Commentary by Ellen Domb

Business Week’s annual list of the top 25 innovation companies came out the same week (April 28, 2008) as the Fortune 500 list. Big difference: the Fortune 500 has an explicit algorithm involving revenue, profit, and other measurable factors. The Innovation 25 is based 80% on the opinions of people who BW has decided to poll (executives at previous winners, mostly) and 20% on financial factors (3-year averages of revenue growth, margin growth, and stock value).

If the purpose of the list is to provide best practices and lessons learned so that people in lower-ranking companies can decide how to become more innovative, I don’t think that this algorithm achieves its purpose. Yes, it is nice to see Tata in the top group, based mostly on the radical concept of the under-$2500 car, which includes a large number of business innovations, distribution innovations, and manufacturing innovations, as well as product innovations. But GM? The editors say that it is because of the electric car experiments, On-Star communications, and the new emphasis on styling. But the same week that they announced losses for the quarter of more than $3Billion? Maybe they are being rewarded for innovating during a recession/downturn, which is another major theme of this year’s articles—real innovators have to ignore the quarterly pressures from investors and make long-term commitments.

Likewise, a major theme of most of the become more innovative articles is the need to free employees from strict supervision and give them opportunity, tools, time, and encouragement to experiment with opportunities for innovation. Apparently that’s true for all except #1 on the list, Apple, which is known for the imperial-decree mode of innovation that has been so commercially successful.

I have great admiration for some of the individual innovative products/services that are showcased, and I invite readers to use them as practice study objects for TRIZ and other innovation methods. For example:

Flip video camera: Great example of “trimming” (no legacy functions—fresh look at minimal requirements) and “nested doll” (USB connector fits inside the body) and “change optical properties” (both for the flat lens and the color-coded instruction button)

Mini-Hummer: Pattern of evolution of making things smaller and smaller

Same for GE shrinking a 15 lb electrocardiograph that took 3+years and $5.4Million to develop into a 3 lb unit that took 18 months to develop for less than $500,000. Lots of business innovation (use off-the-shelf logic chips instead of custom, target rural clinics in low-income countries instead of specialty doctors in high-income countries, and putting the research in the countries to be served) as well as technical innovation.

This column is called “commentary” because it is personal observations and opinions, not detailed research. So, you have my opinion—BW’s “Best 25 Innovators” isn’t useful for those who are trying to figure out how to make their own companies more innovative. What’s your opinion?

Question 1. Is this list useful?

Question 2. Do you know any other list that is useful?

Question 3. What companies’ innovation stories have been helpful to you to improve your own organization’s innovativeness?

Use the “comments” button below, and if we get more than 10 comments (a Real Innovation/TRIZ Journal rare event) I’ll do another article on OUR readers’ opinions.

A simple summary of the three steps is as follows:

1. Break down the task that the customer wants done into a series of steps. (Not what they are doing now, but what they want to do. You’ll have to get out of your office and go see real customers!)

2. This will show you all the places where your customer might need help

3. Then, consider innovations to make each step simpler, easier, faster, if the customer is satisfied with the current basic performance, and to make it better if the customer is unsatisfied.

This is a very powerful tool for getting companies to step back from focusing on their current offerings, and looking for new opportunities. To inject a bit of TRIZ vocabulary, it uses an available resource in the environment—the customer for your current products—as the source of information and stimulus for new ideas.

Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal readers will see the clear link in step 3 to whatever methods they use now—once you know what the customer needs to do her job more effectively, you’ll know where to innovate. The saddest problem that I see in TRIZ workshops is people who say that their problem is that they don’t know what to work on—here’s the cure for that problem.

Try it (well, read the article first…) and use the “comments” button to let us know your experience.

TRIZCON 2008 concluded on Wednesday, April 16 with Jack Hipple’s seminar on How to Use TRIZ with All the Other Innovation Tools and Assessments You Are Using and my presentation of "Contemporary Su-Field Analysis" which was developed by Iouri Belski and Len Kaplan. Some of the participants had started on Saturday, with the pre-conference tutorials, so they had a full week of learning, and many of them were also presenters in the technical sessions. Picture: Jack Hipple making a point about right brain/left brain creativity.

Why do this? Why spend time (participants came from Korea, Japan, China, Malaysia, Israel, UK, Germany, Mexico, and the US, and probably places I have missed) to travel, inconveniences of travel, money, and the value of the work you could have done if you had stayed home? Why not just buy the proceedings? Or wait until the authors publish the articles someplace else? The TRIZ Journal made agreements with many of the associations to publish no more than 2 articles each month, so that people would not have the excuse that they could get all the articles and skip the meetings. With all the blogs and other sources these days, a diligent student could probably get copies of most of the papers very quickly.

So, why go to the meetings?

The benefit of putting people together is the unstructured communication. Lunch, coffee, between sessions, and even in the tutorial sessions, where people talk about their experiences. Success stories are easy--that’s what most of the presentations are about. Failure stories are much harder--what company will give permission to talk about failure? What consultant will stand up in public and says "here’s something that doesn’t work"? But the failure stories, told face-to-face, are very significant learning opportunities. And once people have gotten acquainted, developed some trust, and learned each other’s histories of success and failure, then all the on-line communications can be effective.

Start planning now. The Japan, China, Iberoamerican and ETRIA meetings are coming in September, October, and November. See you there?

Mansour Ashtiani won the election for President of the Altshuller Institute, and Don Masingale will become Secretary. Tim Schweizer and Richard Langevin continue as VP and Treasurer, respectively.

The conference began with a fascinating talk by Dr. Cemil Inan, Director of Research at the Arcelik Company in Turkey, which is in the process of growing from third to first largest producer of appliances in Europe, with factories in Turkey, Russia, and several other countries. They have a unique patent and intellectual property development system—they became #101 on the list of 500 top IP companies this year (Google was #100) New products with a TRIZ “flavor” were impressive: the trend of using the kitchen as a family gathering area makes it desirable to get noise out of the kitchen. Their “Divide and Cool” puts the refrigerator compressor outside the area, and puts the cooling function in several easy-to-reach drawers. Multi-media presentations of case studies from their TRIZ projects made them easy to understand (we heard the noise of the washing machine pumps). Picture: New AI President Mansour Ashtiani thanks speaker Dr.Cemil Inan.

Dr. Andrew Brown Jr., Chief Technologist from Delphi Corporation challenged the audience to understand global mega-trends, to apply TRIZ and all our skills to the needs of our future customers that are specific to the regional needs of the global society. Their extensive research in Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, India, etc., revealed common trends and regional differences that were surprising, and that created vast new business opportunities, all of which require innovation. He inspired the audience with the scope of vision of the future of the integration of interfaces between all the now-disparate technologies that people manage in the course of their lives. Audience questions ranged widely from the future of clean water to the history of the electric vehicle to the interfaces of technology/society/regulatory activities.

Track 1 papers dealt with TRIZ and Chemical Engineering and Project Management—see the Altshuller Institute website for the abstracts. I participated in Track 2 which started with Larry Smith’s case study on his use of TRIZ in his work at the ASQ where he has been leading the massive initiative to revise their world-wide education and training systems. He presented an overview of the ASQ’s needs, and the specific ways that he introduced ASQ staff and other volunteers to TRIZ methods, developed some of those people as facilitators, then used those facilitators with those methods to stimulate creativity at the subsequent meetings.

