Dr. Rod King is a thought leader, consultant, and trainer on business model analysis, design, and innovation. In today's world of globalization and increasing competition, enterprises need new ways to do business as well as create highly desirable and uncontested market spaces, in other words, "Blue Oceans." In fact, a 2008 Global CEO Study by IBM reported that virtually all interviewed CEOs are changing their business models. The majority of CEOs consider business model innovation as the most profitable and defensible form of innovation. Dr. King is a pioneer of an integrated approach to business model analysis, design, innovation, and performance management.

As an expert on visual business modeling, Dr. King helps individuals, teams, and businesses to develop visual business models and dashboards for greater profitability and competitive advantage. He offers clients a better way to ask and manage breakthrough questions not only for designing business models but also for monitoring and managing the performance of business models. Dr. King is the inventor of the Blue Ocean-Performance Dashboard, which is an integrated portfolio of best practice tools for exponential growth in business. The Blue Ocean-Performance Dashboard visually integrates three powerful tools in business management: Value (Supply) Chain; Blue Ocean Strategy; Balanced Scorecard.

Dr. King is the inventor of the "Fractal Grid" which is a visual organizer that has pending US and international patents. The Fractal Grid is also being applied as a visual search engine. Dr. King uses the Zoomable Page, which is the basis of the Fractal Grid, to facilitate visual idea generation and problem solving as well as business model analysis, design, and innovation.

Bob Malanga is a graduate of Princeton and Stony Brook Universities where he majored in Mechanical Technology and Total Quality Management. Bob's time at Princeton was a U.S. Navy sponsored program. Bob spent most of his career in the Aerospace, Automotive, and Financial Services Industries where he held the following positions: Vice President of Six Sigma Quality for G.E. Capital Corporation, Vice President of Quality for Chromalloy Corporation, Director of Quality for Fairchild-Republic, Director of Operations for Transpo Electronics, and Research & Development Manager for U. S. Filter.

Bob also spent time in Washington, D.C. as a Lobbyist for a Major Defense Contractor. In 1986 he orchestrated a filibuster which in essence achieved the objective and in the process held up the U.S. Budget that resulted in the Federal Government's inability to pay workers and technically run out of money.

He is a Certified Six Sigma Master Blackbelt, Triz Master, ISO9000 Lead Assessor, ASQ Certified Quality Manager and holds numerous U.S. and World Patents for three different companies. Additionally, he has served on the State of Florida's Sterling Committee and is currently serving on the Central Florida Board of Industrial Advisors.

Bob began his real estate career in New York on a part time basis, but decided to make it a full time endeavor in Florida. He specializes in commercial, land and investment properties with a focus on Condo-Hotel conversions. Bob was one of the first Realtors to be involved with Condo-Hotels in Central Florida and has been highly touted for his expertise in that area of real estate.

Bob resides in Lake Mary, Florida with his wife and daughter.

In a recent issue of Industry Week (3/16/09) a major point was made about using employee input for continuous improvement without using capital. I would suggest a broader use of this principle through the use, not only of the people resources you have, but a reminder about a powerful, but simple "stretch your mind" concept known as "trimming".

When we look for resources for continuous improvement, we tend to think about either reducing purchased materials and supplies, energy costs, and labor or improving the yields of these same inputs to our process. How often have you really, sincerely asked your employees some really challenging questions such as:1. How could we increase throughput rates by 25% with little or no spending?2. How could we improve the efficiency of our energy use by 25%?

Why do you assume that you and the senior staff have more knowledge than those executing the business activities on a daily business? Maybe in a few areas you do, but certainly not in all. (I must admit that this was in part triggered today by the firing of the Chairman of GM by the President who has an outstanding career record of running profit making corporations).

Sometimes you don't get honest answers to these questions because your employees think that if a process or organization becomes significantly more efficient, their jobs may be in jeopardy. Why not offer a guarantee? I saw a real life example of this at a TRIZ innovation workshop in St. Louis, attended by 3 emergency response operators. At the end of the course, I asked everyone in the room what they were going to do with their learnings when they returned to their workplace. Everyone else in the course spouted off a long list of actionable items, while these individuals said they were going to share nothing. I was dumbfounded and asked them why. They replied that, if they did, their department would become more efficient and they would lose their jobs. What a tragedy and waste! You don't have any situations like that, do you? How do you know?

Another way we normally approach increasing capacity is to start with a base of how much it costs (in operating and capital costs) to produce what we already do. Then our engineering staff calculates how much money we need to spend to increase capacity, reduce energy consumption, increase our distribution network, or to reach new customers. Then we estimate the positive cash flow from these benefits and calculate an ROI to allow us to make a decision.

Several columns ago, we put forward the concept of "trimming"--the arbitrary removal of a part (say an expensive part) of a product or system and then force ourselves to still accomplish its function with the parts that remain. Several simple examples are the "toothpaste in the handle of the toothbrush" product, the "clean the shower while you shower" product, and the the self-reporting of news that is seen on television today. In each of these cases we would have asked the following questions:

1. How could we get the FUNCTION of the toothpaste tube with just the toothbrush? How much money does that save? How much more money could we charge for such a toothbrush for travelers?
2. How could we clean the shower while we are showering instead of using a separate process and time?
3. How could we make the news report itself using the resources already there without our reporters ( the resources by the way are individuals on the spot and their egos at seeing their pictures on TV--a lot cheaper than reporters!).

Now the reporters can focus on higher value work such as news analysis.Times are tough. Capital is tight. Money is tight. No one seems to really know when all the money we are putting into the banking system will stop filling reserves and actually be available for spending. The government in some strange ways is trying to unlock the financial pipeline to get more capital into the system. Why not do it without the capital and stop waiting? If you can accomplish some increases in capacity without significant capital, you'll be ready long before your competitors are.

