Commentary by Ellen Domb

Stop the Innovation Wars is the attention-getting title of this month's Harvard Business Review attempt at controversy by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, both on the faculty at Dartmouth, and co-authors of a new book on innovation, due out in November. (See www.hbr.org July-Aug. 2010) What is the Innovation War? It is the battle between corporate operations groups, responsible for ongoing operations and support of existing products and services, and the teams formed for new initiatives, usually given names like innovation team. The authors' description of the powerful, extremely negative reactions to the idea of creating an innovation team with special responsibility for a new strategy and how it gave rise to their research is fascinating, but familiar; readers of Real Innovation and the TRIZ Journal are likely to ask what is the excitement, and what calls for academic research.

The authors rename the operations groups the Performance Engine of the company, and prescribe a partnership modality, in which the Performance Engine partners with dedicated project teams tasked with innovation projects. They present an interesting series of case studies: BMW's regenerative braking team, West's (the legal publishing branch of Thomas Reuters) creation of database products, Lucent's service businesses, and WD-40's new dispenser to demonstrate the universality of their proposed method as applied in a product, a service, and a component part.

Step one of the partnership process is dividing the work between the Performance Engine and the dedicated project team. One insight that I found quite useful was that it is not just the work to be done and the skills of the people that should be assessed, but also the past working relationships of those people. If they have always worked in a hierarchical relationship, they may not be able to work in a flat organization. If they have always worked on projects that have well-defined deliverables, they may not be able to work in an exploratory environment. And, of course, vice versa: one example showed how people who had typically worked very independently, or with a small technical support staff, were not well-suited to working in a large, structured team with complex, interdependent roles. The new organization will also need new metrics of success, new compensation/reward systems, and its own unique culture. Trimble and Govindarajan task management with creating these elements, but I've seen management fail more often than it succeeds as creating a specific culture - - it seems that the best that management can do is be sure that the metrics and reward systems are not contrary to the desired cultural elements.

For a short article, they did a good job at illustrating the kinds of problems that will occur in this partnership. TRIZ readers will recognize the physical contradictions in the situations of loose â€" tight management, team â€" individual metrics, and the technical (trade-off) contradictions in the schedule vs. completeness and new technology vs. traditional methods and new suppliers' creativity vs. traditional suppliers' reliability, etc. Disappointingly, the authors did not use any of the insights available from business applications of TRIZ to propose solutions to these contradictions. Their solutions to the problems of innovation are remarkably un-innovative. Equally disappointing, they do not present any data or case studies showing that their proposed method work. Case studies from which the method was derived are interesting, but obviously are available because they were successful for those companies in those circumstances. The test should be to apply the method to new situations and evaluate its effectiveness, and iterated the method based on both failures and successes. I am particularly dubious about the effectiveness of changing the names of the operations and innovation teams as a key success factor!

Readers are invited to contribute their case studies and observations, and particularly any methods they have found effective in Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal-reading companies.

Two times in two weeks on two continents then twice more by e-mail people asked about TRIZ and open innovation. Sounds like a trend? I honestly had not given it much thought, and before my current exposure I would have said that my impression of open innovation was that companies invite outsiders to contribute ideas in order to get more ideas from a population that is more diverse than their employees, and that if they used TRIZ, they could solve their own problems and not rely on the mob. I was a bit uncomfortable with this, remembering that when I was new to TRIZ, an expert (he thought he was being kind!) said that it was too bad that I had put so much time and effort into QFD, since now, with TRIZ, you can solve all the problems and predict all the customer needs so you don't need QFD.

Regular readers may remeber that at TRIZ India we heard lot about open innovation from the Yahoo India participants.
" http://www.triz-journal.com/commentary/archive/triz_india_summit_day_2.html" One of their unique concepts was conducting 2 hack events, inviting their own employees to one and outsiders to another, creating new applications, presenting them to a judging board (talent show style) and being rewarded immediately for high potential ideas. My TRIZ bias started to dissolve: the participants were not solving a problem that the sponsor had defined; rather, they were solving their own problem, and the judges were deciding both whether the problem was general enough (there would be other customers) and the solution was good enough.

When I got back from India, my accumulated LinkedIn messages included a note from a friend in Minneapolis pointing out a meeting in San Diego (which is 150 km from me and 2000 km from her) and yes, the topic was open innovation. Bright Ideas develops software that a lot of companies use to manage open innovation systems, and the Birds of a Feather meetng is a non-commercial users group meeting. http://bi.brightidea.com/bof My estimate is that a bit more than half the participant were users of the software, a few used other methods, and some, like me, were just there to learn about the topic. Next meetings are in Zurich and in Hong Kong, and I recommend them - - very good speakers, very good experience sharing by participants, very restrained selling by the Bright Ideas people. If you can't get to a meeting, look at the on-line discussions, or do both.

Great big learning that I'm almost embarrassed to admit: There are two different meanings to open innovation
1. Inviting employees to contribute ideas outside their own areas of specialty. This can be everything from the old-style company suggestion box to the current style of campaigns where ideas are solicited for particular projects for a specific time period.
2. Inviting non-employees to contribute ideas. Popular versions of this are Innocentive, Nine Sigma, Idea Connections, and many others such as the recent attempts by BP and the US Environmental Protection Agency to get public contributions of ideas for solving the problem of the oil well catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. They got more than 80,000 ideas, creating a new problem: how to sort and evaluate the ideas, and they also created frustration - - I got many communiques from TRIZ practioners who had ideas but could not get them noticed by anyone in a position to do anything about them.

Jeffrey Phillips from OVOInnovation and John Russo from CCH Wolpers Kluper gave the morning presentations that were actionable lessons learned. Russo's talk stimulated a lot of discussion of how many people in any group will participate, and the conflicting data on the use of incentives to stimulate participation. Philip Horvath from INOS spoke more to the philosophy of communication and knowledge transfer, and stimulated a lot of discussion.

I'll summarise highlights of Jeffrey's paper because it has application to the whole adventure of finding out how (and IF) TRIZ and open innovation can interact. If you want to get more see http://www.ovoinnovation.com

Success depends on alignment of the innovative idea with overall company strategy - - NOT that the idea can't be completely different from past work, but that the death of an idea is most likely to be caused by lack of resources (time, money, talent, attention, ...) and resources are allocated according to strategies and operating plans that support those strategies. We may talk about company culture, but it is an iceberg, with a tiny bit showing above the water, and most of it hiddent below, and in most cases companies only talk about the part that shows. Biggest failure cause for specific idea campaigns is lack of criteria (or clear criteria, well-understood by contributors) and organizers should put a lot of work into creating the criteria before announcing the campaign, to avoid disappointing/frustrating the contributors. Some members of the audience were surprised by one point, and other agreed vigorously: evaluation is a skill, and experience matters, so develop a skilled cadre of evaluators.

Jeffrey and I are both on the program for the Business Innovation Conference in Chicago in October, and I look forward to learning more.

My viewsnow on the role of TRIZ in Open Innovation (two somewhat new, one pretty much expected)
New: Formulate better questions or challenges. Ideality gives a different perspective!
New Don't just select a best idea. Use function and attribute analysis, use feature transfer (or the Pugh method) to hybridize ideas to create better ideas than the best of what was submitted.
Expected: Generate ideas using TRIZ to solve the problems presented in the challenge.

I will be working with people who are now using open innovation in the coming months, and I invite readers to comment, so that I can combine what we are all learning into something we can all use.

Ido Lapidot from Intel in Israel opened his talk on TRIZ in large companies with the Tetris project's video on the history of TRIZ, and then a charming demonstration of his personal history using S-curves. Since he started with the announcement that the benefit of TRIZ to Intel was many millions, this got the audience very engaged. Then he astonished us by saying that we need Systemic Innovation, not Systematic Innovation - - in other words, if the culture is right, it doesn't matter if we have TRIZ or any other specific methodology. But, the current Intel theme that power is not the goal, power/performance is the goal, makes resolving the contradiction the focus of the whole company, so there is a high compatibility with between the strategy, the culture, and TRIZ.

There was great interest in Lapidot's chart showing the correspondence

Vision - - Ideality

Mission - - Laws of evolution

Strategy - - S-Curves

Targets - - Ideal Final Result

Indicators - - Ideality equation: Functions/(Cost + Harm) He emphasized the need to have multiple factors in the indicators.

Lapidot gave the audience very practical advice while simultaneously illustrating the application of TRIZ to cultural change. He used both the separation principles and the 40 principles to show some of what he does; for example, combining the principles of local quality and self ��"service, have people develop their own examples of TRIZ applicability for their own problems, instead of having an expert supply generic examples. His history of the adoption of TRIZ through the company from 1996 through 2010 was sobering for those who wanted an instant solution, and his statement that they do not use metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of TRIZ was a challenge to those who use conventional management.