Boris Zlotin and Alla Zusman presented their research on applying their methods of “directed evolution” to bridging the gap between long-term and short-term forecasting. (See their article in the current TRIZ Journal for an introduction to their work, and references to other articles.) Boris’ charming story-telling enhanced the serious science that he showed in the analysis of the evolution of the prediction system itself. Picture: Alla Zusman and Boris Zlotin.

Manabu Sawaguchi is a frequent and popular contributor to the TRIZ Journal. He reports on his unique experience, designing a workshop on innovation through cooperation between industries, and using TRIZ for the case examples used in the workshops. Typical workshops had 3 participants from each of 5 companies. He created a model of 4 classes of innovation (radical—incremental vs. disruptive—sustaining) and then challenged the participants to identify successful and unsuccessful cases in each area, and to generalize the results. The case study of the development of the paper coffee cup, and the way such a simple case could stimulate the workshop participants, created quite a bit of audience interest.

Jim Belfiore from Invention Machine Corp. challenged the audience to think about the business side of innovation, and the growing trend of innovation by corporate acquisition as a shortcut to development of new business. He adapted the technology maturity model to give people an easy (relatively) to use tool for assessing the readiness of specific technologies, and used the patterns of evolution of to look for candidates for acquisition; “validation” of a candidate in his model comes from finding technologies that are in harmony with the patterns of evolution, or that have resolved fundamental contradictions.

Track 1 concluded with two papers from the Intel Team. Tay-Jin Yeoh from the Penang, Malaysia group presented “Exploring TRIZ Usage in New Applications for Industries,” which included a number of excellent case studies of processes. For example, his first case was improving (reducing the time) for the preventive maintenance process of the burn-in system (part of semiconductor processing.) Case study 2 was a test handler, which picks items up and inserts them into a test interface. Detailed analysis showed several instances of waste and re-work that could be eliminated using simple process improvement methods—in this case, the benefit of TRIZ was in getting the detailed analysis of the root cause of the problem done. He then changed pace and showed an IT problem from China, which had the classical contradiction that the easier it is for multiple people to access information, the harder it is to protect the information. The 40 principles, starting with the matrix and then proceeding to use all the principles, were the key to new thinking and new solutions to this problem. Equally “classical” is the shop floor inventory management problem—the problem itself is not complex, but the systematic approach of TRIZ helped people get through the analysis and create solutions that are “elegant.” He concluded with a quotation from Altshuller: “You can wait a hundred years for enlightenment, or you can solve the problem in 15 minutes with these principles,” which appeals to the action dynamic of the industrial engineers.

Alex Talalaevski from Intel’s Israeli contingent concluded the main conference session with “TRIZ FMEA reduces Risk of New Technology Transfer from R&D to Production.” The complexity of the silicon transfer process, and the complexity of the 7 major sub-processes of this process is truly awe-inspiring, and the need for FMEA is obvious. When combined with the “tick-tock” Intel pulse of 2 years for each generation of technology, the need for TRIZ to accelerate the preventive analysis and implementation of failure circumvention also becomes obvious. The case study showed the benefits of TRIZ to FMEA in these cases, and the specific benefits of using semantic search-enabled software to resolve complex problems

Picture: TJ Yeoh

Amir Roggel from Intel started the conference with a masterful keynote address—he applied his TRIZ sensibility to create a talk that was both educational and entertaining, and a true “key” note, setting themes for the conference of modernizing TRIZ with the new technologies of the 21st century, and simplifying TRIZ—not eliminating concepts, but eliminating jargon. The history of TRIZ at Intel is fascinating, but I hope that the 12 year history of getting started isn’t replicated at all companies of that size and complexity. Thanks, Amir! And thanks for bringing 11 delegates from Costa Rica, Malaysia, Ireland, Israel, and the US. His colleague David Austin from Arizona explained Intel’s global strategic integration of TRIZ and the tactical implementation through training and projects, sharing the excitement of both the fast-moving world of semiconductor manufacturing and the impact of TRIZ. (David Austin and Amir Roggel being congratulated by Larry Smith, President of the Altshuller Institute.)

This is a live blog, not a detailed report on the conference—to see the actual agenda go to http://www.aitriz.org/ai/2008/AGENDA-TRIZCON2008-FINAL.pdf . We were graciously welcomed to Ohio and to Kent State University, and the 10th anniversary of TRIZCON was celebrated. Thanks to Prof. Don Coates for arranging for Kent State to host this year’s conference.

Since I was the first speaker in track 1, you’ll have to read about track 2 in the agenda. Joe Miller and I had a very responsive audience for the presentation on using the complete technical system definition and the system operator as tools for helping TRIZ beginners define the problem that they need to solve—fresh case studies from the business world on call center operations and airline regulatory changes focused on “non-technical” TRIZ.

T.S. Yeoh from Intel in Penang, Malaysia continued the story of Intel’s TRIZ implementation with impressive detail. Case study examples from manufacturing test operations showed that Intel is using TRIZ in key areas of the business—these are not “teaching” cases—but very real problems in parts handling and alignment in high-speed testing of very sensitive devices. The success of the case studies was essential to the proliferation and adoption of TRIZ in the Intel manufacturing environment. Picture: T.S. Leong and Janice Marconi model the Altshuller Institute hats!

John Borsa from TRW’s Automotive Division presented a unique TRIZ history, coming from the value management /cost reduction systems that had been used to meet OEM’s cost requirements. TRIZ compatibility with value management was obvious, but a test was needed. They considered a simple, 5-component system: Traditional VM generated 50 ideas, of which a small % were useful. Then a TRIZ specialist spent 3 hours introducing people to TRIZ, from which 10 new ideas emerged, 20% of which became business cases. John’s history focused on the real-world situation of no time, no money, no training opportunities, and a TRIZ process that was initially perceived as too complex and too abstract. Their success has come from focusing on internal training, fully adapted to their industry and their culture. His case study examples of real-world automobile parts simplification (seat belt attachment, air bag stitching, steering system hydraulic service and installation) showed how people with very small amounts of TRIZ training can make large improvements in both function and cost.

Darrell Mann brought his extensive research in product development together with his TRIZ experience to show the range of methods, philosophies, and systems that all need to combine in the toolkit of product developers. In one case, based on the time spent, TRIZ was 2% of a successful product development (packaged gravy—great case for after lunch!) and Darrell was challenging the audience to realize that they need to do much more than TRIZ.

Robert Adunka from Siemens (we’re in more countries than any organizations except Coca Cola and the Catholic Church) showed the history and development of the propagation of TRIZ in their company, growing from a historical “invention on demand” process, through facilitated meetings, to the present TRIZ-based system, with structured training and projects. He illustrated their case study method with the story of a safety interlock system, which was the subject of a cost reduction and size reduction project, which started when manufacturing rejected the engineering design and engineering rejected the manufacturing design—what a contradiction! The audience was interested in the teaching and facilitating methods as well as the case study.

Prakasan Kappoth from Mindtree showed the use of substance-field modeling to analyze emotional conflicts in the workplace. This is a very creative use of the tool system, that could be very effective for people who need a structured, analytical approach to the management of groups of people.

Ron Fulbright from the University of South Carolina Department of Informatics demonstrated a project that he did with students, using “ideality-first” to evolve software requirements. The exciting news was that this is a precursor to a full graduate course in TRIZ. The team of professor and 2 undergraduates tackled the problem of how to design software to teach TRIZ-type thinking to elementary school students. Since they had no existing system to start with, they started by studying what kids think is “cool” so that they could emulate the best of the kid-friendly systems (no 7 year old goes to training to learn to use a toy!) They developed a model of the ideal system, that had all beneficial functions, then looked at available TRIZ software to understand the contradictions between adult and child-oriented systems. The product concept combines fun, “cool” and learning, as well as community—students can “talk” to others to combine ideas.