These thinking concepts don't just apply to manufacturing processes. They apply to ANY business process. How can you increase your marketing contacts with no increase in spending? Ask your people and trim. How can you decrease warranty costs with no increase in spending? No increased capital? Ask your people and trim. How can you retain customers? Ask the ones who left and trim (make it easier for them to return and stay). Ask and trim!

Be on the lookout for fresh concepts: sometimes you have to start over. ----- UC Riverside: The Arts and Letters Lecture Series: An Evening with Elizabeth Gilbert; March 12, 2009 Palm Springs, California. -----

Elizabeth Gilbert is noted for her number one best selling memoir Eat, Pray Love published by Viking in 2006. I decided to share with you two thoughts that occurred to me regarding innovation as I listened to her talk about her journey writing this book.

1. Be on the lookout for fresh concepts. Most readers of this book are women. Elizabeth shared a story about a man who would read her book on the subway but would hide the cover by wrapping it in a magazine. He didn't want to be "outed." What a great value screen for some innovations - the concept of being "outed." You can add this concept to your value screen list if you like and use it when it makes sense.
2. Sometimes you have to stop and start over. While writing her next book on marriage Elizabeth kept feeling that her manuscript wasn't good, it just didn't feel right. This feeling wouldn't go away. Two weeks before the deadline to the publisher she finally gave into her gut instinct and told the publisher she wouldn't be submitting her manuscript and returned the advance; a gutsy move. This cleared the air for her. She was sparked with new energy, started fresh and wrote a new manuscript that felt right.

Stopping and starting over can be very difficult to do. The trick is recognizing when you need to stop and start over. Paying attention and listening to your feelings - gut instinct (red hat) can help.

I have since discovered that Elizabeth Gilbert made a presentation at the TED 2009 February conference titled "A Different Way to Think About Creative Genius." Click here to watch it. About 20 minutes.

Until next time ...

The day opened with a short business meeting of the Altshuller Institute. Isak Bukhman was elected Vice President and Don Coates was elected Secretary. Mansour Ashtiani continues as President and Richard Langevin continued as Treasurer and executive director.

Noel Leon announced the Computer Aided Innovation meeting in Harbin, China, in August and the 4th IberoAmerican Innovation Congress in Chile in November, and urged the Altshuller Institute members to participate and to help propagate the invitation.

Victor Fey presented the work that he and the certification committee have been doing for several years to create a system of certification. Readers of this column know that I have tremendous admiration for all their hard work, but considerable disagreement about certification systems—not about the details, but about the usefulness and appropriateness of having one at all (this IS a personal report!) Details will be posted on the Altshuller Institute website www.aitriz.org with a target of May 2009. The system will start within a year after all the documents are posted.

The second day keynote by Leonid Chechurin from the Institute of Innovatics at St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University brought us much new information on the state of TRIZ in modern Russia. The Institute for Innovatics was organized in 1998. They have 300 students and 30 faculty in 5 departments. They work with innovation theory, quality systems, management of innovation projects, investment engineering, and technology of complex innovations. There are now 50 universities with Innovatics departments, and the 82 hour TRIZ program pioneered at St. Petersburg is part of the curriculum for all of them. Leonid gave us a very impressive tour of the state of the study of innovation world-wide, as well as at St. Petersburg. His insights on the difficulties of putting TRIZ into universities were appreciated by the audience—he quoted from Gaetano Cascini's research on the publications of TRIZ-related work in academic journals (and I anticipate an excellent collaboration from this!) He also announced plans for an international Student TRIZ Olympics starting in 2010 and a series of university-university and university-industry events.

Alla Zusman's presentation "Producing TRIZ Solutions: Odds of Success" opened track 2. Alla used both historical examples (machining a very long blade) and modern examples (the curved shower curtain bar for the hotel bathroom) to demonstrate her current research (with Boris Zlotin) on the objective probabilities of TRIZ success for problems at different stages of the S-curve of system development. Revealing secondary problems, then using TRIZ to overcome the secondary problems is an important step in the process. Unveiling "hidden" resources at the micro-level in a problem is another important step. Alla suggested that ARIZ, particularly the Smart Little People tool, can be very useful for revealing the resources, and particularly to keep the emphasis on avoiding new complexity and avoiding degradation of the original function. Her work shows that the probability of success increases in this order:

1. Resources previously hidden by psychological inertia
2. Unutilized resources on micro-level found
3. New Enabling technology utilized
4. Hybridization of the given system with another one designed for a similar purpose
5. An alternative way to obtain desired results within the same paradigm has been found.

But if none of these are available, the only way to move forward is to look for the next generation of the system. Alla concluded with very strong findings that real problem solving requires solving the secondary problems as well as the initial problem, and that training cases that ignore practical implementation issues will have negative impact—people will be convinced that TRIZ is not practical.

I enjoyed giving my presentation "Learning TRIZ is not Teaching TRIZ" to a very participative audience. The paper is in the Dec. 2008 TRIZ Journal, since it is part of a series in which I plan to gather teaching methods for a variety of TRIZ elements, to see if we (TRIZ teachers) can help each other make it easier for people to learn TRIZ. If you start using the model in the article, e-mail your results, please!

John Terninko's paper "Implementation Improved by Considering Values and Beliefs: How Can We Improve our Solution Concepts?" primarily used the value system model developed by Clare Graves. John explained the system to the audience, then showed them what their own value profiles are (many participants contributed their own data yesterday) and some research by others on national profiles. He then extended the model to show how mismatches of value systems can be a significant barrier for the acceptance of both the TRIZ methodology and the implementation of TRIZ solutions in problem solving applications.