Lapidot then became a member of the panel for the discussion of embedding TRIZ in large enterprises, with Jagdish Ramaswamy, Chief Quality Officer from Wipro (Software and IT services), and T. Mukhopadhyay, Senior VP and head of R&D for CavinKare(shampoo and other personal care products.) (Picture, Left to Right, Ramaswamy, Lapidot, Bhushan, Mukhopadhyay) All panelists agreed that there is no one formula for introducing TRIZ throughout the organization, and that they used methods similar to Intel's for different people, different departments, and different jobs within their companies.

There was an extensive discussion of what constitutes innovation in software, which extended to innovation in systems and applications as opposed to the innovation in the software tools themselves, and potential areas for TRIZ applications. The audience questions then returned the panel to practical issues of the time spent on training and on projects when introducing TRIZ into a company. Navneet Bhushan gave a very complete description of an experimental approach, in which the people learning TRIZ are encouraged to experiment with it, not just treat it as training, over a 9-month period. The message from day 1, that TRIZ software / hardware / systems / services all benefit from TRIZ became much more concrete for the audience as they heard the commonality of approaches and results at Wipro, CavinKare, and Intel. Both Wipro and Intel have extensive Six Sigma deployments, and there was considerable interest in the TRIZ/Six Sigma hybridization (building on what I talked about yesterday, but with real examples from the 2 companies.)

After a short break, a second panel convened to discuss intellectual property. Krishan Prasad, inventor of global warming solutions and founder of Carbonda Global, Prof. Mary Mathew from the Indian Institute of Science, and Pinaki Ghosh, head of IP at Infosys joined Navneet Bhushan to discuss the methods used by inventors now, and the potential for TRIZ. Ghosh and Bhushan both emphasized that TRIZ is useful both for evaluation of ideas as well as for generation of ideas. Karthik Iyer asked the challenging questions: my favorite was, since TRIZ is successful for patent circumvention, will inventors be discouraged and will they stop generating new patents? The panelists had a vigorous discussion of the difference between the legal, ethical approach of patent circumvention and the improper use of patent information that results in infringement. (Ask your lawyer about this!)

The next paper built on the interest in patents. Priyaranjan Mishra from Philips India teamed with N. Bhushan to show how they search for relevant patents using TRIZ and the patent citation analysis method that was presented yesterday afternoon. Mishra emphasized the financial benefits of a good, fast, accurate, high confidence search system. Bhushan showed a case study using Perfusion Imaging, which combines MRI with cellular metabolism measures. There is a fascinating correlation between the high-ranking patents in their system and high level of invention, using Altshuller's 5 level scale.

Prasanna C. from Infosys Technologies reported on the use of TRIZ to determine qualitative parameters for estimating IP value of intangibles. They start by analyzing the contradiction that is solved by the invention, using D. Mann's business parameter matrix and the principles of invention that are cited by the matrix. The strength and frequency of use of the principles becomes the foundation of the analysis.

Bala Girisaballa, Director of R&D for Yahoo India, opened the afternoon session with a broad analysis of innovation in business models as well as technology, leading to discussion of open innovation methods. Yahoo's view of innovation includes business system patents, mostly from a defensive point of view, since the lifecycle of innovation in their business is 1 week-3 months, and innovative patentable ideas are published, not patented, as a business decision. The scale of Yahoo! is mind-boggling: 9 billion advertisements per day, 600 million people… They have a strong discipline for deciding what areas will be innovative, with a hierarchy of employees, partners, network associates, and their ecosystem. Yahoo! has an extensive suite of methods for engaging and rewarding employee innovation initiatives, some familiar to all readers of the innovation literature (reward fast failure, communicate cross-functionally) and some unique (internal hack days.) The need for common vision, trust, and open communication is the same for both employees and for partners, but very different in details of application. The network and ecosystem relationship are much less close, aimed at long-term relationships that will result in future partnerships. The challenge is to create a system that promotes the diffusion of new ideas from the outside layers to the inside, where they will be developed into implemented concepts. In parallel, they have a concept called radiation, in which problems go out through the layers, to the people who have the most interest in solving it.

Bala Ramadurai from MindTree spoke next about a unique what /if and function /attribute /analysis method to generate exhaustive system test case scenarios. The method was developed for a complex system, where classical analysis produced 80 scenarios, then WI ��" FAA produced 300 scenarios for a much more comprehensive test set. The deceptively simple method uses standard TRIZ function analysis: A does something to B, then ask what happens if the action is effective, missing, insufficient, excessive, or harmful, and what could cause an effective action to transition to one of the other modes.

Bala Girisaballa, Navneet, Venkatesh VR (Sr. VP and head of external innovation at Wipro) and I were the panel for a discussion of open innovation and TRIZ. My view was that TRIZ could be used to refine the definition of problems, and to focus the solutions, so that the mass idea submission approach of open innovation is unnecessary (I'm not sure thatI was a real contribution to the discussion!) The audience had a lot of questions about the technicalities of open innovation and IP, and a very vigorous exchange began, which will continue outside the conference hall.

The final presentation of the conference was planned to be Darrell Mann by remote connection from the UK speaking on TRIZ: Evolution to Revolution for Innovation. Technical difficulties caused cancellation, so Ido Lapidot, Isak Bukhman, Bala Ramadurai, and I did a quick panel discussion with the audience on high points of the conference, and next steps. Summarizing, the challenge is to DO TRIZ, don't just talk about it and don't just study it, DO IT! Second challenge is to keep the momentum going after the conference using all possible mechanisms. There's a live blog of the conference at http://trizindia.org/profiles/blogs/live-updates-trizin-2010 for those who would like a different perspective. Then there was lots of thanking each other and hugging, and people started for their next adventures.

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.

I'm in the beautiful suburban environment (all the trees are in flower!) of Washington DC this week for the 2010 DoD Performance Symposium, which is the USA's Department of Defense Six Sigma meeting. People from all services present their projects(for feedback, for sharing, and for bragging), attend workshops, and get the opportunity for in-person networking. iSixSigma Live, a division of CTQ Media which also owns TRIZ Journal and Real Innovation is the organizer. For the full program see http://live.isixsigma.com/dod2010

The incorporation of TRIZ into LeanSixSigma has been well-documented in articles and commentaries, so I'll focus this report on how the DoD is working at real-time improvement. The live Innovation/TRIZ networking element is very active - " Phil Samuels (BMG) and Dana Clarke (RACE) are familiar faces to TRIZ Journal readers. The emphasis throughout the day was on the need to innovate to meet the every more stringent improvement goals.

Leadoff speaker was Mr. J.D. Sicilia, director of DoD's Lean Six Sigma Program Office. He used a lot of humor (some military, some just human) to set the theme of performance excellence - " not just one time, but for sustained benefit to the military and to the taxpayers. He called attention to more than 40 storyboards that documented success in projects in all areas of process improvement - " the organizers considered skipping this element because formatting the presentations takes a lot of time, but the participants wanted it, so they used a very TRIZ-ish "local quality" solution -" the presentations are in any format that works.

Eric Fanning, Undersecretary of the Navy, gave the keynote address, and surprised the audience by saying that he had changed the talk he planned to give, because of Secretary Gates' speech last week about the importance of efficiency to achieve the same mission with $28billion less cost. This is THE opportunity, THE "game changer" for continuous process improvement/Lean SixSigma. Fanning said that this could make it easier to report savings, and will be a challenge to distinguish between cost avoidance and cost savings. His distinction between the "tail" and the "tooth" of the organization applies to non-military organizations as well; the goal is to save a lot on the "tail" (support) processes and move those savings to the "tooth" (mission).

"How do we show the value of continuous process improvement to the Navy?" Fanning proposed aligning problem selection with the Secretary's commitment to dramatically reduced energy use. His statistics on the cost in money and in casualties of delivering one gallon of gasoline to the front line were persuasive, and the benefits to the improvement community of working on projects that the leadership is pre-committed to.
Audience questions dealt with specifics of the DoD's organization issues, which got the audience some interesting answers to difficult questions.

General C. Robert Kehler, Commander of the Air Force Space Command, gave the second re-structured presentation, focusing on how to apply the techniques of Lean Six Sigma to make operations efficient and effective, regardless of the technologies involved. He had a very strong focus on the functions of the users of the systems that his group (46,000 people world-wide) provides. He made the point very dramatically that "we have been on this road before" recalling both the successes of Total Quality Management, and the failure (which was proliferation of a TQM bureaucracy and emphasis on procedures rather than results.) "It was doomed because of how we went about it." His claim to being a "card carrying skeptic" was greeted with good humor by the audience, and his openness to try again, with awareness of all the lessons learned from earlier efforts, was very positively received.

