This week I'll be reporting from the TRIZ-Future Conference 2008, "The Synthesis of Innovation," presented by the European TRIZ Association, CIRP The International Academy for Production Engineering, and the University of Twente at Enschede in the Netherlands. CIRP has 550 members in 40 countries, so their participation will be significant in spreading the TRIZ message. There will be a special TRIZ session at the next CIRP conference, as well.

I came to Enschede by train from the Amsterdam Schipol airport, so I can't report on the scenery—8 of us from Taiwan, Iran, Japan, US, UK, and Turkey had a great time talking about TRIZ! This is what we have called in the past the "generous definition of Europe." In the morning light, we could appreciate the beauty of the campus and the Dutch countryside.

The Wednesday morning program of tutorials continued the generous definition of Europe:

1. "Introduction to TRIZ for Technological Applications" by Hongyul Yoon, South Korea
2. "Introduction to TRIZ for Business and Management Applications" by Valeri Souchkov, Netherlands
3. "A systematized use of Su-Field Analysis" by Iouri Belski, Australia

All three audiences were quite participatory, and were a mix of university faculty, TRIZ practioners, and TRIZ students. The University of Twente demonstrated new conference communication technology—each visitor got an MP-3 player that functions as a USB memory. When plugged into the computer, it gives a 3-dimensional tour of the campus, it searches for new information and delivers it to the computer—we got the morning tutorials immediately after lunch .

This is where I usually insert my editorial remarks on the indirect benefits of attending TRIZ Conferences—you not only learn the new information, you learn the methods of presentation that a variety of teachers are using, and you learn what other people are interested in, both from their questions in the sessions and from the conversation over coffee and meals and walking between the sessions and the hotels. Start planning now for the 2009 meeting—some people need to request budgets now for meetings throughout the year! And some people can only attend a meeting if they are presenting a paper—start organizing your research and case study work now! End of Ellen's editorial!

Today I mixed papers from sessions 1 and 2 in order to get a mix of theory and practice, and to find out what some of my friends have been doing since the last conference.

Giacomo Bersano, T.Eltzer, and R. Uhl reported on their method of integrating TRIZ with risk management to increase the success ratio for innovation projects. New data from the French ministry of industry showed that 23% of companies stopped innovation projects, 30% were seriously delayed, and only 10% were fully successful. He used the function modeling method from GTI to look at the complex relationships that lead to the failure of innovation projects, which identified the lack of good data as a key issue. TRIZ analysis of the contradiction between the need for precise data (and the requisite time and money) and the need for speed to market led to several suggested methods for resolving the contradictions. These methods have not yet been applied to new innovations—perhaps we can have a paper next year with the results?

Darrell Mann returned to a favorite theme from past papers, with technological updates, in the paper "Smart Materials Solve Contradictions: Connecting the Right Materials Solution to the Right Market Need." Darrell used a wide variety of examples (vacuum cleaners, automobile suspensions, room air conditioning, bullet-proof vests, shin pads for sports) to address the fundamental issue of discontinuous change rather than optimization. Smart materials that are flexible when not stressed, and rigid when stressed resolve the contradictions because they have non-linear response to the impulse. For heat control, Darrell introduced smart conductors that change conductivity (the molecules rearrange themselves) as a function of temperature. Rheo-chromic and mechano-chromic materials change color as a function of stress—there are different applications for reversible and irreversible changes. He organized the stimulus and response fields in a matrix, which can serve as a guide for patent searches to find the materials which demonstrate the needed phenomena.

Simon Dewulf, Vincent Theeten, and Bernard Lahousse use case studies of novelty products to illustrate their thesis that simplicity is an overriding concept in TRIZ. Simon created a cross-index of properties and functions, and build a geometrical device (think morphological matrix with spider charts in the cells) to look at the opportunities for achieving the desired functions in the simplest possible way. More performance, less harm, more convenience, lower price are the 4 criteria that almost all developers want (on behalf of their customers), which can be used to rank the techniques found in patent searches. The audience enjoyed the de-colored beer (de-colored sugar syrup) and the metal foam (bread dough, whipped cream) and the flexible piano and dozens of other examples. Too much time was spent demonstrating features of their software, rather than the basic principles of the paper.

We then reconvened for the second keynote by Zinovy Royzen, "TOP-TRIZ: Theory, Applications, Training and Integration." TOP TRIZ is a further development of classical TRIZ which includes problem formulation and Tool-Object-Product modeling, development of standard solutions into standard techniques, further development of ARIZ, and utilization of resources. Royzen presented six cases that demonstrated the practical applications and the depth and breadth of the method.

The day concluded with a reception, and I'm told that those with fewer time zones travel than I continued drinking and talking late into the night.

The Mexican TRIZ Association (AMETRIZ) is hosting a blog for ideas to solve the global economic crisis: http://blog.ametriz.com/.

Put that TRIZ (and other innovation methods and tools) experience to good use and submit your ideas. (And share them here, too!)

Thanks to Gaetano Cascini and Noel Leon for getting us this abbreviated report on the 2nd IFIP Topical Session on Computer-Aided Innovation, presented in conjunction with the 20th IFIP World Computer Congress (September 7-10, 2008, Milan, IT - http://www.wcc2008.org ), and dedicated to the Integration of CAI systems in the Product Development cycle. IFIP, the International Federation for Information Processing, is a multinational apolitical organization in Information & Communications Technologies and Sciences, recognized by the United Nations; it represents IT Societies from more than 50 countries, covering all 5 continents. Working Group 5.4 deals with Computer-Aided Innovation, http://computeraidedinnovation.net. Frequent TRIZ Journal readers will see that several of our frequent authors were participants and award winners for outstanding papers.

35 papers were evaluated in a double-blind process. Final program was as follows:

- A. ALBERS, N. LEON ROVIRA, H. AGUAYO, AND T. MAIER

Optimization with Genetic Algorithms and Splines as a way for Computer Aided Innovation: follow up of an example with crankshafts

- M. ANNARUMMA, M. PAPPALARDO AND A. NADDEO

Methodology development of human task simulation as PLM solution related to OCRA ergonomic analysis

- G. CASCINI AND M. ZINI

Measuring patent similarity by comparing inventions functional trees

- D. CAVALLUCCI, F. ROUSSELOT AND C. ZANNI

Representing and selecting problems through contradictions clouds

- D. CEBRIAN-TARRASON AND R. VIDAL

How an ontology can infer knowledge to be used in product conceptual design

- G. COLOMBO, D. PUGLIESE AND C. RIZZI

Developing DA Applications in SMEs Industrial Context

- S. DUBOIS, I. RASOVSKA AND R. DE GUIO

Comparison of non solvable problem solving principles issued from CSP and TRIZ

- O. KUHN, H. LIESE AND J. STJEPANDIC

Engineering Optimisation by Means of Knowledge Sharing and Reuse

- V. F. TELES AND F. J. RESTIVO

Innovation in Information Systems applied to the Shoes Retail Business

- A. J. WALKER AND J. J. COX

Virtual Product Development Models: Characterization of Global Geographic Issues

Posters:

- A. AMATO, A. MORENO AND N. SWINDELLS

DEPUIS project: Design of Environmentally-friendly Products Using Information Standards

- R. ANDERL AND J. RAßLER

PML, an Object Oriented Process Modeling Language

- F. BELKADI, N. TROUSSIER, F. HUET, T.GIDEL, E. BONJOUR AND B. EYNARD

Innovative PLM-based approach for collaborative design between OEM and suppliers: Case study of aeronautic industry