Phil Samuel's "The Paradox of Enabling and Limiting Structures of TRIZ" used a different, cognition-based model for human behavior. The orthogonality of level of learning and style of learning was particularly fascinating to the audience. The brevity of this report is inversely proportional to the excitement about this concept!

John Cooke concluded the conference with "How to have your cake and eat it too!" He analyzed the whole library of TRIZ methods in terms of effort to use and tool value (defined as benefit / investment.) and showed us some clear segmentation of the tools into clusters—conclusions about which tools either need to be higher value, or lower investment, or less effort to use (or all!) I'll be very interested in learning more about his analysis and his conclusions, but (tyranny of time at conferences) had to be elsewhere.

Pictures of speakers and of some of the group discussions will be posted on the Altshuller Institute website next week, www.aitriz.org

I encourage readers to start planning now for future travels—there are definite advantages, even in these days of 7 TRIZ-related LinkedIn groups and 2 Google Groups and E-mail listservers and Facebook and and and…to people meeting people face-to-face and learning something together. You have lots of choices—China in August, Japan in September, Europe and IberoAmerica in November, Taiwan Cross-Straits in January…start planning now!

TRIZCON 2009, the eleventh meeting of the Altshuller Institute, is going on this week in Canoga Park, California, where the primary sponsor for the event, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne is located. About 75 people are involved in a variety of learning and discussion events.

Monday featured pre-conference tutorials by Zinovy Royzen, Sergei Ikovenko, and Isak Bukhman, and demonstrations by Invention Machine and Ideation International software companies. Tuesday started with an opening address by Altshuller Institute president Mansour Ashtiani, who gave an overview of the challenges of moving from business focus on productivity to a focus on innovation, and the many ways that TRIZ can accelerate the innovation process. Mansour led the group in a moment of silence to remember the many contributions of Wes Perusek, who died in February, and who had devoted many years to introducing TRIZ to children through schools and supplementary programs. Mansour then thanked the members of the board and the committees, and gave the attendees a brief view of the work of the Altshuller Institute, and concluded with the inspiring message that TRIZ will bring hope to people who need innovation to create the future.

The first keynote speaker was Herb Roberts from General Electric (and TRIZ Journal author and commentator!) "TRIZ at GE: Edison, Altshuller, and Imagination at Work" started with Herb's note that GE is not noted for being willing to share their methods, but the benefits from TRIZ have come from other people sharing with them, so they are glad to reciprocate. Herb highlighted how the TRIZ propagation method in the research centers and in the energy business have differences, based on the needs of the employees and the kind of work they do, and that a wide variety of methods (personal, class, and project learning, for example) have all been successful. He sees the future challenge as innovating in business models as well as in technology and technical processes, and embedding innovation in the company-wide metric systems. The benefits of a small audience were immediately visible in a vigorous discussion of many of the points of Herb's talk.

Kiho Sohn from Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne introduced his colleague Jeff Jensen, Director of Business Development, to present the second keynote lecture, "Accelerating Innovation," which is a foundation of the 2018 project to add $4Billion(US) to the company—15% compounded growth, which is "unheard of" for an aerospace company. Jeff's major theme is "Innovation is converting ideas into revenue." He had many lessons for the TRIZCON group from P&W's experiences, complementary to Herb's talk. He emphasized that the creative people need to understand the customer needs and the business needs (size of market, speed of deployment, future potential) at considerable depth, in addition to understanding the technical challenges. Current research emphasizes developing collaboration processes and communication systems so that everyone is operating with appropriate information. The benchmarking research was of considerable interest to the audience—companies as diverse as Procter & Gamble and the Mayo Clinic had common trends, such as executive leadership, and differences in implementation tactics (central vs. dispersed research, protected research environments, etc.) Information systems, such as wikis, are emerging in usefulness for collaboration and communication, to make the innovation process faster and more focused.

Mansour Ashtiani chaired a large panel discussion—Sergei Ikovenko, Alla Zusman, Zinovy Royzen, Isak Bukhman, Noel Leon, Jim Todhunter, Leonid Chechurin (tomorrow's keynote speaker, from the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University) and I were asked to comment on the present global and local knowledge of TRIZ and adoption of TRIZ, driving forces, roadblocks, the role of TRIZ-related software, and suggestions for the Altshuller Institute's role in advancing TRIZ.
For the track sessions, I'll report on the papers that I heard personally. Of course, as in the past, we thank the Altshuller Institute and the authors for agreeing to let us publish a sample of the best papers in the TRIZ Journal!

Track 1 got an excellent start with "The Function Modeling method for New Product Development" by Young-Ju Kang (a TRIZ Journal author) from Hyundai, which has made great strides in TRIZ adoption and in application of TRIZ in areas as diverse as cost reduction, patent circumvention, system improvement, technology forecasting/new product development, and the personal level of improving engineers' creativity. Kang showed that the present modeling methods are based on the present system functions, and that a more comprehensive system is needed to encompass the needs of those who are creating the future of the system. The function modeling system popularized in axiomatic design has proven very useful for TRIZ modeling as well. Kang's examples from injection molding, photography, and data storage were excellent illustrations of how his modification of the function model makes it easy to develop the definition of the TRIZ problem.

Two excellent papers kicked off the afternoon session: Noel Leon's work using TRIZ to develop a Stirling engine powered car, and John Cooke and Darrell Mann's paper showing two ways to solve the same problem (un-stacking aluminum sheets) using ARIZ and systematic innovation. I hope that we'll have both papers for the TJ soon, so that readers won't suffer my problem of choosing! Noel gave an extremely useful review of solar technology and means of storing solar heat to operate the Stirling and Stirling-Brayton engine. The morphological matrix was used to explore families of options for the design approach, using direct solar energy to avoid all the problems of fuel storage and fuel combustion.