General Kehler's story of work in progress emphasized the cultural and business change from spot inspection by outsiders to rigorous, continuous self-inspection and improvement. The objective is making sure that leaders have clear view of the capability, rather than the enthusiasm, of their people and their systems. He handled the delicate question of inspection (bad in Six Sigma, good in military history) quite nicely, challenging the audience to find the careful balance of people and achieving process excellence in difficult situations.

120 of the 450 attendees participated in my TRIZ workshop after lunch. Thanks to those who pointed out that TRIZ is now in the official DoD "Lean Six Sigma body of knowledge" document!

The entire group reconvened to hear from Elizabeth McGrath, DoD Assistant Deputy Chief Management Officer. She did an eloquent job of explaining the new orientation of DoD improvement as well as the elements that are frankly re-used from earlier initiatives. She used her 22 years' government experience as a basis for lessons learned from past experience as well as explaining plans for change in 10 significant areas ranging from energy use to acquisition processes. McGrath concluded with an announcement that www.defense.gov will feature requests for innovative solutions to the problem of taking cost out of DoD business operations.

David Tillotson III, Deputy Chief Management Officer of the Office of the Undersecretary of the Air Force spoke on "Shaping the Air Force Future through Business Transformation." For a TRIZ perspective, he focused on the contradictions in the present environment ��" a traffic jam due to construction is bad, but people having jobs is good. He showed the alignment of the Air Force's strategies with the overall DoD strategies of the previous speaker. Priorities are now assigned to projects that have measurable ROI, that are desired by the commands, and (surprisingly) where anticipated resistance to change is low. The results of benchmarking commercial organizations were another set of surprises which resulted in an initiative called "Clean Audit" that Tillotson pointed out is no fun at all, but absolutely necessary as a precursor to realigning spending (in TRIZ terms, he really emphasized ideality -" more benefit at less cost with less harm/waste.) He concluded with a strong message, backed up by numerous cases: Mission effectiveness is dependent on business efficiency.

"American Freedom Festival" was a unique video presentation by Jack L. Tilley, the retired Sergeant Major of the Army. The American Freedom Foundation helps military members and their families. The Festival is a series of concerts that raise money and raise awareness of the need and the campaign.

Chairman J. D. Sicilia returned to the podium to present awards to the winners of the DoD Performance Bowl which was a Six Sigma contest held yesterday. The Air Force "Team GD" were the winners.

A wine tasting featuring the Six Sigma winery followed, with plenty of opportunity for networking and learning.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (well-known management author and Harvard professor) presents her observations and challenges to CEOs who are embracing innovation during the recovery in the article "Block-by-Blockbuster Innovation" in the May 2010 Harvard Business Review. See http://hbr.org/2010/05/column-block-by-blockbuster-innovation/ar/1

I agree with many of her points, but I also noticed that with a bit of TRIZ orientation, much of what she says would be a lot stronger--they would stand as part of the database on human innovation that is the foundation of TRIZ, rather than as the observations of one person (although she's a very well-qualified observer.)

Prof. Kanter starts with the observation that some company leaders are ignoring risk, calling for breakthrough innovation, and even denigrating incremental innovation. She sees the positioning of continuous improvement as the opposite of breakthrough innovation as a false dichotomy, that increases the risk of innovation. I disagree with her contention that innovation must be risky, while agreeing with the other points. She is in complete agreement with the classical patterns of evolution in TRIZ, pointing out that breakthrough systems are the result of many incremental changes in product, processes, and the environment (including the customer!) that make the breakthrough possible.

She proposes an innovation pyramid with multiple ideas from many sources at the base (TRIZ concept "somebody, someplace has solved your problem"?) a portfolio of ideas in the middle, competing for resources, and a few strategic ideas at the peak, given dedicated attention to develop future directions for the company. This could be seen as a business example of the separation principles (the parts have different characteristics from the whole) or even an example of multi-dimensionality.

Did this article stimulate your thinking about innovation? Comments are welcome.

Technology Review magazine's listing of the world's most innovative companies has just arrived (see www.technologyreview.com/tr50). For the first time I am not going to rant about lists of "most innovative" that don't have the criteria for selection or the definition of innovation! You may disagree with the TR editors' definitions, but at least they have them.

Innovative companies: demonstrated superiority (that implies some measurement method that is not detailed) at inventing technology and using it both to grow the business and to transform how we live.

I'll take issue with the dual requirement, and use trivial cases to demonstrate the point:

1. Suitcases with wheels transformed how we live, and put a whole class of porters and baggage handling people out of business. The "technology" involved was nil (using skateboard wheels) - the big change was in marketing, using (male) pilots to show male business travelers that wheeled cases were acceptable.

2. Curved shower curtain rods have, in a modest way, changed the comfort level of our bathing experience, and the "technology" change is nil. This is a nice demonstration of the TRIZ principle of migrating a technology from one field to another, but not of creating a new technology. It is a favorite TRIZ teaching case because curving the rod uses 2 of the 40 principles (17- dimensionality change and 14 - increase curvature) and demonstrates how one improvement can cause the need for others (attachment to the wall has to change, for the early designs)

In both cases, there was technology development, 10-30 years previously, in another industry, for another reason, paid for by another company for its own reasons. And yet there was impact on the way consumers live, and creation of profitable business.

The article has a fascinating selection of companies and technologies, and businesses ranging from some of the biggest to relatively small. I suggest reading it with the idea that the technologies being honored are usually doing one specific thing for their customers...how could you migrate that technology to a different field, and do more things for different customers? Thermoelectric SI chip cooling, integrated photonic circuits, superconducting power cables, yeast that makes biofuel (didn't we have this 3000 years ago, and called it wine-making?)...

Let me know what you think.

I'm at the Queens School of Business First Annual Innovation Summit in Kingston, ON Canada (Friday-Saturday, March 19-20). Over 160 students, faculty and alumni are talking, listening, and being creative about the process of innovation, with a few visiting speakers sprinkled in to stimulate the discussions. Keynote speaker Stewart Beck, Canada's consul general in the San Jose/silicon valley area of the USA, gave a very personal view of innovation, starting with the Grateful Dead (music group, for those of you too young to know...) and the experience of his 4 friends (physical education majors in college, now a London solicitor, an Ottawa dentist, the consul general, and a business school administrator.) His conclusion about the Dead: you don't have to have a technology - you need a good idea and understanding your customers. The Dead only had one song on the top 10 list, but they have a 40 - plus -year history of fanatical followers, a concert and product sales business, and a gigantic business that is seen as non-business. They did it via social networking with the telephone and personal contacts (now a lot easier with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter) but if they hadn't done what they did in the '60's and '70's, it is possible that the technology - based social networks wouldn't have understoon the potential.

More history: in 1985, working with Canadian companies in the US, the model was to help them find a distributor in the US,ke and the entrepreneurs would frequently back off from the relationship, wanting to fine tune the product before introducing it. Now, 25 years later, his observation is that Canadian companies are much more likely to be willing to take the product to market, but they are reluctant to pay local distributors for their services - they want to apply their home culture methods to doing business abroad. This took Mr. Beck into a discussion of the need to innovate business methods as well as innovating products and services. He used the S-curve model, and showed Canada's strength is at the low end (academics applying R&D, developing concepts) and the high end (successful big companies) but with a big gap in the middle where the small companies grow, and the products/services are propagated into the economy. He is observing some slow changes in the Canadian innovation ecosystem - more willingness to take risks, more experimentation in customer relationships and financial structures, more willingness to work on a global level - but he encouraged the university audience to take leadership in all these areas. Beck's personal experiences in China during the scale-up in globalization of production and consumption and in the Silicon Valley on his first assignment in 1985-90 have both strongly colored his views. He compared the traditional Canadian view of bankruptcy to the Silicon Valley view (disaster, vs. something that happens that you learn from) and the traditional Canadian view of international commerce to the Chinese view (something risky to be very careful of, vs. something that is part of everyday operations of the company.)

Beck concluded with a report on Canadian leadership in the game industry, and in the health of the financial industry, and showed the mostly Canadian audience the video that he uses to tell people elsewhere about Canadian innovation (a few shots of Cirque du Soleil as well as green electronics industries and the Vancouver Olympics) to general audience delight.