The after-dinner keynote speaker was Ben Berry, speaking about the Airship X-Prize—see the report from Sunday for details. He mesmerized the audience with the story of the competition for the prize, the design of both the vehicle and the open innovation method, and the results of the live TRIZ case study that we did on Sunday to help him with business and technical problems.

More tomorrow….

The experimental workshop on the US$10million Automotive X-Prize at the Altshuller Institute TRIZCON2008 started Sunday morning with delegates from Germany, Israel, Ireland, UK, Korea, Taiwan, and multiple parts of the US; from the electronics, automotive, aerospace, control systems and textile industries; from universities, private industry, and consulting. The X-Prize will go to the vehicle that can demonstrate 100 miles at 100 miles/hour, in a production-ready vehicle.

Ben Berry is the CEO of the AirShip Technologies Group, one of 84 teams competing for the prize. ATG is using a combination of well-known and experimental technologies, and an aggressive Open Technology organizational method for design and production. Prof. Tim Schweitzer from Luther College recruited Ben to be a keynote speaker for the conference, then Tim and Ellen Domb took advantage of Ben’s expertise and attendance at the meeting to organize the workshop—TRIZ practioners had 2 hours to learn about the problems that the AirShip team has worked on, and 5 hours to develop ideas for alternative approaches. Ben will take those ideas back to the team to accelerate the development of the airship (and he might recruit some of the workshop participants to join the team, too.) See the Steering Team (standing) and the Track Sphere Team (seated) below.

For details, see http://www.progressiveautoxprize.org/ to learn about the prize and http://www.airshiptg.org to learn about the AirShip Technologies Group. See Ben (standing) explaining the problem to the group.

Ralph Czerepinski and Joe Miller presented the TRIZ workshop for newcomers (it used to be called “Everything you need to know about TRIZ to get through the conference”) to 24 people from industry and academia. Some of the teachers (both high school and college-level) were graduates of the Saturday workshop on TRIZ for Teachers taught by Don Coates of our host organization, Kent State University, and Sergey Malkin.

Darrell Mann did triple duty, teaching “Navigating the Competitive Jungle: Systematic Innovation for Business and Management” on Saturday, a short course on “TRIZ Trends, The Voice of the Product and Innovation Timing” on Sunday, and participating in the Automotive X-Prize workshop. Thanks, Darrell!

Isak Buhkman did 2 short workshops on Sunday—one on psychological inertia and one on Su-Field modeling and standard solutions. The 4th short workshop was Sergei Ikovenko’s “Pragmatic S-Curve Analysis.” Since I was in the X-Prize workshop all day, I’ll try to get the information from the short workshops to summarize for our readers later in the week.

Consultants write articles for a lot of reasons. Two leading reasons are (1) A genuine desire to share their research with the world (2) To show how smart they are, to get people interested in hiring them.

Since I am a consultant writing an article, it would be ungracious to attribute selfish motives to the most recent article on trends of evolution in the IT world to the McKinsey researchers. As a very large, successful consulting company, McKinsey has access to a lot of research just from studying their own clients, and those of us in more limited environments can take advantage of their work. (ref.1) Let’s compare the McKinsey trends to those in TRIZ—even though different TRIZ authors use different labels, this should be pretty easy—and see if there are new trends emerging. (ref. 2 & 3)

They have identified 8 technology-enabled trends in 3 areas of business activity:

A. Managing Relationships

1. Distributing co-creation—both distributing it throughout the supplier/customer value chain and to outsiders. Sounds a lot like recognizing that “somebody, someplace, has solved your problem—creativity is modifying that solution to apply in your circumstances.” And it sounds a lot like using elements of the supersystem (as in the System Operator) to solve the problem.

2. Using consumers as innovator—special case of (1)

3. Tapping into the world of talent (using networks of freelancers)—special case of (1)

4. Extracting more value from interactions—business innovations such as “outsourcing” of clerical tasks can provide much more value by providing statistical analysis of the work done by the clerks and by providing management of the work. Likewise, outsourced engineering drafting work is rapidly being upgraded to improving the configuration management of the drawings and improving the designs in the drawings.

B. Managing Capital and Assets

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation (specifically for information)—this gets very close to the ideal final result of information handling. First, the customer gets her own information, reducing the cost of customer service, improving speed, and improving satisfaction. At a more advanced level, the information itself controls the entire system (such as RFID information controlling inventory management systems.) Both required large investments to start, with an unknown payoff.

6. Unbundling production from delivery—direct application of the TRIZ “Segmentation” trend. Examples include everything from Amazon’s providing software and logistics services to the sale of fractional ownership of real estate or jet aircraft.

C. Leveraging Information New Ways

7. Putting more science into management—use the available information in ways that were not anticipated when the information was generated. Sounds quite a bit like the “Uneven development of parts” pattern from the classical patterns of evolution? As well as taking advantage of all the resources in the system, once the resources are recognized.

8. Making businesses from information—more use of resources. Google and other search systems (best fare from India to Alaska, best price for a new coat…) are early examples. I saw a great example recently: instead of paying several hundred thousand dollars to install traffic sensing devices (to post the time delays on a highway, so people could plan alternate routes and reduce air pollution), an entrepreneur realized that the busy-ness of cell phone towers, and the rate of change of access to the towers, is an excellent measure of how fast the cars are moving on the nearby highways, and he could access that date very inexpensively. The cell phone company now has a new business—selling data about the state of the tower—and the city has what it needs at lower cost. “Meta-data” is the buzzword to watch for.

My conclusion: No new trends, but good new examples for those of us who need to practice identifying trends. Readers comments are WELCOME!

1. J. Manyika, R. Roberts, K. Sprague, “Eight business technology trends to watch” McKinsey Quarterly, December 2007
2. B. Zlotin, A. Zusman, Directed Evolution. 2001. www.ideationtriz.com and http://www.triz-journal.com/archives/2006/09/04.pdf
3. D. Mann, Hands On Systematic Innovation. 2007, Hands On Systematic Innovation for Management, 2007. www.systematic-innovation.com

TRIZ Journal readers have been given more terms for this one element of TRIZ than any other—laws of technology evolution (many translated texts), guided evolution (Victor Fey), directed evolution (Alla Zusman and Boris Zlotin), trends of evolution and evolutionary potential (Darrell Mann), DNA (Simon Dewulf) and others.
Bad news—this is confusing to people who are learning TRIZ.
Good news—this part of TRIZ is undergoing active development, and fresh research is being tested all the time.

You can combine your TRIZ learning with participation in the research, and the only resources that you need are the things you already have (very TRIZ-ish!)

Resource—whatever you are reading about the future.
Future of technology is an obvious one, but don’t forget to include others
Future of education
Future of medicine
Future of social organizations
Future of science

For example, this week I saw the current (March 2008) issue of PC World magazine, which is the 25th anniversary issue. You can test your past, present, and future knowledge of the trends of evolution by reading articles on the 25 most important PC-related inventions of the past, the 25 “I can’t live without them” present-day things, and the 25 predictions for the future. For example, one of the present-day favorites is Open Office 2.3, which has much of the capability of other integrated office suites, and is free. It is pretty easy for most TRIZ students to see this as an advance in ideality – the system delivers the benefit at no cost.