Sergei Ikovenko devoted his paper to the "Trend of Increasing Coordination." He included the history of the use of the trends in the development of TRIZ and the recent emergence of the trends from previous use as guiding concepts to the current use as direct problem solving heuristics. The trend of increasing coordination is a branch of the trend tree, a sub-trend to the trend of increasing value, and the trend of s-curve evolution, and is superior to the trends of increasing controllability and the trend of increasing dynamicity (this is called the St. Petersburg model.) Sergei guided the audience through the arguments that a "survivable" system is the most economical system, which is the one that uses the fewest resources, which can do that under multiple circumstances if it is dynamic, which requires control. Sergei presented the 4 sub-trends (coordination of shape, rhythm, materials, and actions) with a variety of examples and levels of detail for each. One surprise to some in the audience was Sergei's dual-direction approach—if the useful approach is (for example) point/line/surface/volume, then to remove a harmful effect try going from volume to surface, surface to line, etc., which he illustrated with the classical pizza box and fishing equipment examples.

Jean-Marc LeLann from the University of Toulouse presented a variant on the use of the contradiction matrix, specifically tailored to problems with multiple contradictions. A topical case study—simultaneously eliminating tars and ashes as byproducts of biomass fuel generation—illustrated the complexity of typical real problems. Both the classical (Altshuller) matrix and Mann's Matrix 2003 were used to explore the contradictions. The principles were applied as in the single matrix, and in a segmented way, applying them at a different level of abstraction from the original presentation. Both of these tactics dramatically increased the umber of "hits"—suggestions from the matrix that replicated the solution of historical innovative problems, or new solutions that were outside the previous research of the team. We had some discussion of how the Toulouse group will validate this method.

Jim Belfiore's presentation "Using TRIZ to Drive Basic Research" was a strong conclusion to the day. He introduced the cultural problems of the ways that research is done in different parts of the world, and the frequently contradictory problem of the expectations that are levied on the TRIZ students (Adult ADD? Do in-depth analysis without spending any time, on situations where you have only superficial knowledge?) I am a great admirer of Jim's work, so I was somewhat distressed by his emphasis on the bad experiences that are a result of bad teaching, bad deployment, bad managements and mismatches between roles and responsibilities—but then he used this introduction to discuss the transition to ubiquitous information, and the accompanying sloppiness of much research. Jim ended on a positive note with examples of improved research techniques based on TRIZ-themed contradiction thinking and systems thinking.

Day 1 concluded with a very sociable dinner.

The current economic scenario has triggered several discussions on emphasizing an innovation action plan for Obama administration to revitalize the US (and apparently the world) economy. The recent Business Week article by Thomas D. Kuczmarski proposing a step-by-step innovation action plan for Obama is encouraging at this juncture, because the growth of several other countries around the world has been depended on US innovations. An unbiased view of Kuczmarski's plan as an "outsider", and indeed by supporting him for his proposal, the question remaining to me is how the government should rationalize the implementation of this plan when the priority is dealing with the reality at the grass root level problems of unemployment, reduced consumer spending, and over and above the looming negative sentiments leading to a deep recession? Is there a way President Obama can tie the innovation policy to bring the changes immediately that we are looking for, so the action plan for innovation can yield benefit quickly?

In his previous post The 4400, Jack Hipple seeded some excellent thoughts on using the "free resources" effectively. Taking the cue from there, some wild ideas to ponder..

• Setting up micro-venture capital fund to help people at the grass root level for the area they have expertise in. May be it is ok to tax the wealthy more but force them to invest in the new businesses as micro-venture capitalists.
• Encourage the huge pool of unemployed, diversified, experienced group of people (resources) to build their own businesses by providing a federal grant, entrepreneurship support, and tax break(must be better than bailing out the banks). Well, can even infuse creativity by ensuring that there are people coming together from different discipline to build a business.
• Leveraging huge unemployed talent pool to setup private educational institution to educate the future generation. Remember, the future gets hands-on education from these diversified, experienced people if we don't enforce the teachers should have high qualification. to teach. ( Kuczmarski mentioned about training people on innovation)
• For those ready to get their hands dirty; encourage, support (money and other) for the community farming. (Another way to focus on "what is consumed in America is built in America")
• And how about letting the community driving the energy initiatives (especially green) by allowing them to setup their own community based power grid (You don't have to be a nuclear scientist to setup a micro wind turbine). Also inline with Obama's commitment to invest in infrastructures, energy. Clean energy, new jobs..

A thought plane for you to think further; what are your ideas?

It's all around us. The language of hard times is everywhere, in every journal, every newspaper, in the State of the Union address, in your stockbroker statements, and in your daily conversations. In a short, but insightful article in Chemical and Engineering News on February 2, Melody Voith summarized the dilemma facing industry and how different companies are approaching the situation.

In my last commentary, I described the brute force approach being used by some companies and the huge loss of human energy and resources that result. In Melody's article, some more creative approaches were described. One of the most striking and simple was that used by DuPont, which also saw the signals early and set a plan in motion before a crisis occurred. Each employee was asked to identify 3 things that he/she could do to immediately conserve cash and reduce costs. How much more positive than laying a large number of people off and then asking the rest the same question!

This approach illustrates the use of the TRIZ problem solving principle of "Do it in Advance", as well as that of "trimming". If you recall this simple tool, we just look at a system and arbitrarily remove a part of it and then ask how we can retain the function that was provided with the parts of the system that are left. We are normally applying this thinking in products such as the Michelin Tweel(TM), the toothbrush with the toothpaste in the handle, the cleaning system without a bucket, a fireplace without a fire, and many more.

But the principle works in a business and strategy sense as well. This needs to be done in the right way to pay off big time. We can say we need fewer sales people if customers will come to us on the web. Now that the need for some of the sales force has been eliminated, we could just lay them off. Or we could take them and explore new applications and markets that we always said we didn't have time to look at. We could use them to assist in that long range planning that we know is so important, but never got to. They could look at patents that get in our way and suggest the ones to circumvent.