- C. CEVENINI, G. CONTISSA, M. LAUKYTE, R. RIVERET AND R. RUBINO

Development of the ALIS IP Ontology: Merging Legal and Technical Perspectives

- B. CRAWFORD, C. LEÓN DE LA BARRA AND P. LETELIER

Communication and Creative Thinking in Agile Software Development

- N. DÖRR, E. BEHNKEN AND T. MÜLLER-PROTHMANN

Web-based Platform for Computer Aided Innovation

- H. DUIN, J. JASKOV, A. HESMER AND K.D. THOBEN

Towards a Framework for Collaborative Innovation

- S. GRAZIOSI, D. POLVERINI, P. FARALDI AND F. MANDORLI

A systematic innovation case study: new concepts of domestic appliance drying cycle

- R. C. MICHELINI AND R. P. RAZZOLI

Product Lifestyle Design: Innovation for Sustainability

- MIN-HWAN OK AND TAE-SOO KWON

A Conceptual Framework of the Cooperative Analyses in Computer-Aided Engineering

- D. REGAZZONI, R. NANI

TRIZ-Based Patent Investigation by Evaluating Inventiveness

The program was enriched by the Keynote speech by Prof. Noel Leon Rovira on "The future of Computer Aided Innovation" and by a roundtable on "The role of computers in Innovation-related activities" (moderator: Gaetano Cascini):

- establishing the differences between innovation, invention and optimization (Roland De Guio);

- identifying the requirements for CAI systems (Rosario Vidal);

- how to integrate CAI systems in the Product Cycle (Noel Leon Rovira);

- how to link CAI tools with existing PLM systems (Marco Taisch);

- how to identify and create collaboration opportunities with other IFIP WGs (Open debate).

The BEST Paper Awards went to

- G. CASCINI AND M. ZINI

Measuring patent similarity by comparing inventions functional trees

- D. CAVALLUCCI, F. ROUSSELOT AND C. ZANNI

Representing and selecting problems through contradictions clouds

The presenters of the winning papers have jointly agreed to leave the 750 Euro Grant offered by the IFIP TC5 Executive Committee to Sébastien Dubois, co-author and presenter of the 3rd classified paper:

- S. DUBOIS, I. RASOVSKA AND R. DE GUIO

Comparison of non solvable problem solving principles issued from CSP and TRIZ

I'll see many of these same authors next week in the Netherlands at the ETRIA meeting, and hope to have more to report, and we hope to get some of the most TRIZ-oriented papers for publication in future issues.

I'd like to share with you a very simple, but powerful strategic analysis tool that I'll just describe as the "tic-tac-toe" approach to strategic analysis. It comes from my experience with TRIZ, but it's a much broader thinking tool and can greatly support your efforts to think strategically about innovation and where your organization is heading.

Put yourself, your product, or your business in the middle of the 9-Box diagram. Above you is the customer you supply. Underneath are your suppliers and the materials you buy. This box could easily be 12 or 15 boxes depending upon the depth of the supply chain and the steps involved in making your product or the needed raw materials needed for your product or service, but for simplicity we'll just consider 9. To the left of your current box in the center is your past technology. To your right is the future. This same logic applies to the levels above and below you.

I propose that if you cannot complete in some detail all nine boxes, you do not know your business very well. Let's look at a couple of simple illustrations. First the automobile. You are Ford, GM, or Toyota at the middle level. To your left is some aspect of previous car design, say windshield cleaning (note that we need to talk FUNCTION and not how it's done). To the right might be the future of windshield cleaning and how it might be done (variable speed? responsive to auto speed? No wiper?). Above you is the integrated system, in the middle say, the car (of which the windshield is a part). Below you are the raw materials you buy to make a windshield wiper, say rubber strips. In the lower left is a description of a previous wiper raw material, say natural rubber (with little flexibility and a tendency to become brittle). To the right on the bottom are the materials envisioned for the next generation of wiper blades. In the upper left hand corner might be the car of the past with no wiper blades and to the right might be a windshield "cleaning system" (note I did not say wiper blades, I am describing the function needed and not how it's done), possibly not requiring a wiper blade at all (think about how this might be done).

If you cannot complete all 9 boxes to some degree, you do not understand what is going on in your universe. The history of technology evolution clearly tells us that products and systems are integrated upward into their super-system. Said another way, your customer, despite what they might tell you, is trying to figure out how to get the function or value you provide without the use of your product or service.

If you are not thinking the same way, you are in for a rude awakening one of these days. Bank deposit systems that eliminate the need for deposit slips and envelopes are arriving. Want to be in the envelope business? Deposit slip printing business? Wouldn't be a lot better to be in the optical scanning business rather than reducing the cost of envelopes? You've have heard the story of the buggy whip manufacturers who were making better buggy whips when the box above them moved to the right in one of these diagrams and better, cheaper buggy whips were irrelevant. The car provides a transportation service which is occasionally used to meet with other people. Maybe working on better Internet based communication systems is a smarter long term business, but that's hard for GM and Ford to do, isn't it?

To push a bit further, consider a cube and not a one dimensional diagram. Parallel ways of getting the same result. Cars are not the only way to get from here to there. Airplanes are another. If you make airfares low enough, who cares about the comfort factors of a car? Draw a simple tic-tac-toe diagram on a piece of paper and put your product or service in the middle box. To the left write in the past generation of this technology or service. To the right describe what you think future opportunities for improvement and development are. Now, one box below, write in a raw material or service you buy and use. While you are thinking about the path of evolution of this product or service, begin thinking about how your product or service could be performed without using it.

Now look at our customer above. What function does your product or service provide? Where is their product or service heading? How could they get the result they get with your product or service without you? What will their next generation need be? Do you have any idea how to provide?

Booz & Company announced its new Global Innovation 1000 report today –"Beyond Borders." The report focuses on R&D expenses across the globe as a key innovation indicator. Their top 10 companies include: Toyota, General Motors, Pfizer, Nokia, Johnson & Johnson, Ford, Microsoft, Roche Holding, Samsung and GlaxoSmithKline. A few interesting findings:

• "Fully 91 percent of the world's 1,000 largest R&D spenders conduct innovation activities outside the countries in which they are headquartered."
• "Even as the companies based in the U.S. performed $80.1 billion worth of R&D in other countries, companies headquartered elsewhere poured $42.6 billion into R&D conducted in the U.S."
• Three industries make up 70 percent of the R&D - automotive, computing and electronics, and healthcare.

The report can be downloaded as a PDF here: http://www.booz.com/global/home/what_we_think/reports_and_white_papers/ic-display/42809114

What do you think? Do the results surprise you? Are those the companies that come to mind when thinking of innovation? Does R&D have a direct correlation to how innovative a company is? Is there too much outsourcing in innovation?

Couple of years back I was explaining the Ideal Final Result (IFR) concept to our engineers (Computer engineers) using the example of "search". The question we tried to answer; what is the IFR for the function (for consumers) search. Since then I was intrigued by the potential possibilities in the human-computer interaction aspect of one of the most active phenomena on the internet, and search was always a fascinating topic to sell TRIZ concept to computer engineers. Recently Google released their browser (Chrome); before I wanted to install it myself and reading some of the fine prints about Chrome, the concept of IFR with "search" struck me queerly. Before I analyze why, let me try to describe some of the IFR's we used to fantasize about.

In TRIZ Ideal Final Result means achieving the maximum functionality without any harm and increasing the overall cost (significantly). I assume the cost of developing a browser for Google should not be expensive considering the 20% time given to engineers doing something their own!

What is the Ideal Final Result for us in the "search" function?

