Commentary by Ellen Domb

TRIZ India Summit Day 1

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.

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