One of the more interesting innovation tools that can be used is to ask everyone in your organization, "What skill do you have that we are not aware of or are not using to its full potential"? This will generate a very interesting discussion list for you.Layoffs and downsizings are easy. Using resources in a clever and competitive way is not, but far more productive in the long term.

More and more the economic pressures will increase the need for proficiency unilaterally. One way for us to respond to this challenge would be to optimize those things that we currently do. This means of course that we need to get better- and we may already be very good. So although this sounds logical that doesn't mean it is easy to do. In fact, it can be very difficult. Especially as financial resources cause us to reduce headcounts and streamline other expenses. That compounds the issue adding the complexity of having to do more with less. And the more has to be more efficient than it was before. This forces the less into a higher state of expectation. So it is quite a conundrum. Clearly we cannot proceed with a business as usual mindset. Things have to change.

You can't expect things to change just because you need them to. The type of change needs to be intentioned. Also, capability must be provided to those expected to deliver the needed change. This makes these difficult times an ideal opportunity to provide training. As more is expected with less, it seems natural that the innovative ability of all needs to be increased. Therefore, intentional and structured innovative techniques are found to be more important than ever before.

The impetus for change is here. Take advantage of that and get the capability of your staff increased. Let innovation guide us through the storm. It has before and it can again.

The last week of January I posted a commentary telling our readers that I had been asked to substitute for a speaker on the subject of "how to persuade your boss that innovation is a good thing." I decided to have the audience members answer the question for themselves, since this requires close knowledge of their own culture. Many thanks to the readers who contributed questions and their experiences that helped me structure the event.

My first question to the group was "When have you had a great success persuading your organization to change ANYTHING? What did you do?" The answers varied widely, from installing email (a while ago!) to changing inventory management methods to replacing conventional advertising with product placement to outsourcing software development, and the methods ranged from the expected (calculated return on investment, benchmarking) to the somewhat surprising (asked customers! took board members to visit customers! used social/peer pressure).

I then repeated the question in the negative: "When have you had a colossal failure to persuade your organization to change something? What was it and what did you do?" Not surprising, on reflection, was that the 2 lists were almost the same, but the efforts were directed at different people. The key element that all our comment-contributing readers emphasized was the need for a good match between the "target" and the technique.

There was very positive response to the two worksheets that I gave the group to organize their thinking. The first was a table with simple columns: People (in your group, in other groups, in the hierarchy), the history with that person (successes and failures, on what issues, using what methods). The participants then picked 2 people and filled out the second worksheet, which was a simple set of questions:

1. What is important to this person?
2. What do you need to have this person DO?
3. Will doing the action(s) in step 2 help this person achieve the goals in step 1?
4 A. If YES, how will you explain it to him/her?
4 B. If NO, what should you change? (The target person – find one with different goals? The action that you are asking for?)
5. If YES, put your action plan here.

There were 2 predominant reactions around the room as the participants filled out the worksheet for their own particular situations.

1. Even though it took about 6 minutes to finish one worksheet, they learned something from the process, and they were astonished (retrospectively) that in the past they had just started talking to people without stopping to think through how to structure the "campaign."
2. The most frequent source of failure was question 3; that is, the requested action would benefit the requestor, but NOT the person being asked to do the action. On reflection, this was considered a primary cause of failure.
3. A significant minority said that they had never considered option 4B; that is, they always kept looking for new arguments for their target, and never looked for new targets/supporters in the organization.

This was a great example of the TRIZ concept of the use of resources that are already in the problem to solve the problem. We used the knowledge in our community (thanks to everybody who made comments!) and the knowledge in the workshop, and their knowledge of their own organizations, to learn new ways to solve the problem of persuasion. Thanks to all of you for the experiment.

At the end of January I had the opportunity to see creativity and innovation expert Sir Ken Robinson speak in Seattle. His new book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, talks about how adults (in his experience) don't know what their talents are - they don't know their "element."

Why is our element important? Three reasons:

1. Personal fulfillment
2. Health of our communities
3. Economic growth & development

Creativity is a process that our education systems can suck out of us as we're forced into a world of conformity and linearity. Education systems are based on "date of manufacture" – education is ruled by how old we are. The goal of these systems is to teach children to go to college and get jobs.

Sir Ken points out that we need to recognize that life is organic, it evolves - and we need to invest in our natural capacities that mimic the nature. Excellence is not standardization - it's about personalization and customization.

Note: If you haven't had the opportunity to see Sir Ken Robinson speak in person, check out this video from a TED presentation in 2006 on whether schools kill creativity. It's a well-spent 20 minutes (as I can safely state having just watched it yet again).

If Europe has a dedicated year of creativity and innovation, do other countries/regions need their own? -------------

There's been a lot of talk – particularly since the global recession became a reality – about whether or not government should be involved in innovation.

The European Parliament proclaimed the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 (EYCI) to focus "on the importance of creativity in private and public life." As nice as that sounds – and as well-intentioned as it likely is – what impact will this "year" have?

They do have a set of defined goals, but they are broad enough that quantifying success will be a challenge. Their ambassadors list is impressive - I hope to find out more about their role (the role of leadership is innovation is critical) and report back here at a later date.

Updated 2/11: BusinessWeek has a new article, "Obama Needs a Secretary of Innovation," – that explores the benefit of having someone in charge of 2 tasks: "The first is to lead a systematic national innovation process, bringing this powerful strategy to bear on the government's role in unclenching the lockjaw of this economic crisis. The second is to create a national innovation mindset, reinvigorating innovation in the private sector." Any discussion of innovation and process makes me happy, but is this a good beginning to making America "innovative"?