- We never want to search if we know everything – This one is beyond the science fiction indeed.
- What if my system can understand what I would be searching in another few minutes – Something like a mind reader?
Possibly some commercially viable IFR's
- I get paid for searching. Currently, searching is a free service for me.
- My search engine selects the keyword automatically and searches for me.
- My search engine knows what I need to search the moment I open the browser
- My search engine knows from where (my location) I search and what
- My search engine understands my situation in which I'm searching and giving the results based on that. Example; searching for hospitals for, and I get the results with the hospitals very close to the place I'm searching from.

A search engine does my actual work –I'm writing a research paper on cognitive thinking and emotions, and the moment I hit on the search, I may get the results related to the topic I'm searching, and search engine recommends an extra paragraph. (Hmmm...This is a cool feature for me to finish some pending articles…)
- Browser understands my emotions and search based on that. My blood pressure is so high after a meeting with my boss, and my browser is providing me some tips to cool down myself. (Think about integration with my mouse embedded a blood pressure sensor and browser)
- Searching what I may need tomorrow

The list can go on:

When Google announced their browser Chrome last week, the immediate connection made was – "Search" and "browser", as in a function diagram interacting each other. Naturally, it is pretty evident why Google should develop own browser and enter this market, which is a very competitive from the era of Netscape, and also having partnered with Firefox supporting their browser for sometime.

They may have nicely packaged about their browser capabilities, (I must admit some of them are unique though), however, that doesn't give their browser an edge on what's there already, especially FireFox or Safari for a common user like me.

Illustrating the entire thought process behind launching a browser, what I believe Google's attempt to bring a browser is nothing more than to implement the next generation search feature, indeed a very innovative thinking and an innovative way to achieve the same via their own browser.

Few Ideal Final Result's we discussed above has been implemented in some part of the world, not necessarily specific to the search, but in similar context. Product like Autonomy is already providing intelligence searching, but with a limited knowledge base (internal to the organization). However, bringing intelligence to the search for the mass, like the way Google excelled in the search engine isn't very easy with a restricted user and knowledge base.

How could Google fill this gap? A dedicated browser for using their own search engine should help them understanding the usage pattern, context in which we search etc and add some brain. Browser as an application running in my own PC, can facilitate more actions, record/log the instances, situations, applications I'm running and more to understand me as a user.

Here is a classic (?) feature:

When I search for the latest movie and book a ticket through online booking site, my search engine knows that and records it; after few days, I'm enjoying some music on my PC and suddenly remembers this movie I watched and want to check out the option to buy some music and open the browser to search. Bingo, there comes your browser and tells you, dude – here is the best site to purchase this song rated best by your friends (remember I also use my social network) from the movie you watched last week!
Well, perhaps not just fantasies after reading this news I guess – Be sure to read Chrome's fine print . Some of the terms and conditions are very close to achieving the search IFR, like self searching, not searching etc, if they get to know what I do using their browser, the way I described above.

Incidentally, they have amended some of the clause mentioned in the copyright license, but still I believe they are on to something. Let's wait and watch.

The 2008 participants represented Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, US, France, and the Mexican states of Veracruz, Jalisco, Nueva Leon, Mexico, Michoacan, Puebla, Queretaro, Distrito Federal, and Tabasco and there have been past participants from Zacatecas and Baja California Norte in Mexico, and Argentina, Brazil, UK, Iraq, Korea, and Spain.

Photo: R. Marin, Z. Royzen and J. Hipple with mariachis at the reception on day 2.

I will continue to report on my observation of the conference, with short notes on the papers. For the complete program, see http://www.ametriz.com/schedule_third_conference_triz.php.

Noel Leon presented the paper that he wrote with Humberto Aguayo Téllez on the use of Genetic Algorithms with TRIZ. The complementary elements of the two methods have been combined into Evolutionary Conceptual Design. Particularly, the use of biological evolutionary mechanisms in genetic algorithms and of technical evolutionary concepts in TRIZ, were particularly fruitful. They found that the two disciplines had developed similar concepts of ideality and the need to abandon trade-offs to reach the ideal final result (using TRIZ vocabulary) The examples that impressed the audience were both concrete and fanciful: The development of a design for a forged steel machine part that meets multiple simultaneous constraints, and the development of a simulated multi-terrain walking robot. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=oquKOVfzGfk&NR=1 to watch the robot learn! (I like when it starts experimenting with jumping instead of walking –TRIZ ideas of using another dimension to solve the problem!) Later in the day Cesar Villareal showed a case study of design of vertical wind turbines using the combination of the genetic algorithms with TRIZ to solve very difficult technical problems that will be essential for energy production.

Edgardo Cordoba presented the work that he did with Angélica Arellano Palacios on the application of TRIZ in human relations. They have worked with individual, management /administrative and cultural problems, and found that TRIZ makes significant and useful contributions in all areas. In particular, organization leaders increased their creativity and demonstrated ideal solutions at a level that had been inconceivable before their use of TRIZ. Tools that were most useful to the leaders were multi-windows, smart little people, and dimension/time/cost. They looked at the leadership dimensions: transactional, transformational, situational, and visionary, and found that leaders need similar skills in all areas, but they need to know how to apply those skills in a flexible way.

Luz Marina Torres Piñeros presented the work she developed with Oscar Fernando Castellanos Domínguez and others at the National University of Colombia. They studied the relationship between "technological intelligence" and the decision making process in countries ranging from Colombia to India to Ecuador to the US. She has extensive data showing how the state of 3 different industries (tobacco, cacao, and finque) improved as the understanding of the system and the technology developed.

Hilda Del Sagrario Vallín Sánchez and her colleagues Sergio Gerardo Mañón Espinon and Álvaro R. Pedroza Zapata from ITESO (Institute for Advanced Study in the West) in Tlaquepaque, a suburb of Guadalajara, showed a detailed case study of innovative development of battery technology through use of multi-parameter designed experiments.

Avraam Serediski is well-known to the TRIZ Journal readers. He participated in two of the projects that were reported at the conference. He and Gabriel González Molina and

Fidel García Gonzalez (who presented the paper) studied >20,000 graduating students from universities, and received surprisingly negative answers to the question of how the students will impact society. They have formulated a plan which is now in active deployment in the state of Puebla, associated with several universities, for entrepreneurship education and for business incubators, to encourage the students and others to work together for new enterprises.

TRIZ Journal readers are familiar with problems in the construction industry. The conference had 3 very exciting papers on the use of TRIZ to solve problems in materials development for construction to improve strength and life of materials and to reduce cost (both for the producer and for the user, and for society by reducing energy costs.)

1. Sergio Uribe from Cemex showed the TRIZ adoption process, and how Cemex is combining TRIZ with training, software, support, and management systems to increase adoption and accelerate project completion throughout the company
2. J. C. Rubio Ávalos and his colleagues at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo and with the support of government agencies used TRIZ for breakthrough improvements in phosforescent concrete, flexible window materials, strong membranes, and inorganic foams. In each case they used very basic TRIZ principles (such as the 40 principles and the separation principles) plus the concept of ideality, to make extreme improvements.
3. Alfonso Moreno Salazar and his colleagues in Guadalajara reported on developments in the use of foam panels for both home and industrial construction. The new techniques make very energy-efficient buildings possible with much less labor and use of raw materials, using classical contradiction resolution, applied in a multi-parameter environment.

Professor Rafael Oropeza Monterrubio both entertained and educated the audience—as the last speaker before lunch he had the challenge of keeping people engaged! His study of the failures of leadership in traditional organizations and his recommendations for structural changes, based on the application of TRIZ to management problems, were very well received.