For the full program, see www.qsbis.com. As always in these travel reports, I report on the sessions that I personally attend, so readers need to rely on the organizers and the program links to the speakers' own sites to learn about the other points of view that were presented at the conference. At Queens, I'm speaking in one of three morning sessions and doing a workshop during of the afternoon sessions, so my report will be more limited than usual. In the first breakout session, Bill Burnett's presentaion "The Foundational Elements for Business Innovation: The Antecedents of Successful Innovation" was filled with charming (true!) anecdotes ranging from Einstein and Feynman in physics to Domino's pizza. His observations on the contradiction between reward and innovation were right on target - he spoke to the business students about all the aspects of business school training that are just wrong when it comes to creating an innovation environment. His concluding technique, the howitzer method, (Ask "How", use wit, call other people "sir" or the culturally appropriate equivalent) is universally applicable as a way of demonstrating the trust and empowerment that are essential foundation elements for innovation. Thanks, Bill!

My first talk about TRIZ (the afternoon talk is a "how to" workshop) got a great crowd. Thanks, QSBIS! Maybe we'll have more TJ and RI readers in Ontario. I met Queens' students and faculty who had TRIZ experience in Germany and in multi-national situations, so I hope that I helped them gain a wider audience.

Stephen Benson from the UK presented both the theory and the reality of open innovation communities. His success with moving from 90/9/1 (joiners who don't participate, those who produce useless contributions, those who produce useful contributions) to 30/30/40 is both impressive and exciting. Innovation Exchange is the particular group he used as his example, but the learning applies to many communities of practice. Benson's discussion of intellectual property in the global, self-organizing communities, and the issues of trust between the customers (generally large companies) who need to reveal their needs to get effective suggestions, and the idea generating teams, who need to reveal enough about the solution to get the customers to pay for an idea, stimulated considerable lunchtime discussion.

Robert Brands used his own experience as a entrepreneur/product developer and his book "Robert's Rules of Innovation" as the basis for his keynote talk. A quick summary doesn't do justice to the depth of Brands' research--see his www.innovationcoach.com site for lots of extracts from the book.

I had a great audience for the afternoon TRIZ workshop--50 people, about 2/3 students in the Queens MBA program, the rest faculty and members of the Ontario business community, with a sprinkling of other speakers. It was a great opportunity to teach some TRIZ skills to people who will be in a position to use them very intensely in the next year. This is a very global group - one student from Germany had extensive TRIZ experience in the automotive industry, a faculty member was a "fan" of the TRIZ Journal, and students came from 8 countries and 3 Canadian provinces.

The concluding plenary talk was by Claude Legrand, "Walking the Talk on Innovation." Claude brought together many of the themes of the day, emphasizing that leadership has to be a daily, physically visible activity to be effective. The day concluded with organizer Jameel Lalji thanking the university, the sponsors, and the 20+ graduate students who pulled the QSBIS together. I hope that "First Annual" is an accurate label, and encourage the innovation community to consider a trip to Kingston next year.

Can you teach other people to be innovators? Or can you teach yourself to be more innovative? TRIZ practioners learn to generate innovative ideas, but they don't always get their ideas adopted in their organizations.

Sarah Miller Caldicott is co-author of Innovate Like Edison and author of a very good blog on innovation: http://www.powerpatterns.com/newsletter/newsletter_jan2010_online.htm This month she combines some of her experience and Edison-based research with the work of Dr. Jacqueline Byrd on innovation in 14,000 organizations.

I won't repeat the full research discussion -- see Caldicott's blog or Byrd's book for more details, but some of the exercises may help TRIZ Journal/Real Innovation readers see why I think this is research that will help.

Byrd finds that there are 8 corporate competencies that interplay with each other in the course of innovation, that can be defined on a two-axis matrix of Creativity vs. Risk-taking, with the 5.1% who are high on both parameters identified as the Innovators.

She finds that there are 4 ways to encourage creativity and 3 ways to encourage risk-taking.
Creativity increase exercises: Encourage the ability to deal with ambiguity, to work independently, to be inner-directed, and to be unique and value uniqueness in others. I would personally add development of TRIZ tools and methods here, to give people a WAY to use what these attitudes encourage.
Risk-taking increase exercises: Encourage authenticity, expand resilience, and strengthen self-acceptance. I need to learn more, since there seems to be a lot of overlap between authenticity as a risk-taking element and the independence and uniqueness elements.

The other corporate competencies have their own ratios of creativity to risk-taking (for example, the Challenger is high on risk-taking but low on creativity, and the Synthesizer is high on creativty and mid-level on risk-taking.) Future issues of the newsletter will look at ways to improve these competencies, and the interplay between them.

Weaving Caldicott's research on how Edison brought new people into his research lab with Byrd's research on 14,000 companies should give us all some new insights into the process of learning innovation.

The conference banquet on Monday night was held in the university's reception hall. We sat at large round tables and shared many dishes, which enhanced the opportunities for conference delegates to get to know each other. The banquet was an educational and cultural opportunity which introduced many of us to a variety of cultural elements. The entertainment included music, dance, and demonsrations of classical caligraphy (See 3 Pictures--more will be on the ICSI website soon) followed by members' talents--I was serenaded in Mongolian, and we were all amazed by Daniel Sheu's karaoke skills.

I gave the day 3 keynote speech on global success stories in TRIZ and Systematic Innovation, which led to significant discussions throughout the day about whether other companies' success stories are useful or not in getting people to try something new. The keynote was followed by 3 parallel technical sessions--I heard some very interesting follow-up to topics from the Computer-aided innovation conference in August by Denis Cavallucci and Derek Tate, among others.

The conference concluded with a tour of local technology site: The Realtek company showed us their approach to innovation and employee education, and part of their art collection, we toured the headquarters of the Hsinchu Science Park, and we visited the ITRI Creativity Lab, a cooperative for companies that want to learn to "play" with ideas.

Start planning now--the Second International Systematic Innovation Conference will be in Shanghai March 24-26, 2011, and the organizing committee is already working to make it even better than this one!

The tutorial speaker for day 2 at the Systematic Innovation Conference is Professor Jay Lee, whose primary work is at the U. of Cincinnati in the US and Shanghai Jia Tong University in China. His talk on "Dominant Design for Product and Service Innovation" introduced the audience to a very organized system of methods for integrating product and service offerings. "Dominant" refers to your market position if you do this! Examples from John Deere, GE Aviation and GE Medical, and GM, all adding information and service components to well-established hardware products were quite persuasive. His Cargill example (matching a US farmer who grows very specialized corn products with a Japanese chicken farmer to produce branded low-cholesterol eggs) was a great example of moving from product (Cargill doesn't sell the corn or the eggs) to an information-mediated service.

Key attributes of service innovation in Lee's model are:

1. Be Customer Intensive
2. Use System Instrumentation (smart agent)
3. Work through Smart Operation Analytics
4. Incorporate Knowledge Management in Business
5. Avoid Potential Issues for Customers

His primary tool is a matrix (no surprise to this audience) that maps the customers' raw needs, both visible and invisible, against the market opportunities. His stories about moving from industry to the university consortia then back to industry as an academic were both illustrative and entertaining! (Picture of Prof. Lee)

The featured talks after lunch were "real world" success stories from Samsung and Hyundai. Mr. SeHo Cheong from Samsung told his personal story of TRIZ learning mixed with the Samsung company story in a very effective way, starting with his trip to Russia in 1999 to hire TRIZ experts. (Picture of Mr. Cheong)

He showed us a great variety of case studies, starting in 2001, with washing machines, refrigerator door design, and the whole developement cycle of the OLED product family. Some early case studies were considered significant because they persuaded senior management to support TRIZ, and some are significant because they gave Samsung early market dominance in their fields. Now in all product development reviews, engineers are asked if they use resources, if they focus on major contradictions, if they have a concept for future super systems and sub-systems, and other TRIZ-based questions. Since they know the questions will be asked, they use TRIZ extensively in development. In SMD (Samsung Mobile Device) only 9% of projects were defect improvement projects; the majority were new products, or processes for creating the new products. Mr. Cheong offered serveral lessons from experience:

1. Verification is important. Verify new ideas immediately. Waiting kills creativity
2. Top-down project selection is very important. This protects projects from getting cancelled early.
3. Select people for the "Creative elite" (internal TRIZ promotion and education team) who have both the technical ability and the personality to help other people succeed.
4. Use a task force for big projects , with the project team and the TRIZ team as partners, dividing the work.

The Samsung teams use a very basic flowchart, with many tools of TRIZ/ARIZ/OTSM used where appropriate for the specific project. There was considerable interest by the audience in the training system, and particularly in the note that the CEO had graduated from the basic level class! The TRIZ training is accompanied by a support system of consultants and patent writing advisors. A TRIZ Festival is held annually--last year the 12 best of 62 projects were selected, and 7 awards were given, to promote TRIZ. Samsung has an internal "webzine" and a conference for their own TRIZ association (6 of the Samsung companies share their experiences.) Future plans are to develop a broad base of projects (not just top-down), to increase the number of people with higher-level tools, to modify tools and methods for business problems, and to continuously improve the effectiveness of the education and support systems.