Reader Questions: If Europe has a dedicated year of creativity and innovation, do other countries/regions need their own? Are there lessons from the EYCI's initial planning that could be improved upon already? How will you judge their success?

Herbert Roberts is reporting from the inaugural TRIZ Practitioners Exchange.---------

The second day of the TRIZ Practitioners Exchange (TPE) continued with open discussions surrounding two additional areas of interest selected from the pre-meeting topics of interest listings were selected for discussions: 1) non-technical applications of TRIZ and 2) integrating TRIZ within a company's existing culture and initiatives. The TPE concluded with a review of the lessons learned over the two sessions.

The non-technical application of TRIZ was a leading point of interest for all of the practitioners. The TPE followed the World Cafe approach provided the necessary infrastructure to keep the discussions on time and kept the user exchanges inclusive in nature. The non-technical discussions were productive enough to expand into two of the allotted discussion time segments. Leading points in this discussion indicated that business managers relate better to business-based solutions than technical achievements.

Within the TRIZ community, non-technical approached to TRIZ are often viewed with skepticism by some TRIZ masters. The view is that non-technical solutions lack the statistical validation than more traditional technical solutions. Some researchers and authors have approached investigating non-technical solutions, and in some cases, some have defined non-technical parameters and expanded solutions to include other forms of modeling to capture non-technical based contradictions and system weaknesses. Several practitioners shared first-hand experiences using TRIZ to address non-technical solutions during the double session, which provided insight into what defines a successful non-technical approach, the process outcomes and the management teams perspective of the processes results.

The discussions about integrating TRIZ in to existing business cultures and initiatives were also supported with discussions of the first-hand experiences of the participating practitioners. Leading the take-aways was the recognition that developing hybrid solutions was common and useful to help build a bridge between the "us and them" separation that TRIZ can develop as a "competing" tools to other more tradition forms of idea capturing and creativity generation tools. A wider discussion focused on the shared perspective of management's "real" level of interest surrounding TRIZ.

The last session of the day focused on recapping the leading points of each of the topics discussed during the exchange. The attendees agreed that the event was useful and supported a level of knowledge exchange that was useful beyond more traditional one-on-one discussions. The information presented and discussed was viewed as compatible to the wider exposure to TRIZ gained at wider open-invitational conferences which can provide a unique perspective on TRIZ's application in the commercial and educational markets. The TPE session ended with plans for at least one more future event and the goal of increasing the participation level to include more active practitioners from other realms of businesses and TRIZ backgrounds.

Herbert Roberts is reporting from the inaugural TRIZ Practitioners Exchange.---------

The inaugural TRIZ Practitioners Exchange (TPE) kicked off at noon on Thursday, January 29th, in Tempe, Arizona and continues on through Friday January 30th. Larry Ball and David Troness of Honeywell International, Inc hosted the event, which focused on the unique needs of industry practitioners. Billed as "not another conference," the event's agenda is based on the suggested topics of the attendees, as collected through the TRIZ Practitioners Exchange Google group site.

The twelve attendees represent five organizations that have developed unique solutions using TRIZ as a learned skill based on causal analysis and problem solving. Identifying themselves as TRIZ practitioners, the exchange kicked off with a vision statement directed at getting "a few questions answered" through an exchange of practitioner based workplace experiences and lessons learned. Following the attendee introductions, the exchange focused on a selected subset of the eight suggested topics on Thursday, with an additional subset of the topics schedule to be covered during the Friday session.

The Thursday session focused on exchanging the practitioners' insights on:

• The lessons learned in deploying TRIZ in organizations,
• The experiences related to teaching and training TRIZ skills and
• Defining useful TRIZ-related metrics for benchmarking and comparative analysis.

Key finding during the exchange identified that deploying TRIZ in organizations has two main approaches in top-down deployment (push) and grassroots-based viral awareness (pull). The practitioners identified that the pull strategy has worked best in educating those employees that will make the best use of their TRIZ education over the long run. It was noted that while having high-level leadership support was useful, the support was not a solid basis for sustainability in the long run.

The practice of teaching TRIZ- and systematic innovation-based skills was best exchanged through a mentorship-based education tied to real work related projects and best learned by students willing to fail and take risks to apply TRIZ skills, even if the initial efforts were poorly executed or misdirected. The practitioners observed that obtaining level 1- and 2-based training skills has not correlated well with student confidence in their TRIZ-related skills or their long-term application of the skills past the initial training exercises.

TRIZ-related metrics were observed to be hard to tie solely to a product or process improvement. TRIZ is seen best as an enabler, ROI analysis is not a good standard to measure the impact of TRIZ skills in an organization. TRIZ-related metrics are best when they fit into the existing structure of an organization's reporting system. Better metrics in the acceptance of TRIZ within an organization are based in leveraging the support of key problem solvers within the organization, and their choice to apply TRIZ skills to solve problems.

A follow up report will cover the practitioner exchange discussions held during the Friday sessions.

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Herbert Roberts is a principle engineer at GE Energy. He is a Six Sigma Black Belt and helped lead GE Energy efforts on expanding the use of TRIZ in support of internal growth within GE's businesses. He has trained and led a range of TRIZ-based research projects and workouts in the U.S., Germany, India and China. Prior to joining GE, Herbert worked at United Technology's gas turbine division for 11 years with a focus on developing advanced technology military products.

Community and Web 2.0 continue to be a recurrent theme in many of the conversations I have with innovation leaders. Helping innovation workers leverage each other is extremely important. The value of intellectual assets within most companies is largely untapped. Designers and engineers need better connectivity to the knowledge that will speed them toward value creating innovations.