Laura Ponce Garcia presented an extensive study of the opportunities for improvement in the hospitality industry, mostly focused on hotels, and the many possibilities made possible by the methods of understanding of customers' needs and the use of information technology.

Christian Signoret & Avraam Serediski (Mexico and France) revived one of the TRIZ methods developed in the mid-1980s to increase the Ideality of a system: the Integration of Alternative Systems. The process was illustrated with an agricultural case study and a student project in rocket design. It produces very dramatic results very quickly, if the practioner has a good understanding of the relationships of the functions and subsystems of the system that is being improved.

Guillermo Cortes Robles Institute Technologica in Orizaba, Veracruz, MX, did two presentations on the use of Alternative Failure Determination to increase safety of industrial machinery. They were very elegant case studies, using the resources of the system to solve the problem, once the problem was understood. His data on the need to improve industrial safety made a strong case.

Pedro Sariego P showed 3 cases from the Chilean mining industry The case studies illustrated specific TRIZ methods, with considerable Six Sigma thinking in the identification of the problems:

1. Elimination of a contradiction: How to position the elecrolytic process in the chain of cathodes in hydrometalurgical processing of copper
2. Su-Field analysis: Problem of an elbow in the discharge of a lime production process
3. ARIZ: Removing large rocks that get stuck in the jaws of a crushing machine in a copper processing system.

Javier Rivera Ramírez discussed his work with Rosario Vidal Nadal on methods of managing innovation in an environment where science, technology and design have evolved without always being focused on the needs of the customer, and pointed out possible ways to manage both the people and the processes to enhance innovation.

Edgardo Cordoba's fascinating presentation on the seventh generation of quality, presented as a new paradigm of TRIZ, had much new data that traced the evolution of the quality control, quality improvement, and pro-active quality movements, and suggested that the predictive properties of TRIZ would contribute to the future of quality in many ways.

Day 4 was devoted to tutorials. I did a half-day workshop on how to teach TRIZ, focusing on understanding the learning process before trying to do any teaching. Jack Hipple did a full-day program on the integration of TRIZ with many other tools and methods, and Noel Leon did an intensive half-day session for TRIZ beginners. I missed the party that the 4 organizations that were sharing the Expo center for the week of innovation presented on Saturday night (had to run to the airport) but I hope that this report shows the organizing committee of AMETRIZ that their efforts were appreciated!

Photo: Rafael Fargas, Noel Leon, and keynote speakers Andrew Brown and Mansour Ashtiani.

Current discussion about innovation has been dominated by the need to create a culture for institutionalizing innovation.

I posed the question "What does culture for innovation entail?" to my students representing cultures of France, China, Korea, Azerbaijan, USA, India, Spain and Romania. (I would like to hear from you about culture change that you have experienced at corporations. Please share your stories.)

I got the following responses:

• Rules and standards
• Objectives/purpose/goal
• Code of Ethics
• Work atmosphere
• Social responsibility/ caring
• Listening
• Bureaucracy – Speed of decision making
• Communication
• Preferences and interests
• Hierarchy/ structure
• Shared benefits
• History/ traditions
• Rewarding failures
• Recognizing successes
• Motivation
• Help/ support

Returning to the creating culture for innovation how does one take into account all the above aspects of culture? One can see that it is almost redesigning a corporation for innovation to change the culture. I think it would be a very difficult task. Can we really change the corporate culture for innovation? Or should we focusing on installing process for innovation in a given culture? In the recently concluded Business Innovation Conference, 5 out of 30 presentations were geared towards the ‘culture'.

AMETRIZ (The TRIZ Association of Mexico) changed the dates of the III Congreso Iberoamericano de Inovacion Tecnologica to participate in the inauguration of the new (Magnificent!) Expo conference center of Guadalajara with simultaneous meetings of Universitronica 2008, Creanimax (animation and video games) MexEEDev (Mexico Electronics and Embedded Developers Forum), and honoring the International Week of Learning, Innovation, and High Technology (my translation!)

Because of the date change, I was unable to participate in Day 1. Zinovy Royzen's tutorial on the TOPS method of function analysis had 50 very active participants in the morning, who then learned to apply TRIZ to processes in Edgardo Cordova's tutorial in the afternoon.

Day 2 is the plenary session, which opened with greetings from the officials of the state of Jalisco, the conference center, and the organizers. We were represented on the podium by Rafael Farga, the local organizer of the Congreso. Thanks to Rafael, and to Noel Leon and Edgardo Cordova who organized the technical program, for a great meeting. As always in these commentaries, this will be a personal report—if readers want the full program, see http://www.ametriz.com/schedule_third_conference_triz.php. The conference proceedings will be available for purchase from AMETRIZ after the conference.

Randall Marín, Senior Test Engineer from Intel in Costa Rica delivered the kickoff speech for our session. He presented the history of the semiconductor industry and Intel's place in the industry, and the development of TRIZ at Intel. This is the same story that Amir Roggel has presented to audiences in Japan, the US and Europe, but Randall made it fresh with new stories from the Intel user conferences--applications of TRIZ to solve problems and to prevent problems in the most stressing manufacturing environment now in use. Randall's slide show tour of the Costa Rica Innovation Center made a lot of people jealous—a great environment for TRIZ, both the physical place and the problem-solving orientation of the culture. The match between the Intel culture and the TRIZ emphasis on removing problems, not just making trade-offs has helped TRIZ propagate rapidly throughout the manufacturing sector of the company.

Photos: Marin, Hipple, Royzen, Brown

Jack Hipple is well-known to the TRIZ Journal and Real Innovation audiences. His talk on "Parallel Universes" got the audience involved in several case studies. He showed how the air traffic control display developers greatly improved the ability of a controller to notice a bad situation in time to do something about it (hey, this is important to me—I'm a pilot and a passenger!) by studying what is done in chemical plant control systems, nuclear power control, and computer game design. Jack's illustration of the key skill of translating jargon into general language, so that you can look for the parallels in other technological "universes" was both helpful and entertaining. Thanks, Jack!

Mansour Ashtiani is the President of the Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies and the TRIZ advocate at the Delphi company. He gave the audience a very concise history of the development of TRIZ and the work of the Altshuller Institute to promote TRIZ, and suggested some future North-America wide collaboration with AMETRIZ.

Margarita de la Fuente y Xavier Gonzalez is an expert in many areas of innovation, including the de Bono and Goldratt thinking systems. Today she talked about the process of administration of innovation programs in business, based on the experiences that she and her co-authors have in the food and food processing industries (KFC, Frito-Lay, Nabisco and other big brands.) A key finding from their study is that organizational culture and organizational alignment are essential to innovation, seen as 2 legs of a stool. The third, essential leg, is the realization that innovation applies to all aspects of the company—service and product delivery, production, business processes, understanding non-users as well as users, regulatory requirements, and many others.

Zinovy Royzen gave an abbreviated paper on the TOP model, which he introduced several years ago and has continued to develop. (TOP= Tool, Object, Product) and showed how to use it to define problems. He injected much interesting historical information about the development of function analysis in TRIZ by many researchers (other than Altshuller). Zinovy's case study on the transformer was a great introduction to the idea of trimming, both for experienced practioners and beginners alike.

I presented my new thinking on teaching TRIZ to beginners (to be published in the TRIZ Journal in December—be patient). What's new? It isn't about TEACHING—it is about LEARNING. And while many of us are teachers, all of us are learners, so learning about how people learn will help everybody. Good news, TRIZ is right: somebody someplace has already solved this problem, and I bring a lot of education research together and show how to apply it to TRIZ learning.