The second paper in this remarkable session was from the TRIZ organizer at Hyundai, and formerly at LS Cable, Mr. Young-Ju Kang, who personally has more than 52 patents from his work in the automotive industry, using TRIZ with Value Engineering and Axiomatic Design. (Picture of Mr. Kang, holding the plaque showing the conference picture.)

He echoed Mr. Cheong in the rejection of benchmarking, choosing instead to create new paradigms to win in the market. TRIZ is used in multiple areas: patent circumvention, system improvement, cost reduction, process innovation, technical forecasting, and general creativity improvement. History: 1995 -2005 TRIZ in the LS and LG companies, with more than 60 patents, and an internal TRIZ Association started to support all the related companies. In Hyundai, 2007-9 there have been more than 40 projects and the development of internal training and support systems. In contrast to Samsung, at Hyundai the TRIZ team selects the projects.

Mr. Kang also discussed the problems of TRIZ propagation, especially the difficulty of assessing the return on investment, and the difficulty of overcoming ignorance and psychological resistance (what can you do if people are convinced that the system cannot be changed, or that all problems can be cured by spending more money?) An equally important problem was selecting easy, unimportant problems as case studies--then the results were not They are now very disciplined about finding the right question before starting work on the solutions. He reminded the audience that early pilot projects were published in the TRIZ Journal in 2005, and that this helped draw attention to the work.

He had a very nice analogy between the complete technical system for a product and the complete technical system for a TRIZ implementation (Picture of Mr. Kang's slide).

Both LS and Hyundai use cash awards and public honor as motivational rewards, and have internal TRIZ conferences to show project results and reward the participants. Similarly to the Samsung efforts, they are now modifying methods to use for business problems, and reaching out to universities and other companies to develop a network of resources.

Mr. Kang concluded with a case study of a wheel system improvement that simplified the brake system, reducing cost and improving energy efficiency, and a patent circumvention case of waterproof optical cable--both cases emphasized trimming in very different ways. His conclusions were somewhat different from Mr. Cheong's, particularly starting bottom-up, then going to top-down in the organization--the audience reacted very positively to his step 4: be ambitious and confident.

Mr. K. Lee then joined Mr. Kang invited us all to the Korean TRIZCON 2010 in March.

The technical progam concluded with parallel sessions in 6 classrooms on a wide variety of subjects related to innovation, and the social program concluded with the banquet

This conference has been planned for over a year, and features many innovations in conference organization, as well as the many papers, tutorials, and discussions of all aspects of systematic innovation. For example, tutorial sessions were planned for Saturday and Sunday morning, so that people could participate who might have trouble leaving their jobs for conference sessions. Skype was used (with mixed success due to an overloaded wireless connection) so that Mark Barkan, President of MATRIZ, could give his personal and organizational greetings to the audience. A mix of government agencies, universities, professional societies and organizations were all sponsors of the conference. (See photograph of Welcome sign.)

Even the coffee break was innovative, with the snacks arranged to form a map of Taiwan, with each food item placed in the province where it was made (see photograph of food map.)

Yesterday, participants from the China, Japan, Korea, Russia, the US, Taiwan, and the UK took a tour bus from Hsinchu to Taipei and toured the Chaing Kai Shek memorial, the 101 building, and the National Palace Museum, for a cultural orientation to Taiwan. Today, I was the first tutorial speaker, focusing on the TRIZ aspects of Systematic Innovation, and emphsizing ideality, the use of resources, and the resolution of physical contradictions. The audience of over 100 was participative (well, they laughed at my jokes and made a good effort to apply what they were learning to their own work situations) and appreciative.

The main conference started with a group photo of the 150 participants from 14 countries. We were welcomed by Professor L.J.Chen, President-elect of the National Tsing Hua University, which was both sponsor and venue for the conference. He invited us to take advantage of Hsinchu's resources as the science center of Taiwan, as well as the universitiy's scenic, technical, and cultural resources.

Professor D. Daniel Sheu, Chairman of the conference and President of the Society for Systematic Innovation, welcomed us and gave a detailed overview of Systematic Innovation, to establish the context of the conference. He mentioned some of the innovations in conference organization, including the launch of the new Journal of Systematic Innovation (an academic, reviewed publication), developed in parallel with the conference, and announced the planning for the second conference in 2011 in Shanghai. (See picture of Daniel welcoming us informally at the reception on Friday evening.)

Darrell Mann's keynote address challenged the audience to expand their skills in innovation beyond TRIZ and beyond many of the standard tools that are usually related to TRIZ (QFD, strategic planning, TOC, DOE, Stage Gate, ...) to the dozens of tools and methods that are now part of Systematic Innovation. He developed both a high-level matrix for selecting tools (the rows are the people in your organization, with a row each for senior executives, marketing, product development, and operations, and the columns are the 4 stages of the S-curve) and a "periodic table" showing a way of grouping 60 or more conceptual tools. Since many participants were "graduates" of Darrell's classes in Taiwan in the last several years, they were well-oriented to appreciate the elegance of this form of organization of the constituents of systematic innovation. Of course, Darrell took advantage of the opportunity to announce the publication of 3 new books, as well!

The afternoon was capped off with six simultaneous breakout sessions, with 4-5 papers in each (3 in Chinese, 3 in English) and a poster session with 15 papers in Chinese and English. There were many case studies from a wide variety of industries. I was chairing one session, so I could not move around much, but I saw examples from automotive safety, steel processing, paint production, and university research management. The session chairpeople were asked to recommend the best papers in their sessions for futue publication, so I anticipate that Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal readers will see a sample of the best of these papers in the next few months.

More tomorrow...

Trimming is a TRIZ technique of improving something by simplifying it (and a small joke in English.) Most often in TRIZ it refers to products or systems where the complexity has increased cost or decreased maintainability, serviceability, ease of use, etc. My husband and I got a gift that let us experience an extreme form of trimming used to create an innovation in experience.

We walked into Opaque, a dimly lit empty nightclub in Santa Monica, California. (There are others in Vienna, Paris, San Francisico and elsewhere. See www.darkdining.com) We are greeted and given menus with limited choices--2 salads, 4 entrees, 2 desserts, wine by the glass only. After choosing the meal, we are introduced to Michael, our guide/waiter/helper, who is blind. I put my hand on Michael's shoulder, Bill puts his hand on my shoulder, and we "elephant walk" into the darkest room I have ever been in except for a cave exploration trip. Yes, what has been trimmed from this dining experience is light, and the diner's ability to see the food, the table setting, the presentation of the food, and one's companion. The theory of the restaurant is that taking away light will enhance the diners' other senses and focus the diners' attention on the taste, texture, and aromas of the food. And yes, they reject all the dogma of the restaurant industry that presentation of the food is important, "we taste first with our eyes."

Michael guided us through sitting down: "Put your hand out. This is the back of your chair. Touch the seat, now move forward a half step and sit down. In front of you on the table is a napkin, wrapped around the fork and a butter knife...." We started with an amuse bouche that was a tiny tomato stuffed with herbs and goat cheese, served on a ceramic spoon, as a single bite. This was the easiest part of the meal! When Michael brought the bread basket, the butter was in a small dish which Bill and I each put fingers in trying to find it, and we eventually just dipped the bread in butter rather than using the knife. The salads were very good, but it took a combination of fork and fingers to get the greens.

I was surprised that Michael did not give us orientation to the entree plate. The steak was cut into fairly large pieces, and we did get sharp knives in case we were brave enough to cut it smaller, but we didn't know where the broccoli or the spinach was. Aroma didn't help, since everything was heavily garlicked.

Desserts were both soft (eat with just a spoon) and probably the best food of the meal, but again, there were surprises: the chocolate lava cake was decorated with raspberries which we found after eating the cake, and the mango panna cotta also had hidden fruit. Michael guided us back to the lobby, where we washed up (very little damage), paid, and departed just as the nightclub part of the operation was getting started.

Did the "trimmed" experience work? The diners definitely focused (hmmm, optics analogy) on each other and on the experience. We tried to guess how many tables there were, what the relationships between the other diners were, why the chefs and designers had made certain choices about the food and the method of presenting the meal, etc. Unfortunately, the food and the wine were just OK, not excellent, and that interferes with my ability to evaluate the experience of the blind dining. It was definitely interesting, but too expensive to repeat for the actual dining.

Trimming lesson: In this case, they removed one element of the experience in order to be unique, not in order to simplify the experience. They succeeded in being unique, but the question is still open whether they will be a commercially successful innovation.

You could duplicate this experience at home, if you have a room with no windows, or try it in your city if you have one of the other "Dark Dining" venues. Readers' comments are welcome! Best wishes to all our readers for a happy, healthy, and INNOVATIVE 2010!