In many organizations, the response to this need is to create internal innovation networks. Often ad hoc in nature, the success of these networks has been spotty. Even so, participants are often very excited because even a drop of water is joyous to the parched soul. Information technology can help add significant value to the internal information network, but care must be taken in understanding what needs must be met.

Traditional knowledge management initiatives are broadly viewed as having failed to deliver the goods when it comes to innovation. IT groups have, in good faith, built impressive infrastructures for knowledge management; yet, workers are still frustrated by an inability to get at information effectively when they need it. This is large because the traditional approach builds the access paradigm on models of physical data deployment and arbitrary taxonomy rather that the mental models of access held by knowledge consumers.

Information becomes actionable knowledge only when it is delivered to the knowledge worker when it is needed, in the form it is needed, and in the context of the knowledge worker job. Once the knowledge management system requires the worker to leave their work paradigm and adapt to the model of the data delivery system, the effectiveness of the system is severely undermined.

So, what is to be done to empower innovation practitioners to connect with knowledge and each other? Here are a few tips to answer the question.

1. Build knowledge management structures around the jobs and thought models of the workers

2. Provide active concept delivery systems – toss out the old and failed search metaphor – anticipate knowledge needs and integrate concept delivery seamlessly into the innovation workers tasks

3. Think Passive – build an internal innovation network, but don't be satisfied with an approach that requires workers to actively look for help. Make sure your network is designed to reach out to workers and connect them not just to knowledge but also to each other.

The theme here is simple. Innovation thrives when the innovation workers are enabled through knowledge and community connections. But, these facilities must be provided in a way that support the work of these designers and engineers, and not one that adds more hurdles.

[Crossposted from www.InnovatingToWin.com]

"How to persuade your boss that innovation is a good thing?"

I was recently invited to speak at a conference on this topic—way outside my usual comfort zone of "What is TRIZ" or "How to merge TRIZ into your Lean Six Sigma System" or "Innovation for Everybody" speeches. This conference is focused on innovation in general, not specifically TRIZ.

My initial reaction was pretty negative in several ways:

1. If you need to persuade your boss that innovation is a good thing, maybe you need a new boss!
2. Who would trust what a consultant says? Of course the innovation consultant thinks that innovation is a good thing!
3. Why would a consultant be expected to know how to persuade YOUR boss of anything? Never met him/her, doesn't know your culture, and not likely to listen, since of course the consultant is biased (see item 2)

I brought my TRIZ experience to the analysis of the situation, but you don't need TRIZ to see what I did. One of the TRIZ techniques is to use all the available resources to solve a problem, and one variant is to include all the negative/harmful resources. This is the "Make your enemy be your friend" method. So I decided to use the negatives as the basis for the event.

My first thought was that since knowledge of the particular "boss" and the corporate culture are essential; this should be a workshop, rather than a speech. That way, the person who is looking for help gets to contribute all the knowledge of the culture and the person, and the consultant acts as facilitator—giving structure to the event, but not trying to provide content. (Exercise for the reader: express this as a TRIZ Physical Contradiction, and demonstrate the use of the separation principles!)

My second thought was the basic TRIZ concept that "Somebody, someplace has solved this problem, but for a different reason, in different circumstances…" This leads to the idea that one major structure in the workshop should be listing all the change initiatives that the company has pursued, and how management was persuaded to start them. Then a success path could be to look for similar arguments, if they were successful, OR look for opposite arguments if they were not. I've done this quite frequently, with companies that "piggyback" TRIZ onto Six Sigma initiatives, for example.

Readers: this is your opportunity to help me help the audience at this conference. Please use the "comments" feature to tell me any stories you have (note whether I can use the name or not!) about how you persuaded somebody that innovation is a good thing. I'll do another column after the event, with the comments, how I used them, and what the participants contributed. THANKS!

Last week I was in Miami for iSixSigma Live! Summit & Awards. (iSixSigma is a sister publication to Real Innovation.) Innovation made its way into the agenda in a few places. (Readers of Real Innovation and The TRIZ Journal are familiar with TRIZ expert Ellen Domb who joined us for two days – talking about TRIZ in a breakout session and a workshop on the final day.)

Innovation was also a topic for the first day's general session – David Silverstein, President and CEO, Breakthrough Management Group International – spoke about "Six Sigma and Innovation: A Distinction Without a Difference."

A few key points from his presentation include:

• "Innovation is about information and data."
• "Innovation is about connecting the dots."
• "Innovation doesn't happen without collaboration."

He also discussed the principle of separation in time. (It's something most of us have probably used to solve problems without knowing "it" had a name!) Separation in time can be explained by the following: you're working on a problem, you get stuck, you go to a colleague's office, you explain your problem and you come up with the idea during the explanation.

The collaboration was with yourself – you could have been in anyone's office, whomever was there listening was irrelevant to the solution. The solution came about because you had to re-process and re-state the problem at another time.

If only every problem could be solved so easily...

Yesterday, I received a marketing piece inviting me to a seminar on "How-to Survive" in a Market Downturn. I deleted it immediately. My intention is to THRIVE, not just to s u r v I v e. I hope yours is too.

This incident got me to thinking about the choice of words that are selected to communicate new ideas and the impact they can have on success. I want to thrive so I'm not going to that seminar. I wonder if the creator of the event thought about the choice of that one word – survive, and the different ways it can be perceived by prospects. The impact on success is immediate, and, it's just a word.

This leads me to share the following two situations that also happened to me this week:

1. I am in my fourth year of learning to play golf; sports of any kind do not come easy to me. I just discovered from another player the markings on my club heads are there to help me align the sweet spot on my club heads with the golf ball. I thought the marks were design elements. So, I went to the website of the maker of my clubs to find out what else I should know that would be helpful to me. Technical golf-speak and lots of acronyms filled their descriptions communicating all the apparently great new innovations their clubs offer. No help to me; just golf mumbo jumbo.