Concluding speaker of the day was Dr. Andrew Brown from Delphi, who has been a spectacularly popular speaker at TRIZCON meetings, and who is a member of several international study commissions on the future of the transportation industry. The audience left in a state of high excitement about the future of transportation, the future of technology, and the future of the world.

Prakasan Kappoth (Prakash) is a Senior Manager working as a Systematic innovation facilitator and innovation consultant at MindTree Ltd., Bangalore, India; a mid-sized IT Service Company delivering techno-business solutions to clients across the globe. He helps MindTree's internal and external customers with identifying and solving technical and non-technical problems using structured innovation techniques (specializing in TRIZ).

In his capacity he is also working toward his Ideal Final Result (IFR) of "not doing his job – or others doing his job" by implementing continuous learning platforms for structured innovation and effective thinking focusing on engineers and leadership team. He recently started working with educational institutions (engineering and business) providing them hands-on systematic innovation workshops and frequent lectures to inculcate creative thinking for the future workforce (more ideal solution).

He has been in the IT industry for over 12 years; He has worked in a variety of technical domains including network management, industrial automation, image processing, consumer and embedded appliances, automotive and storage. He is an active student recently completed his MBA besides Dip in IT, Textile and Fashion Technology, and is now enrolled in a psychology course.

Prakash also represents ETRIA (European TRIZ Association) in India as a global coordinator, Member, Altshuller Institute of TRIZ Studies, and founded the TRIZ India Forum, a not-for-profit platform bringing together TRIZ enthusiasts from India.

Saturday dawned (well, 8:30) with more than 100 people attending the workshops on innovation, lean, six sigma, collaboration, and international business. The informal theme of the Friday session was emphasized by several of the presenters: let's stop talking about "it" (innovation, or quality, or whatever!) and start doing "it."

Jeannine Siviy, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute kicked off the plenary session by addressing "Innovation in Engineering Process: Multimodel Harmonization." She explained the problem of multiple model environments, in which a variety of models for corporate management and improvement are deployed at different hierarchical levels, across functions, using a variety of methodologies. For example, one company might have improvement initiatives using six sigma, ISO certification, improving enterprise governance, changing configuration management, and using CMMI (software methodology improvement.) This creates competition for resources, contradictory metrics, and duplication of work without any increase in benefits. The harmonization research is creating a unifying structure based on a philosophical orientation: go for performance first, the compliance will come, rather than an elaborate checklist approach. The case study of the approach used by Lockheed Martin was very helpful, and was also an illustration of the "positive deviant" method explained by Roberto Saco on Day 1.

Darrell Mann traveled to Zacatecas by way of Australia and the US (next stop Austria!) Darrell needs no introduction to the TRIZ Journal and Real Innovation readers. The Forum audience was very receptive to his presentation "Breakthrough Software Design and the Need for Breaking Rules." He used Infosys specifically and India more generally as benchmarks for development of IT in all areas. (89,000 employees. 8000 new last year, one million applicants for the new jobs.) He compared the well-known software design patterns to the TRIZ principles for innovative problem solving, and reported on research that expands the patterns by a factor of 500. Darrell reported that the research shows that there are millions of systems, but only hundreds of problems and tens of successful solutions (no surprise to our TRIZ readers.) He presented a new acronym that was helpful to the people hearing about TRIZ for the first time:

PERFECT –IFR. Get rid of trade-offs

ESCAPE –from the box. Disrupt your patterns of thinking.

RESOURCES –use all resources to solve the problem, and don't forget that the knowledge of the situation is a resource.

FUNCTIONS—understand the job the customer is trying to do.

EMERGENCE-patterns of evolution. The audience was very impressed by the universality of the patterns

CONTRADICTIONS – Eliminate them! Software uses the same 40 principles, but re-interpreted for the nature of software

TURTLES—Systems are fractal (the turtles are part of a long joke.)

Readers who want more of Darrell's great examples are invited to go to the free downloads section of www.systematic-innovation.com

The after lunch speakers shared success stories from businesses in Mexico, and some of the resources that are available for businesses that need help starting innovation or quality initiatives, or both.

Jorge Perez-Rubio from the AMA training and consulting organization challenged the participants with "Leading Innovation: a unique opportunity for Mexico," emphasizing the unique resources of people, education, location, and natural resources that Mexican companies can access.

Victor Hugo Arellano Lopez, Director of Operations for Texas Instruments de Mexico, reminded the audience of TI's long and distinguished innovation history (revolutionized the exploration for oil, invented the integrated circuit, developed infrared cameras, created new industries with the DSP and DLP—even won the Emmy for how technology changed entertainment!) He showed how TI de M's employees are the foundation of its continuous innovation and quality improvement efforts, and gave examples of the reward and recognition system that is a fundamental part of TI's process.

David Rios Jara explained "Regional Innovation Systems" which had been benchmarked for products, services and management models. Experience in Europe for small and medium-sized enterprises was considered particularly relevant to Mexico. They found that regional systems are better than trying to build big national or mult-region systems— they are more in touch with the technology and resources of the region.

Fernando Avila, Quality Assurance Manager of the Tequila Sauza Company gave the concluding address, "Foundations of Value: Statistics, Quality and Competitiveness." The audience appreciated his strong focus on quality defined as satisfying the customers' needs, and his entertaining stories about the tequila business. His conclusion that quality alone is not sufficient for competiveness was well-received.

Temo and the entire staff of CIMAT got a very well-deserved round of applause from the audience for an excellent program.

In 2009, Real Innovation's sister website, iSixSigma, will host its first annual Summit and Awards in Miami. Although there are some who debate whether innovation and process improvement can work together, we know that as successful as they can be on their own, combined they are unstoppable!

If your company also practices Six Sigma and systematic innovation, take the time to nominate a breakthrough innovation project for the Largest-Breakthrough Improvement Projects. Your project could be recognized at the awards breakfast AND highlighted in the March/April 2009 issue of iSixSigma Magazine.

The First National Forum for Organizational Competitiveness through Innovation and Quality convened Sept. 26-7 in Zacatecas, Mexico, a World Heritage city and a growing center of business and academic innovation. The conference was organized by Dr. Cuauhtémoc Lemus Olalde ("Temo") and the staff of CIMAT, the mathematics research institute; they brought together an impressive cross-section of research, business, education and government resources to learn from each other's experiences. The government of the state of Zacatecas was strongly represented: Secretaries of Education, Commerce, and Technology participated in the Forum personally, and staff members from several other departments were present.

The business community of Zacatecas is primarily small and medium-sized enterprises, with a heavy concentration of software and systems engineering business, and the applied research at CIMAT focuses on software development that enables and enhances enterprise functions—I had enlightening conversations with researchers working on strategic planning, decision making, failure modes and effects analysis, and balanced scorecard systems (and several projects that incorporate TRIZ elements!) About half of the presentations and workshops at the Forum are specifically oriented to the software-centric businesses, and half were more general.

This is a personal report, not a comprehensive summary of the conference, limited to the sessions that I attended (and my moderate ability to listen in Spanish while thinking in English) or what I heard from other participants. For the complete program, list of sponsors and organizers, see http://www.cimat.mx/Eventos/primerforoinnovacion/ The morning session started with brief welcoming addresses by the government officials, business and academic leaders, on the general theme that we know that innovation and quality are both important, but we don't always know how to get from the general sentiment to application and implementation, and we welcome the Forum as an opportunity to advance our capabilities.