It is hard to convey the elation and enthusiasm of the audience at this conference, particularly for the student papers. Some are elegant "classroom" exercises, and some are real projects done for real industry, and some are entrepreneurial ventures where the students are both the engineers and the business developers. It is a great joy for all of us to see the spread of TRIZ into the next generations, and to see the students' willingness to learn new ways of thinking at the beginning of their professional careers.

Christopher Nikulin's second paper explained a model for design of new products based in TRIZ, using the value in the market as the decision criterion. The multi-window method was used in an example of developing low-carbohydrate pasta for a student project that is now being commercialized. Other projects being developed are:

• plastic bag recycler
• uninterruptible power supply
• easy to install vehicle covers
• golf cart brake for hillside use
• hoist system using the axle of a 4 wheel drive truck
• magnetic car roof rack

Rodrigo Silva did not "give a paper." His passionate exhortation to the conference could be called a sermon or a call to arms or a harrangue, but not a paper! His topic was the philosophy of value and innovation, and he addressed himself primarily to the students, telling them that they should focus their careers on adding value to the world, not on getting a job, or even getting a good job.
Edgardo Cordova demonstrated that TRIZ itself is a system, and evolves as a system. He gave us a brief guided tour of the spiral of evolution through 6 stages, culminating in the merger of TRIZ into business and design. There's a lot to reflect on in this model, and he has promised me an English version to share with our readers in the near future.

==============================================================================
After lunch, I showed the group that the first day's report was already in the TJ Commentary. The conference audience appreciated seeing themselves in the TRIZ Journal "live" during the conference. I encouraged the faculty to make the TJ available to their students and colleagues!
==============================================================================
Generation of Energy Alternatives was presented by Alvarao Vera. He pointed out that Chile's long shoreline is a natural resource that can be used to generate energy, and reviewed the state of the art of European, US, and Japanese wave and tide powered electrical systems. They selected opportunities where TRIZ could help make concepts more applicable to Chilean deployment. This was not theory - - we saw pictures of the prototype and the cold developers in a small boat leaving the large ship for real open-ocean testing. He gave credit for their success to the interdepartmental nature of the team, with knowledge of how to get financing and organize the project, as well as all the technical disciplines. See www.gea.usm.cl for more of the story, and new projects in air, water, and solar, in Chile and Guatemala, sponsored by business, the UN, and entrepreneurial initiative.

Srs. José García Torres and José Rangel Cordero from Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico demonstrated the application of invisible resources in TRIZ, specifically for optimizing the use of fuel for internal combustion engines. (And they started with my example of using resources to save the passengers on the Titanic!) They focused on Internal combusion because of air pollution, and the extreme smog problems in both Sangtiago and Mexico DF. Two different improvements have improved efficiency by 12% and by 30%, using resources from the air, which is frequently an invisible (overlooked) resource, and from the momentum of the moving vehicle. Additional catalysis may increase the efficiencies even more. An added benefit may be reduction of maintenance. After the paper there was discussion of the total power balance, and the source of the energy for hydrolisis of the air.

The following paper by Germán Guerra, also from the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico was a complete change of pace. He introduces children to TRIZ by means of a card game incorporating ideas from the 40 principles. The cartoons are funny, drawn by German (and he says he's not DaVinci.) The audience laughed at the cartoons of Innobot (a robot) and SuperTRIZ (a caped hero) as they demonstrated the concepts in terms that children understand. Segementation was cutting a cake, and Asymmetry was a very fat lady with a very skinny man. His personal favorite was universality: a microwave oven with a cooking surface, because the first time he tried this with 10 year old students, they each had their own examples: a bicycle used as a clothes rack, a backpack used as a pillow. The energy that he got from working with young children was communicated to the audience, to encourage them to take risks of leaving the comfort zone of engineering for the risky world of children.
----------------------------------
The afternoon keynote talk by Sergei Ikovenko returned us to the world of technical problem solving, focusing on applying TRIZ to Patent Strategies. The audience appreciated his sharing personal history of taking Altshuller's seminars several times, and then joining the research group. Sometimes he had personal interests, such as patent law, that Altshuller did not share, so he worked on both his assigned research and his personal interests. Sergei told us that the examples in Altshuller's books are very clear as illustrations, but they are not practical, because Altshuller was interested in the clarity of the teaching, not in the business of making and selling products. When he came to the US, he returned to his interest in patents, because there was great interest in the economic advantage of innovation.

For those who are not familiar with patent law, Sergei gave an excellent brief review of major strategies, and showed us some of his research on the TRIZ methods that are most helpful for each of the major strategies. For examples: patent circumvention does not create the next generation product. What it does is legally avoid violating competitive patents, so, with the fewest possible changes, you have the freedom to operate. The safe, straightforward way to do this is not to add components (since you will be in the zone of dependent patents) but to subtract them. Sergei gave a brief lesson on trimming, so that all functions are performed by a simpler system. His examples are all REAL products, not just patents that exist on paper and an introduction to the intricacies of patent law (doctrine of equivalents, estoppel research) for non-specialists. The case of the Dior sunscreen that senses the amount of sunlight and adjusts the amount of blocking material, and could be bought in the hotel store, was a great illustration of a multinational successful product.
-------------------------------------------
Prof. Noel León presented work by himself and Roberto Durán and Eduardo Uresti from TEC in Monterrey, Mexico, that challenged the audience with the concept of genetic algorithms, a form of simulation that makes it possible to test many variations of a design, and, by formalizing the definition of a "good" design, makes it possible to evaluate which alternatives are best, and simulate evolution of design. (I first heard about this last year at the Guadalajara meeting and have been fascinated by the possibilities.) They combine TRIZ with genetic algorithms, using the patterns of evolution and principles as the triggers for change algorithms, and the concept of ideality for evaluation. Noel gave us a historical insight into the development of genetic algorithms, and the parallels between TRIZ concepts and concepts in GA. They are now extending the genetic analogy to the concept of antibodies to stimulate alternative solutions to problems.

Carlos Contreras presented the work by himself and his colleagues at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogata, Colombia (Srs.: Luz Torres P - Diego Flores H-. - Oscar Castellanos D.) on the production of derivatives of sugar cane, and on development of the markets, which depend on many political factors (regulation, tariffs, etc.) as well as the technological ones.

The second report from Colombia was on the management of the process of technology evaluation and assessment in the agricultural industry by Srs.: Aida Fúquene – Diana Ramírez – Oscar Castellanos, presented by Laura Egea. Extensive research on the search parameters and statistical data was used to develop opportunities for Colombian products.

Jose Vicente from Valencia Spain had the honor and challenge of being the last presenter of the day. His theme was transition to the supersystem, a primary law of innovation. Jose had a marvelous global set of examples of products and services for each of the concepts that he discussed. He illustrated the need to listen to the voice of the customer, but be careful, with the case of Kawasaki's breakthrough in the world of "wet bikes" that came from recognizing that customers sit on motorcycles, but stand on water skiis, and that hybridizing them would create a large new market. He illustrated the difficulty of innovation with an extensive list of both products and services where the second company to come to market succeeded, while the innovator did not have the business success. The audience had great appreciation for this world-wide collection of well-known names (Royal Crown lost to Coca Cola, RIM lost to Apple, Sega lost to both Nintendo and Sony, DeHavilland lost to Boeing, ...)

Jose used a dramatic, non-technical example of the use of the supersystem: the new horror movie that was made for US$15,000 and promoted via Facebook, and distributed by "friends" and has now made US$ two hundred million. The innovation was not the making of the movie, it was using the supersystem instead of the conventional distribution system. Moving to the technical world, he gave persuasive examples from medical imaging (PET/CT) and from renewable energy resources, and showed how the concepts apply to the business world as well as the technical world. The conference ended on a high point with the decision scene from the movie "the Matrix." Thanks, Jose!

Prof. Sariego concluded the conference by asking the keynote speakers to each say a few remarks, then we took lots of pictures, hugged each other, and promised to meet again.

Daniel Palma opened the Day 2 program with a fascinating study of "TRIZ: a competitive advantage in the Mexican labor market." He and his colleagues looked at the employment experiences of 183 engineering students starting in 2005, and found that those with TRIZ training had more interviews and more job offers, even in the last year of great economic stress. Further study will be needed to distinguish whether the employers value the engineers' problem solving capability, or whether they actually recognize TRIZ and use it as a criterion for granting an interview.

Juan Enrique Aguila showed a work in progress, studying the application of ISO 9000 to education, particularly in Chile. He pointed out many TRIZ-type contradictions in the application of ISO 9000 and the competition with other quality certifications, some of which are general and others that are country-specific or discipline specific. Audience discussion addressed the need for business to know about whatever is new (TRIZ, ISO9000, other quality and innovation methods) to ask the universities for both student preparation in these areas, and to apply these methods to the improvement of the universities themselves.