A leading example from the futures article is the personal factory, also called desk-top manufacturing. Remember (or remember the pictures, for the younger audience) when computers filled whole rooms and required separate air conditioning and specialized operators? They followed the trend of becoming smaller and smaller and smaller….Now, factories are on that same path. Desktop manufacturing of printed circuit cards and of plastic objects is a reality in 2008. Making anything that is the right size to fit on your desktop is just a few years away.

That leaves 25 past, 24 present and 24 future items for readers to try on their own. Don’t worry about which vocabulary you use. Just pick the one that you are comfortable with, and PLEASE report your experiments in the “comments” to this article, so we can merge our readers’ reports.

For more esoteric exploration, Technology Review magazine’s March/April 2008 issue features 10 emerging technologies that the editors predict will have significant impact in the next few years. Number one (by Frances Arnold, at Caltech) is the development of cellulolytic enzymes. The current concern about the use of biofuel raising the price of food is based on the use of the edible components of plants to create fuel. If the cellulose (inedible) parts could be used, we could make the fuel AND keep the food for consumption. The invention has 2 parts—an enzyme that “eats” cellulose to produce fuel, and a computational method for creating the genes would produce the enzyme. What are the patterns of evolution?
* Increasing ideality (benefit with less harm)
* Uneven development of subsystems (the enzyme is ready but the method of producing it is not)
* Transition to the micro-system (using the simulation instead of laboratory experiments to develop the enzyme)

There are 9 more in the article for readers to try. Try one of these, or one of the 70+ from PC World. We look forward to your comments and to writing a future report using your research.

Day 2 concluded with a delightful dinner show—two “physics professors” who entertained and educated the audience with a fire tornado, bubbles that sink (breathe SF6 before blowing bubbles) and a fast-moving tour through tricks and games from buoyancy to Boyle’s law.

Day 3 opened with a keynote address by Greg Yezersky, explaining the General Theory of Innovation, which is the result of his research over 20 years, starting with TRIZ and adding his extensive experience. Greg has an extensive website (www.ipinetwork.com) with tutorials on the method. The audience appreciated his presentation several ways—Greg’s presentation of some of the standard TRIZ concepts is very helpful (Where do contradictions come from? Why does the law of ideality exist?) and TRIZ advocates for both companies and universities got many new examples of the critical need for innovation methodology.

Amir Roggel and Nikolai Khomenko

The program committee did an admirable job reshuffling the program, since several speakers did not show up (Ellen’s editorial: Unless you have a communicable disease, or unless your family has a crisis, you should show up. If you submitted the paper to the conference, you made a commitment to the audience to present it and discuss it!!!! Saying, “Sorry, I have a business opportunity,” is disrespectful of your colleagues—we all gave up time and business opportunities to be here.)

“TRIZ for Reverse Market Research” was presented by Bert Miecznik and Markus Glaser of the Wittenstein AG, makers of many medical technology products. We hope to publish this paper in the TRIZ Journal in the near future—they present both their application of TRIZ methods to understand all of the customers’ needs and product features at an abstract level and then show a case study of using TRIZ for product development and TRIZ-guided patent searches to understand the competitive environment. The product is a bone growth system, so that children who have had bone cancers removed don’t have to have repeated surgeries to replace bone substitutes as they grow. The double use of TRIZ advances both theory and practice.

Joe Miller and I did a study of the use of the Complete Technical System to define the problem to be solved—usually a big stumbling block for beginners. The presentation at ETRIA was aimed at other TRIZ teachers, so that they can help their beginners. The paper will be in next month’s TRIZ Journal, but reading it is not as much fun as being at the meeting and discussing the system with other teachers and practioners!

To conclude the morning I went to “The application of TRIZ methodology in iron & steel making industry” by HeeChoon Lee of the Intellectual Property Group of the Posco Company of Korea. They combined TRIZ with Six Sigma analysis to eliminate the problem of the buildup of harmful deposits in the gas transport system of coal oven gas, which is used as an energy source. The case study demonstrates the use of Su-Field analysis, the 76 Standard Solutions, and the index of scientific effects in a very complex situation.

Claudia Hentschel, Hansjurgen Linde and Gunther Herr

After lunch, I hears about the development of a new artificial intelligence based software by Tiit Tiidemann from Estonia, “PRIZ” = “Program for solving engineering tasks.” This is not yet integrated with TRIZ, but it points out situations where TRIZ should be applied.

Simon Dewulf did a dynamic and enthusiastic presentation in the last session of the afternoon showing some of the new patent analysis techniques that he is using for situations where people have resources and want new uses for them. (We have this machine—what else can we do with this?) He has also done extensive work on functional and input/output indexing for the invention list on the Creax “More Inspiration” website. (Free utility, start at www.creax.com.)

Gaetano Cascini chaired the membership meeting that concluded ETRIA—members should go to www.etria.net for the agenda and business meeting details. The good news for everyone is that the 2008 meeting is already planned for Nov. 5-8, hosted by the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

Feedback and comments on these daily reports from both Monterrey last week and Frankfurt this week? Please use the comment utility at the end of this column, send me an e-mail (ellendomb@earthlink.net) or post in the discussion forum. Thanks!

The last item from Day 1 was a dinner speaker from the Congel company in Austria, showing food preparation–specifically the process for vegetable preparation for banquets, and the needs, and all the improvement opportunities that are available in the process. He showed an elegant small TRIZ case study that saved 10 out of 14 steps in vegetable preparation, and reduced by 80% the amount of butter used, improving both cost and health. Then, we found out that his company had catered the dinner, which was called Taste of TRIZ—we’ll need to add taste and aroma to this website so readers can appreciate the dinner.

Frankfurt’s famous bull and bear statues outside the stock exchange building, where the conference is located.

Day 2 started with parallel sessions. Since I am chairman of Session 2, there will be no report on session 1 this morning. First speaker was Meysam Maleki Anvar from the Iranian Institute of Innovation and Technological Studies. He had a first person report on his experience as an industrial engineer, using TRIZ methods to solve a problem in maintenance of manufacturing production line, and trying the Innovation Situation Questionnaire, the Problem Explorer, and the Function and Attribute Analysis methods to define the problem. The list of resources in the production environment, and the careful attention to non-material resources (fields, information, time, etc.) makes this an very useful teaching example.

Valeri Souchkov presented “Selecting Contradictions for Managing Problem Complexity” which was both a historical view of a primary TRIZ method and a tutorial on the modern approaches to the method. His hierarchy of selection criteria, based on ideality properties, will be very useful to people who confront realistic problems with complex relationships between the functions. The audience was most appreciative of the realism of Val’s examples, particularly the distinction between causally related problems and independent problems in complex situations (train schedules, RFID luggage tagging, and wind turbine blade design.)

Pavel Jiman from the Technical University of Liberec in the Czech Republic reported on “Development of the Technological System Tool as a basis of TRIZ Prediction.” He showed the difference between the traditional TRIZ use of the 9 screen method, starting at the system in the present (center of the box) and a more flexible system that starts at other points. He combines the 9 screens with the complete technical system (which I will also present tomorrow, and which will be in the December TRIZ Journal) and with the pattern of ideality increase, to predict changes in the technical system. The example of information display, and the video of interactive table displays and the glass manufacturing example were appreciated by the audience.

TRIZ Tools and Techniques session speakers (l-r): Valeri Souchkov, Meysam Maleki Anvar and Pavel Jiman.