Roberto Saco, President of the American Society for Quality, was the lead speaker. His presentation "Innovation from Within: The Soft Power of Positive Deviance" emphasized that all innovation—hardware, software, organizational structure, operational systems—requires behavior changes. The theory of positive deviance emphasizes using the resources of the community to solve its own problems by finding the unusual (deviant!) members of the community who are thriving, and learn from their solutions to help the rest. Roberto had a pointed and emotionally moving case study to illustrate his points, showing how the Save the Children program in Vietnam used the creativity of 2 world-wide staff, local community participants and the parents of the children to make radical improvement in the problem of low-weight children using only the local resource (the nutritional value of the same vegetables that are in the ordinary diet can be dramatically increased when they are cooked in different combinations, for example.) Positive deviance was a new concept for me—look for more "commentary" columns as I learn more about it.

"Why Business Needs to Innovate and How to Do It" is my translation of the title of the talk by Rodulfo M. Rodriguez Gutierrez, visiting Zacatecas from the Polytechnic University of Catalunya. He emphasized the increasingly rapid cycles of product introduction, and the increasingly global competition in all fields, which combine to make innovation the only survivable business strategy. He gave numerous examples, emphasizing that service businesses need the same emphasis on innovation as product businesses.

Manuel Liñan is a six sigma master black belt and business consultant from Monterrey, with projects in Spain, France, Poland, US, and elsewhere. His talk, "TRES: The strategy for competitiveness" used the model of Technical, Alignment, Structural, and Social elements (TRES in Spanish-trust me) for understanding customers, your own company, and the environment, in order to decide how to be competitive. He showed the extension of the principles of lean process improvement to the lean enterprise as an example of how it might be necessary to change all 4 elements of a company's operation to be competitive in a changing world.

I was the concluding speaker for the morning. "Enhance Business Innovation with TRIZ" was a 40 minute TRIZ introduction, emphasizing the universality of TRIZ for small and large, local and global, hardware and software, and emphasizing that the audience members who are hearing about TRIZ for the first time can start using it, and can learn by using it. Fortunately, Darrell Mann will be speaking tomorrow on TRIZ for software, and will have time to give the software participants some specific guidance.

The speakers were then organized into a panel for questions and answers. Most of the questions were about how to start innovation initiatives, and the panel differed widely, from the strongly traditional (reward systems, measurement systems, traditional bonus systems based on following the rules, etc.) to the radically un-managed (create a positive environment then let things happen, don't try to control it.) Questions about how to improve the competitiveness of Mexico, or the competitiveness of Zacatecas, were mostly answered at the global level, with the emphasis on doing what your customers need, and taking advantage of your local resources (for example, the strength of the software industry in Zacatecas is due to the local university and research centers) and using government agencies to build infrastructure and reduce inhibiting factors.

After lunch we had 6 workshops, then a cultural evening. Zacatecas was originally a mining center, and the miners used the rhythms of their work to create very rhythmic music. Somehow, this became a festive event Callejoneada Típica Zacatecana where musicians walk around the town with a donkey who carries the drums and the supply of mescal, followed by all the participants in the event who sing, play the drums, and drink the mescal. (OK, the donkey is a myth. We carried the mescal, and the musicians carried the drums and we danced and walked and drank and danced.) AFTER that is dinner!

Sometime ago, I read that a new technology officer of a leading computer manufacturing company has discontinued R&D projects that go beyond 2-3 years. The top 20 or so projects were retained for generating short term revenue. Leadership in other companies have adopted the similar strategy to productize R&D. To an extent I believe R&D must become more business focused, efficient and productive, however, I do not believe R&D should be required to generate revenue in the short term. Instead, R&D organizations must become a source of profitable revenue growth, not only in short term but also in long term. There is a difference between revenue growth and revenue generation

For the sake of next quarter, corporations are forsaking future. First no R&D has been so efficient that it can produce additional revenue in just one or even two quarters. Secondly, their designs have been marginal at best for reproducibility. To accommodate design marginalities manufacturing organizations generally struggle for sometime resulting in wastage of precious time and losing potential competitive advantage. Thirdly, even if the new products are released due to reprioritization, early launchers in most cases cut sales of their own profitable products and causes operating loss due to poor initial profit margin. Hence, the R&D projects prioritized for short-term gain are very unlikely to produce desired results.

While no one would undermine the value of immediate cash flow, we need to continue to invest for long term sustenance. Every major firm must continue to invest in R&D for short term as well as long term. Real challenge is the sensible allocation of R&D investment. The R&D must take a 15 or 20-year perspective, and define a portfolio that would include some research on fundamental (F) discoveries, platform (P) development, derivative (D) products, and create plug-in opportunities for partners to innovate variation solutions (V) on their platform and derivative products. The timeline for F, P, D, V innovations vary from longer term 15 years to on demand in real time. Such breakdown of innovations would allow a sensible allocation of R&D resources. Just totally shutting down the long term research is a very short-sighted strategy, or senseless act. Such acts leave no room for survival, killing any chance for long term competitive advantage. Short term acts are no strategy.

What do my readers think? Any comments, please?

My second day in Orlando was about as busy as the first so forgive me if I gloss over some of the details as I try to share as much as I can from my audience view.

The first two keynotes focused on architecture. "How Architecture Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Collective Intelligence" was presented by Dr. Gunter Henn (Henn Architekten) and Tom Allen (MIT, Sloan School). They co-authored The Organization and Architecture of Innovation and shared some of their findings from their years of research. A main finding? Internal technical communication is needed to excel at innovation. "Eighty percent of all innovative ideas arise from face-to-face communication."

Henn and Allen explained that innovation can't be organized, but the innovation process can be. They broke down the idea further by saying that innovation happens with a synchronization between time and space. (The challenges of remote team problem solving was looked at in the June 2008 issue of The TRIZ Journal – take a look for more on this topic.)

Next up was Dr. Andrew Lippman from MIT's Media Lab on "Architectures for Innovation: The End of Products." Things are changing in that agility and relationships trump stability in today's global marketplace. Globalization isn't unimportant, but socialization is more important. It boils down to a "we" vs. "I" debate – the "solution" vs. the "problem." Once again, the importance of defining the problem comes into play!

This afternoon I headed back into the Guru track. First up, Jeffrey Phillips (VP, Innovation at OVO, also this track's chair AND a Real Innovation author) with Kim McEachron (VP, Human Resources at Medtronic) on "Innovation: A People Centric Process."

Who should be on an innovation team? Someone comfortable with ambiguity! They identified four primary roles:

1. Innovator or idea generator (involved in the first step)
2. Scouts or trend spotters (often spread out in companies, so they can be hard to take advantage of/synthesize)
3. Idea sponsor (usually a more senior employee – business owner or project manager)
4. Evaluators (often an ad hoc process with a broad array of people involved)

Along with those necessary team members, there are also five barriers to developing a successful innovation team:

1. Compensation
2. Evaluation
3. Training
4. Recognition/reward
5. Cultural barries

Along with that, another message repeated throughout this conference: fail! And fail early. Failure is not mistakes. "Mistakes produce no new or useful information and are without value." Failure, and learning from those failures, can lead to later successes.

The last session of this track was a shared presentation among three speakers: Frank Tyneski (Executive Director, Industrial Designers Society of America - IDSA), Lou Lenzi (SVP, Product Development, Audiovox Accessories Corporation) and Bruce Claxton (Motorola). They each talked about industrial design and its importance in the product development process. A favorite buzzword was "no compromise!" For those of you who have delved into TRIZ, you know that eliminating trade-offs/contradictions is an important tool of the methodology. Although TRIZ wasn't mentioned in the presentation, the importance of designing the ideal and not accepting compromises was clear.

All in all, it was an interesting two days of engaging speakers and conversations. Thanks for sharing the experience with me!

I'm in Orlando for a few days attending the Product Development and Management Association's 32nd Annual International Conference. It's been a busy and fun day; I'll try to sum it up here! I do have to say at the start that it's been great to talk to people who know what TRIZ is!

