. D'hondt, J. Vertommen, S. Dewulf, J. R. Duflou from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Mechanical Engineering Department, Belgium.

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