Why do companies spend so much money on innovation and then neglect one of the most important steps in the whole innovation process – communicating the innovation in a clear, compelling, and easy to understand way?

2. A Tide commercial caught my attention. This amazed me because my approach to buying cleaning products is to keep my life simple and to save time by just buying the brands I always buy.

Why did Tide catch my attention? The commercial communicated a compelling easy to understand message about a new innovation. It demonstrated solving a problem that bugs me; having the colors of my clothes fade from washing. Tide showed their new version retaining the color of clothes for 30 washes. I will likely buy it the next time I am shopping.

I share these observations with you because I think now is a perfect time to consider conducting an Innovation Communication Review/Audit. It's such a shame to see a valuable innovation languish or fail because the communication step is weak.

I know it's frustrating for many to be working in an environment when so much effort is focused on cutting budgets. I believe by deciding to complete an Innovation Communication Audit, a very inexpensive and proactive activity, you can actually end up adding to your top and bottom-line this year; not to mention, actually strengthening your valuable innovations.

Until next time …

If Bruce Nussbaum's recent posts on the death of innovation have done nothing else, they have generated a lot of reactions in the blogosphere. Although that inner voice is shouting "Enough already!", I can't resist making one more comment on the subject.

There have been some very nice pieces written on this topic in past two weeks. You can find some great examples of these at CounterNotions, Fleishman-Hillard Innovation, and here (of course!). In Kathie Thomas' post (Fleishman-Hillard), she referenced a passage from Bruce's arguments for transformation that I found particularly amusing. The passage reads:

"Innovation" implies changing what is. "Transformation" implies creating what's new. That's what we need today, a huge amount of totally "new."

Well Bruce, let me help you out. Let's crack open the dictionary and see what we find. Hmm… Oh yes, here we go.

in•no•va•tion \i-nə-vā-shən\ noun
1 : the introduction of something new
2 : a new idea, method, or device : novelty

trans•for•ma•tion \tran(t)s-fər-mā-shən, -fȯr-\ noun
1: an act, process, or instance of transforming or being transformed
2: false hair worn especially by a woman to replace or supplement natural hair
3 a (1): the operation of changing (as by rotation or mapping) one configuration or expression into another in accordance with a mathematical rule ; especially : a change of variables or coordinates in which a function of new variables or coordinates is substituted for each original variable or coordinate (2): the formula that effects a transformation b: function 5a c: an operation that converts (as by insertion, deletion, or permutation) one grammatical string (as a sentence) into another ; also : a formal statement of such an operation
4: genetic modification of a bacterium by incorporation of free DNA from another bacterial cell; also : genetic modification of a cell by the uptake and incorporation of exogenous DNA

As you can see, Bruce, you have simply got your definitions backward. Innovation is the creation of something new; transformation is the act of changing something in to a different state which may or may not represent something new. If "totally new" is your prescription, then innovation is the cure for what ails you.

Meanwhile, the EU has pronounced 2009 to be the Year of Creativity and Innovation.

Enough said?

[Definitions excerpted from Merriam-Webster Online]

[Crossposted from www.InnovatingToWin.com]

In the past two weeks or so, there has been a torrent of layoffs, plant closings, and restructurings unknown in recent times. Two major layoffs that caught my eye with my chemical industry background, were those of Dow Chemical (5000) and Air Products (1500). These numbers are in the neighborhood of 10%+ (maybe more) of total staff. It's not clear how many of these people had technical backgrounds, but I think it's safe to say that a good many were. Probably around 4400.

Many of you, especially in the US, may remember a hit TV show that ended a few years ago called "The 4400". It mesmerized many people on Wednesday nights. This was a story about a ball of light exploding when it hit earth and releasing 4400 men, women, and children--all of whom had lived on earth previously from a few months to 50 years, none having aged a single day when they were last seen. These folks were rounded up, quarantined, and eventually released to their families. Soon after their release, some of the returnees begin to experience unexplainable, and in some cases, uncontrollable new abilities. These mysteries, needing to be solved, became the basis for the ongoing series. Does this sound familiar?

It sure does to me and I have seen this through several cycles. It wasn't but a year ago that chemical companies on the Gulf Coast were paying hiring bonuses to new ChE's. What will this new 4400 crop do? The same thing they have always done, albeit with a little more difficulty than in the past. Most will be quarantined in with re-employment companies, resumes will go out in the hope that someone is expanding and not contracting (and there are some of these folks!). Some will totally retire and play the stock market, while others will early retire and possibly sign up for a consultants' registry for short term work. Others will start an entrepreneurial dream they've always had in mind and were never able to pursue. Some will join risky venture start-ups. Others will go back to school to gain education in a parallel universe that has always been of interest.

It is highly unlikely, from my knowledge of people who have been through this, that any of the 4400 will return to the same industry segment from which they came.Think about the cost involved in these 4400 people. At a minimum gross cost of $100K per year, this is like the engineering, research, and manufacturing staff costing $440 MILLION dollars per year. This is larger than the research or engineering staff at all but the largest of companies. Now from the standpoint of the previous employers, this is a huge cost savings.

From the standpoint of a new business opportunity, what a resource! Maybe all these folks could be assembled into a new chemical/materials company called "The 4400 Company". Maybe they could "self-assemble" into a huge consulting firm for the chemical industry--their knowledge will probably be forgotten and will be needed again at some point in time and they will be paid far more as consultants than they were as employees.

I don't begrudge the hard decisions necessary in a publicly owned/traded company vs. say those of a private company (Cargill, S.C. Johnson for example). They don't have the same flexibility to be patient. But I do think a little more time could be spent on thinking about how to creatively USE these intelligent resources vs. viewing them as a source of cost savings.What ideas do you have?

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