The first of the morning's keynotes was "From Passion to Reality: The Story of iRobot" by co-founder Helen Greiner. (Before she got into the business of her talk she satisfied the curiousity of the audience about her accent – a mix of London where she was born with Long Island and Boston thrown in for good measure!) One of iRobot's big lessons was to incorporate users into their product development; what users do is often a mystery and surprise until the developers/design see them using the products.

Next up was "The Next Generation of 'Fast:' Visual Problem-solving & Decision-making Using Oobeya, the 'Big Room'" by Takashi Tanaka (QV System, Inc.) and Don Kieffer (formerly of Harley-Davidson). Oobeya means "big room" in Japanese and is one small piece of the Toyota Management System.

The big room is all about human interaction and finding clear targets (even if they are unreasonable or unachievable) and accountabilities. Not for the first time today, the importance of finding/defining the root problem was raised. If the targets aren't correct, the execution will not matter.

Focus on a quick and clear resolution of conflicts in an open and collaborative way. Picture a wall covered in Post-its (I have photos, but forget the cord to connect my camera to the laptop so pictures will follow later!) and using them to specify the progress/problems/make decisions.

This afternoon I sat in on the "Inside the Guru's Studio" track. First up? Matt Calman, SVP and innovation executive from Bank of America with "Inside Bank of America's Global Tech & Ops Innovation Lab." The lab is a team of seven at this time: 3 concept developers, 2 prototype developers, a technical lead and a lab director. They are a mix of ages, education and experience levels; everybody does everything.

The innovation lab focuses on everything "from 'twinkle' to launch." They prototype (pure creativity), which leads to proof of concepts (a combination of prototyping with existing technology/systems). They use the prototyping to build requirements, not vice versa – another great way of being sure to identify the "right" problem. With a great deal of collaboration from discussion groups, voting systems and expert assessment they are able to progress to deciding to take an idea to market.

Next up was Adam Nash, Sr. Director, Product at LinkedIn.com with "Building a World Class Web 2.0 Product Organization." Their focus is how to make business people more productive. To do this, they use (many) small, cross-functional teams with the product managers as force multipliers who help define/set prioritizations for the business. Transparency is important in LinkedIn's processes as well with a corporate wiki - specifications are open and transparent to all. The roadmap is a public document that helps reinforce the message that it is okay to be wrong and make mistakes.

And, in another repeated message of the day, Nash touted the importance of framing the problem as it "defines the solution!" Going along with that, rather than focusing on ROI, they focus on making LinkedIn useful and engaging, "knowing" that ROI will follow.

The last of the Guru sessions this afternoon was Rob Wallace from Wallace Church, "Reinventing Innovation: The 10 Best Practices of the Design-led Innovation Process."

1. Sharpen the ax (see quote from Abraham Lincoln)
2. Craft the team
3. Fund the process
4. Own an experience
5. Visualize the experience
6. New research methods
7. Integrate the team
8. Implement
9. Synthesize
10. Re-invent
11. (Yes, this was a surprise at the end of his presentation!) Determine ROI

The evening's keynote was Bumper Carroll from The Second City, "Improvise to Innovate." Since The Second City is all about performance and interaction, it should be no surprise that his presentation had the audience interacting in several different ways. I didn't have much time to take notes, but overall his three points were:

1. Set the stage for everyday innovation
2. Invite customers to co-create
3. Killer ideas are rare; idea killers are a dime a dozen.

Whew! That was a busy day! More to follow tomorrow!

Paul Filmore is reporting from The Third TRIZ Symposium in Japan.---------

I have arrived to my second Japan TRIZ conference near Kyoto. The official title is ‘The 4th TRIZ Symposium in Japan'. After a 12 hour flight, three trains; I have finally arrived. And ‘arrive' is the operative word, because to arrive in Japan is like few other countries. Immediately one is aware of ‘contradictions'. A land very flat with sudden dramatic mountains, beautiful forests and dense industry, frantic activity and inner peace, modern architecture and ancient temples, to name but a few i.e., a TRIZ practitioners paradise!

Out my bedroom window I see Lake Biwa; a lake as big as a sea. In the foreground are long sticks appearing from the water in regular patterns. What is the ‘function of these I wonder?

My Japanese friends here tell me these are to guide fish to a small area where nets can be placed. This system works by the knowledge that when fish find their way blocked they tend to always swim towards deeper water. As one can see from the photos the sticks are often further apart than a fish's dimensions, but work I assume because when the fish starts to swim from a blockage, they keep going in one direction. This approach seems to be symbolic of a key area of TRIZ, that of really understanding the underlying functionality (or physical principle) in any process. Please get back to me if I have missed something here! I was also wondering if the heights of the sticks allow transmission of vibrations from the wind to produce an acoustic fence underwater, enhancing the fish channelling effect?

The day started with an exquisite breakfast (with hardly any food I recognised). A warm greeting waited at registration for the pre session delegates. The choice (?) was to learn about TRIZ in Japanese or for a detailed discussion of sharing individual TRIZ experience. The second option proved to be interesting not least in catching up with colleagues' developments from a year ago. It also developed into interesting speculation of where TRIZ is going.

The formal opening was after lunch, by Toshihiro Hayashi, chairperson of the Japan TRIZ Society Board. He presented an interesting analysis of the growth in participants over the last four years to this conference. Although the total number of participants was lower (167) this year (due to a number of reasons), those presenting had increased from 34 to 46. The first Keynote was from Amir Roggel who gave a presentation of Intel, innovation and the TRIZ developments at Intel worldwide. Two significant points stood out. Firstly that Intel has recognised that TRIZ has made Intel ‘many millions', far offsetting ALL the costs associated introducing TRIZ. Secondly that TRIZ is being significantly ramped up with over 1000 employees having gained level 1 (5days), over 200 at level 2 (another 5 days) and ~40 at level 3 (20 days).

After the Keynote, there followed a number of sessions in parallel. All presentations were dual projected in English and Japanese, with translation provided for question sessions. I gave a paper which followed on research from last year's presentation of identifying indicators associated with highly effective engineers and then linking these to TRIZ tools. This year I presented the results of associating Lean and 6Sigma tools with the same indicators. What I found from initial analysis was that Lean, 6Sigma and Lean Six Sigma had ‘less rich toolsets' associated with these indicators. This rather implying that TRIZ has some significant advantages over traditional approaches! One other session of note was from Dr Toru Nakagawa reporting on the latest developments of USIT. This approach is gaining strength in Japan, judging on the number of papers to be presented using this. I rather liked Toru's ‘Six Box' overview of the USIT procedure developed using Data Flow Diagram visualisation (see diagram). I have always felt that the ‘four boxes' representation of ‘general' TRIZ, used often to promote TRIZ, trivialised TRIZ in the minds of new comers.

The evening began with a buffet dinner allowing people to move around and ‘communicate' with each other. This worked very well and gave many opportunities to talk and link up. The evening closed with an optional classical guitar concert from Ireland's premier guitarist, Catherine Thom.

Toru Nakagawa exclaimed, ‘a very beautiful and relaxing recital'.

What a day! I look forward to tomorrow.