The morning keynote speech was a departure from the TRIZ community, into the broader study of theories of technical evolution. Denis Cavallucci introduced Vincent Bontems, a philosopher, who introduced the audience to the work of Gilbert Simondon, developer of the theory and method of “mecanology.” Simondon organized a hierarchy of drivers for technological change that is similar to the TRIZ concept of progress toward ideality—for example, a system with complex energy transfers is “defective” compared to one with simpler transfers, or no transfers. Examples range from vacuum tubes to diesel engines to Guimbal’s turbine—Bontems made several observations about how unusual machine illustrations are in the literature of philosophy.

The afternoon session kicked off in 3 rooms—I’ll bounce around and tell you what I see. Roberto Nani from Bergamo, Italy, attracted a large audience to hear “TRIZ tools to evaluate marketing strategy and product innovation: A new start-up case study of silicone technology.” Patent portfolios in silicone are dominated by sealing methods, but the products of interest are consumer products for kitchen use. The novel TRIZ orientation is the separation of the intrinsic characteristics of silicone (water resistance, flexibility, moldable) from the extrinsic characteristics of a particular application, in order to analyze the relevant patents. Everyone enjoyed the case study of a flexible colander, with convex (rather than concave) bottom, so that the holes shrink under stress so that small pasta or rice does not pass through, but water does. The combination of the detailed patent analysis and a classical ARIZ approach to operational zone analysis and contradiction identification with a home kitchen example was very helpful.

Peter Schweitzer from Switzerland challenged the TRIZ community with “No Need for Methods?” He explored the psychology of groups and individuals, especially experts in research groups, and the many ways that they reject formal methodologies, even when the methodologies create breakthrough solutions for them. Extensive discussion (participants from Australia, US, Japan, Germany, Austria…) showed that this is a universal problem.

Sergei Ikovenko was wearing 3 hats this week—Gen3Partners, MATRIZ, and MIT, and made many indirect contributions to the program, since many of his former students are now featured presenters. His expertise in the technical issues of patent law and intellectual property development were of great interest to both the industrial and academic communities. Sergei started with the 5 strategies for revenue growth from Michael Treacy’s book, Double Digit Growth, and illustrated patent strategies that enhance the revenue generating potential for each of those strategies. MPV-“Main Parameter of Value” analysis is a bridge between classical TRIZ, classical portfolio analysis, and new perspectives on market needs.

Claudia Hentschel fascinated the ETRIA audience with her presentation “Tracing unorthodox use: A TRIZ-related ideation method in systematic product innovation.” She had a wide variety of examples over more than 150 years of situations where customers used products in ways never planned by the designer—the most remarkable statistic was that only 8 of 98 companies answered that they use data on unorthodox use, but 97 of 100 consumers say that they use products in non-conventional ways. TRIZ orientation helps break the “functional fixedness” pattern by helping you see the resources that are available in any product or system. TRIZ awareness of analogies helps you find the available alternate situations. Try it! Send your examples to the “Comments” section of this commentary—everything from using cola as a cleaning solution to using a paperclip as an antenna for a radio, to a Sony Playstation as an analysis device for blood analysis ….

Two sessions on the implementation of TRIZ picked up some of Peter Schweitzer’s themes. Eckhard Schueler-Hainsch from Daimler and Martin Jandt from the Technical University of Berlin presented “The introduction and application of TRIZ in industrial business in Germany—an investigative study” and Jurgen Jantschgi presented “Joint Application of TRIZ in Groups of several companies in Austria: Approach and Case Studies of Cross-Company Workshop.” Both statistical and observational data were analyzed. Key success factors included the expected (leadership commitment, open/fearless communication, personal and organizational interest in innovation) and the less expected (creation of cross-disciplinary and non-hierarchical teams, shared credit for new concepts).

Day 2 will end with a surprise social event, so I plan to post this commentary before, since this group has been known to drink, dance, and talk about TRIZ all night…

The main conference opened in the afternoon with greetings from the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce, and the joint sponsors, Dr. Rolf Herb from TRIZ Centrum and Prof. Gaetano Cascini from ETRIA. Gaetano announced that the membership meeting on Thursday will consider some opportunities to expand TRIZ by association with other organizations—any ETRIA members who are reading this should watch the ETRIA website for news.

Prof. Udo Lindemann from the Technical University Munich introduced both TRIZ and the Conference. The keynote talk by Prof. Lucienne Blessing from the U. of Luxembourg raised the question “Design methodologies: Blessing or Curse?” She has recently become the VP of the university, and reports the challenges of applying the concepts of system design to improving the programs of the university.

The afternoon technical sessions had 2 tracks. I was very happy to see the strength and depth of the contributions in both the academic and industrial tracks. Even though many of the industrial companies are not publishing their actual TRIZ applications for reasons of protection of intellectual property, it is very helpful to have their papers on how TRIZ is being introduced, propagated, and advanced in their companies. In this blog I’ll be giving samples of the sessions I attended, which is an eclectic and personal choice.

“Trends of Toyota Production System Evolution TPS-TESE” by Dmitri Wolfson and Sergei Ikovenko used some of the well-known Toyota systems, such as Just-in-Time, Kaizen (continuous improvement) and Jidohka (defect detection, correction, and prevention by means of removing human work from machine work, and making machine work self-maintaining and self-correcting.) as examples for the Trends of Engineering System Evolution. The examples are excellent and will be useful to people in any industry who need illustrations of applications of TRIZ concepts to systems and methods, rather than to products.

“Lessons Learned in the Introduction of TRIZ at Siemens A&D” by Robert Adunka was both serious and entertaining. Robert had 2 years of stories of the internal company politics of the development of their “Patent on Demand” and “Invention on Demand” training methods. He taught a workshop every week for a year, to evaluate both the applicability of TRIZ to the product portfolio, and to test whether the workshop participants would use TRIZ after they had the training. They had excellent results both with problems solved, and with numbers of ideas generated and number of patents submitted. As a result, the course was reorganized into a hierarchy of four courses with a progression of tools, using both TRIZ and other methods (brainwriting, morphological box, mindmapping, DeBono methods, etc.) which are now being used widely. Robert showed a collection of photos of class project inventions that have made big improvements in manufacturing and assembly technology. More than 1000 people have had the beginner level training (1 day and 5 days) and the intermediate (5 days) and professional (15 days) classes will begin this year.

“Intel Corporation’s Expert TRIZ Field Guide” by David Conley is a handbook that David developed in the course of taking TRIZ classes, to explain the system to himself. David gave us a view of the use of TRIZ at Intel—95% is applied to manufacturing process improvement, with the rest being business process and product oriented. The manual was needed because standardization and repeatability are cornerstones of the Intel culture—the 5 weeks of expert training, and 1500+ pages of training material can be overwhelming! He gave the audience many ideas about the kind of examples that make abstract ideas come to life for students in Intel, using a mix of concepts from daily life (coffee pots) and applications to proprietary technology. A delightful example (“ten minute consulting”) showed how the 9 screen analysis found an improvement opportunity for human resource data management that has saved thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in software development. The guide is internally published, but David’s paper should make it possible for other people to write their own.

The conference Day 1 concluded with a second Keynote: “Innovation Management within Alstom Transport.” Presented by G. Vendroux, Director of Innovation at Alstom, which makes a wide variety of transportation systems. He gave a history of their evolution from un-managed innovation to the management of innovation, and how learning to manage the transition from idea to implementation has been the key to financial success.