Rafael Munoz Gomez from Mexico presented a wide range of examples of the application of the 40 principles to environmental engineering, including numerous examples of improving water purification systems, reducing gas emissions from storage areas, and reducing dust and particulate matter scattered during cleaning, increasing efficiency of wind generators, and others. TRIZ has a long history of examining new inventions to identify which TRIZ principles could have been used to generate the invention - - it is a proven method for both teaching and learning, and this list of examples will be useful to many people in environmental technology.

Jack Hipple (member of the TRIZ Journal editorial board, a TRIZ Journal author and commentator, and consultant) reviewed other creativity techniques, and compared them to TRIZ for both structure and usefulness. He then introduced the audience to assessment techniques, including Meyers-Briggs social style assessment and the KAI creativity evaluation, and showed how knowing the characteristics of the people you are working with on a TRIZ project can improve teamwork and improve results, if people can anticipate the human reactions of other team members. Jack's example of the use of TRIZ in designing the human interface for air traffic control computer systems by using experience from video games and from chemical factory control systems was a great example of overcoming psychological inertia.

José Alberto Ochoa, president of the Sociedad de Inventores de Chile presented the perspective of Chilean private inventors - - the people who are not academics or employees of large companies. There are 100 members, who all have at least applications for patents. They stimulate inventiveness through fairs and school activities. He talked about the difficulty of countering the impression that everything has already been invented and the need for a paradigm of inventing and of getting from the invention stage through production and to the market. They have identified opportunities for invention to support the development of the Chilean economy, although their members work independently. I invited Sr. Ochoa to tell all his members about the TRIZ Journal.

The University Federico Santa Maria division at Vina del Mar made a unique presentation of 3 student projects, from their program of student innovation projects for local industry. Innovation is encouraged in all 3 phases--conceptual design, basic design, and production/parametric design. Sr. Reinaldo Espinoza, director of the Center for Innovation and Creativity at the University, gave the overview of how the university teaches design concepts, which uses the 5 elements of a complete technical system as a fundamental concept, superimposed on the flow model of classical design (energy, material, and information are inputs, designs are the output.) and thanked his colleagues from Mexico for sharing the methodology that they use with their student/industry projects. These projects take about a year, and 500 projects have been "banked" for the use of industry. The university has a unique laboratory for student use for prototypes and experimentation. The student presentations were:

Sr.: Diego Araya - Appplication of TRIZ in the conceptural design phase of designing a laboratory for region 6 of Chile, for students from grades 5 and 6, learning biology, physics and chemistry. There were a number of requirements on the internal and external properties of the lab, because of the diverse climates in different parts of the region, and because of the needs of both teachers and students. One requirement was that the lab could be transported on an 18-wheel truck, which generated many more specific requirements both for durability and for easy deployment when it reached the site.

Srs.: Mario Gonzalez – Christopher Jiménez - Design and innovation of machinery to filet fish (salmon up to 1m and 20 kg) QFD- like matrices were used to translate from general needs to specific subsystem requirements. Eleven of the 39 parameters of the classical TRIZ matrix were identified as important to the design. Application of multiple principles gave the students ideas for making the system self-adjusting for a variety of sizes of fish, and incorporated numerous safety features. Video of the simulation of the design was quite vivid.

Sr.: Ricardo Ayala – Carlos González - Design and innovation of machinery to fill bins for export fruit, which must not be bruised during handling. Process flow and functional analysis and constraints (use of a specific apple sorting system) were basic elements of the design process. They used the 40 principles to remove contradictions, with a very elegant emphasis on ideality for chosing between multiple concepts.

Authors and other participants are invited to add their comments and corrections using the "comments" function at the end of this column. Since my name was spelled wrong in the program, I'm sure that there were others as well, and I have relied on the program for basic data. For the papers given in Spanish and Portuguese, I've use a combination of my high school/tourist Spanish and Google translate for the titles, and the help of the excellent conference translators for the themes.

The audience was fascinated by "Contribution to the development of conceptual design of new high tonnage truck for mining projects" presented by Carlos Dublé. Extensive research on the patterns of evolution of trucks of all kinds, as well as specific economic problems of the mining industry (especially load vs. weight of the truck) gave the analysis team ideas for a number of improvements in the trucks and in the management of the transportation system. They made great progress with the use of gravity as a resource, and the use of the existing structures of trucks in new ways. The audience was also interested in Carlos' observations on the team's learning process and the patent analysis that reached back to 189o, and he even got one offer of collaboration on development.

"Aplicación computacional de modelo Sustancia-Campo basado en las 76 Soluciones Estándar" --
Christopher Nikulin demonstrated an interactive algorithmic modeling system developed at the university for the use of the 76 standard solution. He showed the application to the milling function that had been explained before, applied to preventing the failure of the mill. The program guides the user through a series of question about the substance-field model and guides the user to a class of solutions to apply to the problem. He noted that the nature of the technical language of TRIZ as well as the technical language of the problem can be enablers for knowledgeable users but can be roadblocks for those who try to use the software without understanding the TRIZ vocabulary.

Noel León (frequent TRIZ Journal author and frequent speaker noticed in this column) brought his experience at TEC in Mexico to Santiago, speaking about the "Proposal for automation of the invention process using QFD, TRIZ and parametric modeling " being developed by his students. He gave us a survey of the taxonomy requirements for the system, which focused on functional analysis, and exposed some of the controversy between axiomatic design and TRIZ (if you can resolve contradictions with TRIZ, do you need functional independence prescribed by AD?) Prof. León showed several of the popular flow charts for the use of TRIZ tools and proposed a more general flow that would be managed by the automated system. He agreed with Sr. Nikulin, the previous speaker, that the user must understand the language of TRIZ, OR the automated system must be able to understand the language of the user. Two case studies have been completed (wind turbine and crankshaft) with active interplay between the users and the program.

Blanca Isabel Vicario Lopez from Mexico presented an application of TRIZ to problems of clean production in the chemical industry. This is a very practical case study of preventing explosion in the production of ethylene oxide. The current, expensive method is to use nitrogen gas , which is expensive, and requires heat exchangers which add complexity. Multiple technical contradictions were examined, and some of the 40 principles were applied to the problem. The resource-oriented solution was to use the ethylene oxide gas to protect the ethylene oxide liquid, which requires much less gas exchange than the other methods, saving U$60,000 directly, plus recovering costs in 2 months, and the solution required 2 days of development.

Montiel Hernandez Fabian from Mexico presented a paper which has won the Millennium Prize 2007 World Challenge in Numero 14: Science and Technology, "Using TRIZ to Improve Human Condition." He propses a series of conference of 150-200 people, with breakout groups of 15-20 people, with facilitators to guide them through the application of TRIZ to specific problems of the country. Massive diffusion of TRIZ could result - 27000 people in year 1, and up to 270,000 people by year 10. Latin America already has many people who can be the facilitators, and meeting rooms, etc. He showed examples from trial seminars, for improving water purification systems using direct solar energy and for disposing of contaminated construction materials.

Just before the coffee break Noel Leon gave congratulations to the Chilean TRIZ association for its formation. The websites of both AMETRIZ and the Chilean TRIZ association will invite solutions to the world economic crisis. He also announced a permanent committee for the Iberoamerican congress.

"Análisis de Vida residual, mejora continua en la búsqueda de aumento de confiabilidad y vida útil de nuestros Rodetes Pelton de la Central Hidroeléctrica de Alfalfal" = improving the life cycle of the hydroelectric facility at Alfalfal which has the most aggressive requirements in the world, due to both the speed of the water and the large amount of quartz that is in the water. Maurizio Edwards is the maintenance manager and he gave a dramatic presentation of the challenges in keeping the power plant working. Numerous improvement projects were conducted between 1991 and 2008. Extensive analyis of the metallurgy, the method of manufacturing, the details of the geometry of the buckets on the turbine, and the variables of operation gave them the data for a model of the system and to an understanding of the fatigue phenomena in the plant. The turbines are now very successful, with much longer life, but there were still problems of cavitation at unpredictable intervals. They found that human variability due to exhaustion, dehydration, and particularly to noise in the manufacturing environment was the source. Using robots for the machining removed the variability. This is a classical example of combining designed experiements, finite element analysis, stastical process control, and the discipline to apply the methods when the "experts" are saying that the results aren't right. The useful life of the power plant has doubled (and Maurizio says he is not popular with the experts.) The question session focused on the use of classical (non-TRIZ) methods, and Maurizio said that he is just learning about TRIZ for the first time at this conference, and he will be applying TRIZ in the future.