We then adjourned to dinner and a chance to talk about the day’s papers, to see old friends and to make new friends—again I urge all our readers to plan now to attend at least one conference next year. TRIZ is a very open society—you will learn things, you will have the opportunity to share what you know, and you’ll meet people who will help you along your TRIZ path.

Robert Adunka (Siemens) and David Conley (Intel) after their very popular papers were presented.

Today is the beginning of the European TRIZ Association TRIZ Futures 2007, in Frankfurt, Germany. Most sessions have either 2 or 3 simultaneous papers. See www.etria.net for the full program—I’ll only report on the papers and sessions that I participate in. I’m starting the morning with Dmitry Kucharavy’s tutorial session, “TRIZ Instruments for Forecasting: Past, Present, Future.” Dmitry is a very experienced teacher, and it was a pleasure to see how he organizes the history and predicts the future of TRIZ, using the methods of TRIZ and his own experiences. He focused on the questions:

1. Is TRIZ a method?
2. What is the difference between a forecast and a prediction?
   1. Forecast- description of emergence, performance, features, and impacts of a technology in a particular point of time in the future, answering what, when, where and why questions.
   2. Prediction-statement made about the future, mostly qualitative, answering “what” and “why” questions. Dmitry used the very popular article by Gahide, TJ 2000 on yarn spinning as an example of prediction (what technology will happen) but not forecasting (no knowledge of when or where it will happen.)
3. Why do we need predictions?
   1. To plan science and technology resources
   2. To plan R&D resources
   3. To plan production and distribution and maintenance and service
   4. (Emerging) to plan recycling and disposal

He then introduced a new question, “Why do we need to forecast?” which was much less about detailed planning, and more about creating the vision of the future in both practical detail (anticipating and removing barriers, understanding socio-technical environments, recruiting participants) and in inspirational, aspirational modality.

The audience shared the tragedy/comedy of the discussion of classical management negligence of forecasting that leads to wasted efforts.

In the second half of the morning, Dmitry took us through a detailed history of the development of the TRIZ forecasting methods, and the evolution of the laws, lines, and patterns of evolution, and some of the difficulties that Altshuller had in getting the concepts of forecasting accepted within and outside the TRIZ community. Jim Kowalick’s AFTER-96 method (one of the earliest TRIZ Journal publications) was used as an example of mid-stage development, along with Zlotin’s Directed Evolution, Fey and Rivin’s Guided Evolution, Shpaovsky’s Evolutionary Trees and Mann’s Evolutionary Potential Model (all familiar to regular TRIZ Journal readers) and other models such as WOIS and Moehrle’s model that combine TRIZ with other systems. Dmitry’s own work on making forecasting more quantitative was briefly demonstrated, and more research was promised. GREAT MORNING—Thanks, Dmitry!

(l-r) Dmitri Kucharavy (tutorial lecturer), Carsten Gundlach (conference organizer) and Gaetano Cascini (ETRIA president)

Part of the audience for the kick-off of the TRIZ Futures 2007 conference. More than 120 people from 40 countries will participate in the 3 days.

August-November have been very busy and interesting conference months. The TRIZ Journal will reprint some of the best papers from each conference (with thanks to the authors and the conference organizers) but I am a great believer in the benefits of personal interactions—make plans now to attend a conference next year! If you need to catch up on what the rest of the world has been doing, see:

• http://www.osaka-gu.ac.jp/php/nakagawa/TRIZ/eTRIZ/ for Toru Nakagawa’s report on the Japan TRIZ meeting
• http://www.innovatingtowin.com/innovating_to_win/2007/10/computer-aided-.html for Jim Todhunter’s report on the Computer-Aided Innovation meeting (global participation, meeting in Michigan, USA) that featured a wide range of topics, from the taxonomy of knowledge to genetic algorithms for shape generators to automation of patent searches.
• Some of my commentary archives for reports on conferences I’ve attended and the archives of other commentators, too.

Day 2 ended with a dinner of local specialties and an excellent band—they played regional music from every region of Mexico and from Cuba and Chile to honor the home countries of some of the participants, on beautiful hand-crafted instruments.

Day 3 started directly with the technical papers, in 2 tracks. Professor Edgardo Córdova Lopez from Puebla presented a fascinating view of the use of TRIZ to overcome psychological inertia in the leadership of organizations. He showed how both the inspirational and the aspirational aspects of leadership both benefit from a TRIZ perspective. Many of his former students, now faculty at other institutions, also participated in the conference, showing the practical application of his leadership methods.

For example, Marysol Montes de Oca Basurta has done extensive work in cognitive psychology, and applied this research to an experimental study of how people solve problems. She had both technical scientific reports and personal observations of the people in the university (One chemistry professor was astonished that she wanted to study creativity of his students—“They are chemists!”) A measurement process for creativity was established, using judges from each specialty field to evaluate the work in that field, based on the definitions popularized by Amabile. Students were given a design challenge (building a moving structure from toy parts) as well as tests of psychological motivation, and of their understanding of TRIZ, after five 3-hour classes. Measurement of motivation raised very serious questions—there was no grade and no requirement for the class, and it appears that the university environment destroys motivation. But the results of the practical class were very gratifying—without TRIZ many students did not even know how to start but with TRIZ, many different structures were built using the resources in many different ways. Future research will examine multiple issues of motivation, acquisition of knowledge, and the use of knowledge.

"STRATEGIES OF ENTAILMENT OF A PUBLIC CENTER OF INVESTIGATION WITHIN THE NATIONAL SYSTEM OF INNOVATION IN MEXICO” by Candelario Moyeda Mendoza and Dr. Arturo Serrano Santoyo (presented by Dr. Serrano) detailed the systematic way that is being used to promote innovation throughout the country. The scientific/technical work is done in CICESE agency research laboratories, and in collaboration with universities and industry. The agency acts as a catalyst in the formation of innovation centers and alliances between industry and education, and provides leadership in the development of intellectual property policies. Their goal is a systematic process for stimulating breakthrough innovation throughout the economy. Benchmark data for Mexico relative to Korea, Spain, and Chile showed the areas of work with high potential, but also emphasized the need for local cultural sensitivity and local economic knowledge. Local clusters of business and universities have been formed in the Ensenada-San Diego area, and the Puerto Peñasco-Phoenix-Tucson cross-border areas, with many innovation-development activities in each area.

In many conferences, such a paper by a government official would be greeted by polite applause, then the next speaker would stand up. NOT so here—there was considerable discussion, with some participants pointing out that they had been active in the study and promotion of innovation for years and had never before heard of the government efforts, which led to extended discussion during the break about how to make the programs more effective.

PYMES is Small and medium size businesses. “COMPUTER SCIENCE TOOLS FOR The SUPPORT OF INNOVATION IN The PYMES” by Rodriguez Gutiérrez emphasized the need for project management, with measurement and feedback, to keep projects moving. The unique needs of the small and medium businesses are the need for simplicity of the system, so that it can be useful without extensive training, and simplicity so that there is no expense of system administrators or maintenance. Without the simplicity, the system will fall into disuse, and the innovation projects will be delayed or cancelled.