Jaime Glaría's paper "Causality" reminded all of us that "how" can be more important than "why" in solving real problems. His humor (and rejection of jargon) were appreciated for the late afternoon session. He started with an example of force, defined as a flow of momentum, and used it to challenge people from all disciplines and all kinds of jargon with an elegant example of water flowing out of a tank, and then expanded the example to problems of water management in times of drought.

Edgardo Córdova's paper gave us a view of the history of industrial maintenance, starting from the review of old maintenance manuals, and seeing progress from fixing what is broken, to preventive maintenance, to predictive maintenance, to proactive maintenance. They applied TRIZ to the maintenance systems, looking for ideality opportunities, such that the system can maintain itself, without stopping. He used the analogy of the ideal shoe, which enables the user to both run and rest, to challenge our thinking, and he demonstrated progress in automotive technology - maintenance is done at much longer intervals than 30 years ago, such as the 100,00- mile tune-up, or the sealed (no maintenance) battery, and the car that protects itself from damage by not starting if the driver is drunk.

Rodrigo Bulnes continued the maintenance theme with "TRIZ-based Tribological Maintenance" which is a specialty of the University. He related many of the concepts to TRIZ methods. He began with the analogy between doing blood tests on people to determine the state of health with testing lubricants to determine the state of wear/friction of a mechanical system. The cause/effect diagram for scuffing in a basic machine, such as a journal bearing, was truly impressive. Rodrigo developed the su-field model, showing how a third substance accomodates the speed difference between the first 2 bodies (which causes the damage) and suggests some approaches to overcome friction.

Prof. Sariego gave a brief summary of the day's activities, thanked the presenters, and invited us to conclude the day with a cocktail reception with folk dancing--will try for pictures in tomorrow's posting, with a faster connection.

Readers--do you want pictures of speakers hugging each other? Distinguished people introducing each other? People drinking coffee together? Or summaries of the papers (like this one.) Let us know! AND please volunteer to report on meetings that you attend.

"TRIZ in automotive quality problem: aligning the nozzle of the fuel tank"

Congratulations to our colleagues in Mexico and Chile for successfully moving the Iberoamerican Innovation Congress from Mexico (1,2, and 3 were in Puebla, Monterrey and Guadalajara--see reports on all 3 in the TRIZ Journal Commentary column. And I got e-mail last night about an exciting new conference in Israel at the Holon Institute of Technology this month--see www.hit.ac.il/TRIZ09 for details.)

The participants were welcomed to Chile and to the campus of the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, and to the challenges of innovation by Patricio Guzmán, Director of the Santiago Campus, and by Prof. Noel León from AMETRIZ (Mexico TRIZ Association) and TEC in Monterrey. The initial address of the congress was presented by Prof. Pedro Sariego, chairman of the congress. He had 2 direct challenges to the audience: think about South Korea, which had half the GDP of Chile in 1960, and is now the fastest-growing economy, and think about the map of the globe, which should be viewed with South up, to see the world of the future! Professors Sariego and León conducted tutorials the day before the congress, so that people new to TRIZ could participate and begin their studies of TRIZ and other innovation systems.

Sergei Ikovenko did triple duty, delivering greetings from Mark Barkan, President of MATRIZ, and from Mansour Ashtiani, President of the Altshuller Institute, and presenting the keynote address, "Directions for Future TRIZ Development and Applications." Sergei focused on the expansion of the family of methods that are included in TRIZ in 2009, not the TRIZ of the past century, driven by companies' needs for revenue growth and profit growth. He used Michael Tracy's model of 5 ways to grow:

1. Retain the base
2. Gain Share
3. Market Positioning
4. Develop adjacent markets
5. Develop new lines of business

and he brought in ideas from QFD as well to discuss how modern TRIZ users have different sets of tools to use depending on which of the 5 areas they are working in. He showed how the Main Parameters of Value (MPVs) of products or services form a hierarchy, and how engineers and product marketers have different challenges at each level--his example of how to design soap so that the customer has a "feeling of cleanliness" requires knowledge of physiology and psychology as well as knowledge of chemistry and manufacturing technology and packaging technology.

Sergei's version of the history of TRIZ, with personal views of the migration from the former USSR to the world, fascinated the audience. He showed that the addition of problem definition tools in 1960-80 period was an important stage in the popularization of TRIZ, as was the addition of tools for determining the practicality of the solution in the 1980-2000 period, and the understanding of MPVs in 2000-present. His story of the change of the S-curves, from Altshuller's philosophical view to the current tools/technicques view, with specific business strategies for each stage of development was appreciated, and his recent insights from Korea tied directly to Prof. Sariego's opening remarks (Samsung, POSCO, and Hyundai--the only automotive company succeeding in the downturn. In only 3 years of TRIZ use they had 81 patents last year, 183 patents this year, with $US 380 million attributed to TRIZ.)

I gave the second keynote address, and expanded on the theme of the simplicity of TRIZ, that I started developing at earlier conferences this year. The audience was very responsive to stories of the use of resources that are already in the system, to take the system to a higher level of ideality.

The second session started with Héctor Montanares' presentation "Application of the methods of systematic innovation to the solution of problems in mining operations." He gave us an extensive orientation to the magnitude of the problems of waste management and recovery of wasted resources in both copper and molybdenum mining, some of which involve tailings that have been accumulating for 40 years or more. Past experiments with trial-and-error methods got a lot of audience sympathy! Simple analyis of the solid waste, the liquid in the waste pond, and the pumping system led to a water-aided cleaning system. The photographic review of similar systems from 1890, 1940, and 1960 helped the audience appreciate that TRIZ helped the company appreciate a solution that had been developed by the miners themselves, after the failures of the "experts."

Pedro Sariego told us that Montanares was the first person who had received a degree in TRIZ at the university. Sariego's paper continued the emphasis on the mining industry, with a project to improve the durability of the plates and lifters in the mills that are part of the mining process. Time loss due to breakdown of the mills is a serious limitation on the profitability of the mines. Function analysis revealed well-known contradictions, and the direct application of the contradiction matrix and the 40 principles revealed "obvious" solutions, as well as alternatives--both segmentation and consolidation (2 plates instead of 4 plates) were explored, and various aspects of psychological inertia ("miners are more conservative than even the farmers") were also revealed. The simple, elegant solution worked well. Sareigo challenged the audience to start with simple TRIZ in the mining industry while observing the advanced development of TRIZ elsewhere.

Chilean folk dancers entertained at the conference reception:

The European TRIZ Association's TRIZ Futures Conference is exploring new frontiers this week: geographically, in Timisoara, Romania, and structurally, using a single session for the entire conference. The conference is at Politehnica University--see http://www.upt.ro/ for some of the history and current information on this engineering and cultural site.

The theme of the conference is "Innovative product design" and there is a strong mix of academic, consulting, and industrial practioners reporting on their research in many areas of TRIZ.

The program, with abstracts, is at

http://www.eng.upt.ro/trizfuture2009/files/Conference%20program%20with%20abstracts.pdf

Reading the abstracts shows that ETRIA has succeeded in one of its goals--by moving the conference to different universities, cities, and countries, they expose many faculty and students to the TRIZ philosophy and concepts. A significant number of this year's papers are by people who first learned about TRIZ this way.

We look forward to having first-hand reports from some of the participants in the next few weeks, and pictures will be posted on the ETRIA portal, http://www.etria.net.

Jerry Smith's presentation on "Intellectual Property & Innovation Management: The Biggest Opportunity for Differentiation" took us on a spectacular tour of Jerry's background in psychology, software, aviation, entrepreneurship, visualization, film making, academia... Great for after lunch when the audience needs multi-dimensional stimulous. He was eloquent on the non-linear nature of innovation, and how that frustrates typical management hierarchies. In many cases globalizing the business creates the need to have an innovation system -- things that happened (or appeared to happen) without structure in one location will be stressed by operating in multiple locations, enough to reveal the weaknesses of the system.

Factors eroding the current innovation model:

1. Availability of talents (mobility, global sources of talents, global opportunities)
2. Capability of external suppliers
3. Ideas getting off the shelf (and losing value much faster so staying on the shelf loses value)
4. Venture capital makes it possible for talent to leave the big companies and succeed

All these factors combine to create a world where the classical "spend and hope" approach doesn't work. For success now you need 3C's of innovation:
C1 Culture of innovation
C2 Collaboration and Context
C3 Common Innovation Processes

Jerry Smith's presentation was broad and deep and fast-moving and full of great stories. If you get a chance to hear him speak, take advantage of it. Thanks, Jerry!

There were two other sessions at this time and there will be 3 more after I leave for the airport. Revisit this site in a few days to see if the participants at the conference have accepted the invitation to supplement these commentaries with their own observations, experiences, and opinions. Thanks in advance to the Business Innovation Conference community.

RSS