"APPLICATION of the ISQ TO BREAK PSYCHOLOGICAL INERTIA IN a Non-TECHNICAL ATMOSPHERE: THE CASE OF THE I.T.S.T.N.” by Maria Gabriela Perez Ramos and Maria Allondra de la Llave Hernandez presented an interesting perspective on a non-technical service environment (a university, including the faculty, administration, students, and staff, in the supersystem of the state of Puebla) with dysfunctional traditional hierarchical management, poor communication, and dissatisfied customers. They presented a comprehensive application of the Innovative Situation Questionnaire (developed by Ideation International) with considerable detail, to some amusement of the people from other universities who share their problems. They did an extensive analysis of the available resources in the system, with particular emphasis of the skills and attitudes of the people, information resources, and energy, as well as the physical resources. They emphasized that the main issue was NOT finding innovative solutions to the problem; the primary issue was disrupting psychological inertia so that the leader of the organization would be willing to accept change. Maria got the biggest audience reaction of the entire conference when she got to the question: Has any similar problem been solved? And the answer: yes, at another university, by changing the leader. The experiment was a success and the audience hopes for a second episode of the story next year, when they have implemented the changes, now that the initial resistance has been overcome.

"STRATEGY OF INTRODUCTION And APPLICATIONS OF TRIZ IN The CHILEAN MINING INDUSTRY” was presented by Pedro Sariego of the Universidad Tecnica de Federico Santa Maria. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the flowchart for the introduction of TRIZ that I developed with Jim Kowalick in the mid-90s (TRIZ Journal, October 1997) and then refined for the publication of Simplified TRIZ in 2002 was the foundation of the method that they have used. They selected the strategically important Division of the Andes, 200 km inland from Valparaiso, at a complex mineral concentration facility, for the pilot project. The case study required extensive modeling of the flow of materials, energy and information through the facility, which helped reveal the need for the application of ideality, of the use of scientific effects, and of specific technical and physical contradictions to the development of solutions. Changes in the stresses in parts of the processing machine (called the “digestor” if my translation is OK) resulted in more efficient processing and savings in material and energy. A second set of pilot projects applied TRIZ to giant earth-moving machines, again producing impressive gains. (OK, giant mining equipment is always impressive.) The success of the pilot project system has made it possible to get TRIZ accepted in the organization, and the students involved in the project will be taking those results to other organizations.

THE INTEGRATION OF QFD AND TRIZ IN ORDER TO ENHANCE SUGGESTION SYSTEM EFFECTIVENESS by Sedigheh Khorshid was the most surprising paper of the conference, since she traveled from Iran to Monterrey to participate. But, since we have a global tradition in TRIZ (I always felt that both Korea and California are important to the European meeting) there should be no surprise that Iran is now in “Iberoamerica.” The emphasis on TRIZ in Professor Khorshid’s program at the Shahid Bahonar University is in the solution of management problems. Her case study demonstrated significant improvement in both the submission of suggestions and the implementation of suggestions when the employees were taught QFD, to better understand the needs of their customers, and TRIZ, to formulate ideas that would satisfy those needs.Many organizations are recognizing the need for innovation by all employees. Enhancing existing suggestion systems by giving employees better skills for making suggestions can be a very fast way to get more benefits from the current system.

I2T2 is the program for innovation and technology transfer. Starting from a 10 minute discussion with Noel Leon 3 years ago, there is now a large university/ government/business joint venture to enhance innovation and technology in Monterrey. The power of an idea was visible in the photographs of the industrial park that is being developed to provide an environment that will be conducive to the development of a community of innovation.

The conference concluded with many good wishes for a successful year of innovation, and plans to meet next year in Guadalajara. I’ll be meeting our readers much sooner than that, since I’ll be reporting from the European TRIZ Association TRIZ Futures meeting in Frankfurt next week.

Readers are invited (begged!) to use the comment feature on this column, or the discussion forum, to let us know if these commentaries and conference reports are useful to you. Please!!!

Pictures of Monterrey and the surrounding mountains looking East and South from the conference center:

Buenas Dias a Todos (Good morning everybody) from the 2nd Iberoamerican Technological Innovation Congress in Monterrey Mexico. The main conference opened today with greetings and wishes for success from the university officials, the regional government of Nueva Leon, the federal government agency for promotion of innovation and the board of AMETRIZ (The Mexican TRIZ Association.) There is strong emphasis on the need for business to master innovation to compete in the world economy, and for the universities to learn how to teach innovation to serve their business customers.

The primary language of the conference is Spanish, with about 15% of the papers in English. Since I am participating in a panel discussion, as well as presenting a keynote speech and a technical paper, this will be a linguistic adventure—I read Spanish much better than I speak it!

I was honored to be asked to deliver the keynote address—getting me to talk about innovation in general, not just TRIZ, was a challenge. The audience appreciated the discussion of the need to innovate because of the changes in the world environment, and that there is equal need for innovation in business processes and in products and services. There was no problem meeting my self-imposed challenge of current research—all examples came from publications in October 2007, ranging from R&D Magazine to Fortune Magazine to the Harvard Business Review.

I picked Track 1 because of the variety of papers and presenters. The first, on "APPLICATION OF TRIZ, TO SOLVE A PROBLEM OF EXCESS OF SUPERFICIAL FOAM IN WATERY SOLUTIONS” was presented by Rafael Oropeza Monterrubio of Instituto Polytecnico de Mexico in collaboration Areli Gonzalez and with Claudio Matta at the Universidad Tecnico Federico Santa Maria in Chile. The foam problem affects a wide variety of chemical, pharmaceutical and food processing industries. The analysis showed clear interactions between 4 classical TRIZ contradictory parameters (productivity and loss of time get better, velocity and loss of substance get worse). Su-field analysis was used to understand the details of the functional interactions in the system. Application of pulsed acoustic energy and application of temperature control both eliminate the problem. The audience enjoyed the discussion of the problems of a $US 5000 investment required to implement the solution, which would save more than $200 per day, and how the company debated the investment.

“DEVELOPMENT OF A RECONFIGURABLE SYSTEM OF MANUFACTURE for EXTRUDED PIECES and PRODUCTS OF VARIABLE CROSS-SECTION” was presented by Rogelio de la Garza Giacomán, on behalf of his co-authors Mónica Vanessa Villa Otzuca, and Pablo Vicente Vargas Cortes, all from Tecnologic de Monterrey. The project goal was to develop a simple, light-weight system that did not waste material in the formation process. They started with direct use of the contradiction matrix and 40 principles, and found a breakthrough solution using the principle of segmentation, making the extrusion die have repositionable parts. Replacing mechanisms with fields (Principle 28) was explored, and gave useful ideas, but requires more research. The audience was impressed by the example of the complex shape that was produced by the dynamically reconfigured die.

"USE OF METHODOLOGY TRIZ, FOR THE CREATION OF A CAE PROGRAM GENERATOR FOR FUNCTIONS CAD-CAM-CAE-CAPP-CAQ” by Guillermo Flores Téllez, Tomas Flores Téllez, Elisa Arisbé Millán Rivera from the Universidad del Valle De Puebla, Consutoria e Integracion de Tecnologias, and CASDT, respectively. The specific problem that they addressed was the development of jigs and fixtures for production processes, which is a complex, repetitive process, which takes a large amount of time of skilled engineers. They used a broader spectrum of TRIZ tools than was demonstrated in the first 2 papers, including the Ideal Final Result, Function Analysis, and multiple modeling techniques as well as the identification and removal of contradictions. Guillermo surprised the group with a live demonstration measurement of human parameters of interaction with technology, and human persistence of behavior using 4 audience volunteers, emphasizing the need for data, not assumptions, as the basis for designing new systems. The Open Cascade Technology Public License system (similar in some ways to Linux, as a community development) was the enabling technology for building a library of reusable elements that can be quickly combined into the elements of the fixture design. He concluded with a beautiful display of simulations of gymnastics and various martial arts, all simulated using the software, showing the application to virtual design, as well as to the physical design of products.

The paper that I wrote with Joe Miller, “The Complete Technical System Defines the Problem to Be Solved” was very well received, and will be in the December issue of the TRIZ Journal. The audience was particularly interested in the hybridization of the 9 windows with the complete technical system, and the structured system of questions that generate specific, actionable problems.

The day concluded with a panel discussion about how to encourage the propagation of TRIZ in Mexico and Latin America. Everyone agreed that this is a desirable state, but that conventional methods used in the past for encouraging adoption of other new methods have been too slow, or ineffective, or both. The majority of the panel were academics with strong ties to local industry in each of their regions, so not surprisingly, many of the solutions featured collaborative work between academia and industry. The government agencies for the development of innovation will be featured on tomorrow’s program, and it will be interesting to see if there are any differences between the two groups.

Readers can see the complete program of the meeting on the conference site http://www.ametriz.com/ so I won’t list the papers that I did not see. The level of excitement is palpable—discussions during the coffee hour were about having a TRIZ for software conference in Jalisco, and next year’s conference in Guadalajara (still under discussion, but a strong candidate!) and on the involvement of industry directly as well as in collaboration with universities.

(l-r) Guillermo Flores Tellez, Edgardo Cordova (chairman), Rogelio de la Garza Giacomán, Rafael Oropeza

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.

My colleague Akhilesh Gulati recently ran this essay on the use of limitations to stimulate innovation in the Radical Thinking column of his newsletter www.pivotmc.com which I recommend to our readers. I have seen this limitation effect many times, so I wanted to share Akhilesh’s paper with our TRIZ Journal and Real Innovation Commentary readers:

In today’s world, it’s almost expected to have product/service innovation to gain competitive advantage. So how does one innovate? One approach is to hire genius employees and to combine the attributes of a number of tools (e.g. Theory of Constraints, Experimentation) or use specific methodologies such as TRIZ (Innovative Problem Solving).

However, if the intent is to gain competitive advantage, your weakness itself may be a source of competitive advantage. To cite an example from many years ago, Thomas Edison was known to be deaf and he used his limitation to help him solve problems as well as develop new inventions. On one occasion, he was called to New York to help solve noise problems associated with the newly elevated trains in the city. Many had tried to reduce noise levels but could never identify the exact location of its source. Due to his deafness, Edison could hear only the worst of the noise. This allowed him to more quickly pinpoint the problem area, rather than be distracted and sidetracked by other noises made by the elevated trains. Ultimately, the noise was due to structural problems with the elevated tracks and not the steam engines that ran the train. While most observers couldn’t hear past the engine, Edison could hear the heart of the problem due to his ‘disadvantage.’

Such is the issue when we place limitations on ourselves as we seek new innovative solutions. Imposing constraints, yes, that’s right, putting ON constraints rather than REMOVING them, allows us to stretch our thinking and become creative. It allows us to break our bounds, get outside the comfort level and seek solutions we might have otherwise avoided. Success of many kaizen events can also be attributed to imposing constraints or limitations: limited time (typically 5-10 days) within which to accomplish the task, having a very limited budget to achieve results, seeking unimaginable results, dedicating ‘operational experts’ full time to the task at hand for an interim period of time, etc.. Kaizen events often allow us to accomplish tasks that we may have been struggling with for months, in a matter of days, with generally unbelievable results.

Some examples of how these constraints have led to creative / innovative results follow:

• Personalized or vanity license plates on cars can allow for only seven characters. Check out the creative messages with a mix of letters, numbers and spaces: 2L82W8, MTBRAIN, GU10TAG.

• TV commercials and print ads have limited time/space in which to get their message across; therefore verbosity is not allowed. A mix of images, words, sounds etc. must be formulated to advertise in different media so as to grab the viewers’ attention and deliver the message – all, without being much of a distraction.

Limiting our way to innovation does not necessarily mean creating self-imposed constraints to motivate greater creativity. We should examine our organizational weaknesses (this can be identified via a SWOT analysis) and determine if we can use them to our advantage; after all no competitor would want to emulate our weaknesses! Southwest Airlines was forced to offer short-run flights in the regulated industry; however, as deregulation set in, they chose to continue to offer short-run flight (something no competitor wanted to do) and has posted a profit every year!

Determining our greatest weakness or constraint might just point the direction towards our competitive advantage. It is said that necessity is the mother of all invention. Might it be that limitation is the mother of innovation?

As Blaine McCormick writes in his book ‘At Work With Thomas Edison’, “Like Thomas Edison you may find that putting limitations on yourself will spur you to even greater creativity,” and innovation.

TRIZ Journal and Real Innovation Commentators talk a lot about the methods of innovation, but we don’t talk very often about the sense of mission and commitment that are frequently needed to keep an idea alive while all those methods are being used.

Dean Kamen is well-known in the invention community – his Segway is an icon of "out of the box" creativity, his stair-climbing wheelchair was featured at one of the first Altshuller Institute meetings, and his use of his personal fortune to sponsor invention workshops and contests for schools has gotten extensive press coverage.

Go ahead – watch the video. It takes 5 minutes, so I won’t make the commentary any longer. Think about what Kamen and his people did in 13 months. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/82

TRIZ lesson: did you spot the use of trimming? He mentioned it twice.

Cheryl Perkins from Kimberly-Clark fascinated the audience with her data on the lack of clear metrics in the innovation “space.” She gave characteristics of good metrics, particularly the advantages of leading (vs. lagging) metrics. The continuum of innovation requires tailored metrics, with different characteristics at different stages. Cheryl had a very sophisticated view of metrics, and got the audience to have several very productive discussions. Technology field portfolio mapping was a concept that most of the audience had not heard of, but all saw the applicability—in TRIZ terms, plan for function changes in your product or service.

Sam Racine from Unisys suggested a lot of mental exercises for innovative attitudes, combining visualization (“I need to be innovative in my Japanese garden.” “I need to be innovative in my Infiniti at 110 MPH”) with other kinds of stimulus (music, art, nature, books, museums). Once the stimulus has had its effect, she uses a system that is reminiscent of the ideal final result, asking the creative team to visualize the ideal customer experience, or the ideal flow of the process, then to solve the problems that prevent them from delivering that experience.

Dean Johnson from the Detroit Regional Chamber talked informally about his experiences changing culture in a non-governmental, public benefit organization, introducing innovation into a low-risk environment.

Sherry MacAlister from Embarq (formerly the landline part of Sprint/Nextel, now independent) was the final speaker, and she did a great job of energizing the audience so that they left with a very positive message and a set of practical guidelines. Sherry reported on Embarq’s process of incorporating idea management into their knowledge management system, and how the idea management system (suggestions, evaluation, feedback, project planning) has unexpectedly become a major tool for the cultural formation of the new company, as well as the expected vehicle for releasing employee creativity.

Sherry will be the first workshop speaker Thursday morning, with an expanded session on the knowledge management/idea management topic. Victor Fey (frequent TRIZ Journal author) will lead the second workshop called “Utilizing Triz To Create Value – Build Your Own Technology Roadmap”

Readers are invited to comment on the live commentaries from the conference—ask questions, make suggestions, let us know you are out there!