Links for further information

• Conference: http://www.osaka-gu.ac.jp/php/nakagawa/TRIZ/eTRIZ/
• Hotel & Lake Biwa: http://www.osaka-gu.ac.jp/php/nakagawa/TRIZ/eTRIZ/elinksref/eJapanTRIZ-CB/e4thTRIZSymp2008Pre.html#Venue
• Catherine Thom: www.CatherineThom.com

Day 3 of the Business Innovation Conference opened with the address by Dr. Gautam Sardar on "Innovation at Tata Consultancy Services" –since the Tata group of companies is everything from the 1880's original tea producers to the $2500 car and Jaguar automobiles and giant IT companies in many countries, he had a lot of history and a lot of current activities to draw on. His main theme was co-innovation, building collaborative frameworks using the innovation "ecosystem" of IT and human knowledge resources, using Tata's resources and the resources of their entire client community to help solve each new problem. The cost of creating sophisticated systems, such as virtual reality simulations, is very high, and creating the co-innovation community shares the costs among participants. The delicate issue of intellectual property in shared knowledge situations is still in active development. (Photo: G. Sardar)

Reminder: this is a personal report, NOT a comprehensive review—see www.businessinnovationconference.com for the complete agenda. I chose Track 1, which started with Raj Datta, VP of Mindtree, discussing the knowledge management system at Mindtree, and how it is a key element of the innovation system. He introduced a mixed audience to the structure, vocabulary, and methods of knowledge management, so that we could understand how Mindtree has used KM as a key element of innovation. Get-Share-Apply-Learn-Innovate is the "virtuous cycle" of Knowledge. In many cases KM is only Get or Get & Share, and that is the broken cycle and not effective. Many participants were fascinated by the self-organizing knowledge communities (and the similarity to Kim Johnson's report yesterday on the 3M GRIT and TechForum communities.) The emphasis is on peer learning and face-to-face interaction.

Mindtree is an active TRIZ-using company, and it was interesting to hear the observations on TRIZ of a non-advocate. Datta said that they encourage people to find the methods that work best for them (TRIZ, lateral thinking, mind mapping, many other methods) and to learn and use the methods that are the best fit, both on their own work and on collaborative projects.

Krishna Kumar of Microsoft had a bunch of very scary statistics (3000 new books are published every day. By 2010, information will be doubling every 72 hours….) as the lead-in to his talk about teaching students in all global environments how to be prepared for jobs that don't exist that require continual innovation.

Sarah Caldicott's presentation was based on her book, "Innovate Like Edison" and the five competencies of innovation. Both the historical framework (she is Edison's grand-niece and part of the research team that is analyzing his notebooks) and the practical how-to orientation made this talk a highlight of the conference. Each competency has 5 supporting concepts—here's a sample:

1. Solution Centered Mindset
2. Kaleidoscopic Thinking
1. Maintain a Notebook
2. Practice "Ideaphoria"
3. Discern Patterns
4. Express Ideas Visually
5. Explore the Road NOT Taken
3. Full Spectrum Engagement
4. Master Mind Collaboration
5. Super Value Creation

Sean O'Toole President and Chief Executive Officer, GiftCertificates.com did the lunchtime keynote speech, emphasizing that his experiences at his own company, American Express, and McKinsey all taught him that trust among the members of the team and trust of management in its own judgment (they KNOW that cutting the training budget is dumb!) are the key elements of an innovation environment.

Roy Luebke of Innovationedge moved us toward the end of the conference with a nice approach to getting people to summarize their learning from the conference, and, as a graduate of the Institute of Design at IIT, tied the learning back to Whitney's talk last night.

The conference ended with discussion of adding all the attendees to the Innovation Network so that conversation and networking could continue on-line and at informal events throughout the year.

Many thanks to Praveen Gupta for his hard work and dedication to making this event happen. He is now looking for people to join the organizing commitee for future events. (Photo: Keynote speaker Tony Reyes -left, Chairman Praveen Gupta -right.)

The audience was immediately fascinated by the opening talk by Prof. Charles Cooney, director of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT. The Deshpande center is a unique institute that sponsors academic research on the process of innovation. Cooney surprised the audience with his claim that both the academic and venture capital communities are risk averse (in different ways) and that rather small grants in the right way at the right time can bridge the gap between them. None of the money goes to developing business plans—that comes much later in the innovation cycle. His "value chain" is easy to remember: "Idea®Invent®Innovate®Impact " and his lessons learned list has a small number of critical risk reduction steps at each interface. Most interesting to the Business Innovation Conference audience were

1. The method of evaluating the proposals for potential market application, 2-3 years in advance of venture capital investment.
2. Replicating the model in multiple countries and universities, which is just starting now.

I was the chair of track 2 for the rest of the morning, so readers interested in track 1 should consult the conference website, www.businessinnovationconference.com. Kim Johnson, consultant from Minneapolis-St. Paul (and PMI, and PDMA, and Scanlon network and …) started track 2 with a great anecdotal talk about 3M's GRIT—the Grass Roots Innovation Teams. Those not familiar with 3M were amazed by the "McKnight Principles" from 1948, which had a very "modern" tone regarding the innovation culture of the organization.

Langdon Morris from Innovationlabs presented a structure for creating an innovation culture. He used many visual metaphors and analogies to explain his model, which the audience found very helpful, and illustrated the theory with the Coca Cola innovation case study. The difference between the Status Quo Culture and the Innovation Culture are remarkable—no need for me to take notes, since Langdon generously offered the audience (and our friends) free downloads of his book "Permanent Innovation" and the conference paper, from www.permanentinnovation.com

Bill Burnett from W. Burnett LLC presented "Steps to become an innovative company" that had some points in common with Morris' method and some significant differences. The story of Nummi (the joint GM/Toyota automobile assembly plant started in 1985) is relevant, since it demonstrated radical change with the no change in the worker population. Nummi had the highest rate of suggestions (product and process improvements) and the highest rate of line shut-down (to prevent quality problems from continuing) in part because of policy changes to remove fear from the system, and in part from creating an infrastructure so that the employee got positive feedback: suggestions were implemented, problems were fixed. A key strategy (illustrated with several stories) was removing vocabulary that has implications of Adult-Child (manager-worker, superior-subordinate) and replacing it with Adult-Adult vocabulary (colleague, teammate, team member).

This was a very full conference agenda—even lunch had a speaker. Tony Reyes, CEO of CartonCraft, gave a delightful, informal talk on how he acquired a company doing less than $5 million/year in business and grew it to triple that size in 5 years by creating a culture of daily innovation based trust and learning. Photo: Tony Reyes networking with the participants.

"Market factor co-evolution" is the theme of Tom Duening, director of the Entrepreneurial Program at Arizona State University. He took us back to basics, to Drucker's statement that "the objective of all healthy enterprises is to strive constantly to create greater customer value." Their curriculum includes "opportunity recognition"—the breakthrough was realizing that there a method for opportunity recognition, and it is teachable and learnable. He used the examples of Cirque du Soleil and Yellowtail Wine, from the Blue Ocean strategy book to illustrate the method of seeing opportunities.

I had the challenge of introducing TRIZ in one hour to the Business Innovation Conference attendees who had never heard of TRIZ—we told delegates who had knowledge of TRIZ to go to the other session. We should get a lot of new TRIZ Journal readers from this, and many people going back to their organizations to ask new questions.

Praveen Gupta had a very interactive session on Measuring Innovation. The audience challenged all the methods of measuring innovation and the need for making the measurements. He brought the whole range of views together by pointing out the relationship between outcomes and process measures.

Even the reception had a keynote speaker! Patrick Whitney, Director of the Institute of Design at IIT talked about the role of design in translating customer needs for services and products into concepts that can be developed, produced, and delivered.

There are two meetings this week. See http://www.osaka-gu.ac.jp/php/nakagawa/TRIZ/eTRIZ/ for the full final program of the Japan TRIZ Symposium. We'll have reports later in the week from traveler Paul Filmore.

I'm reporting this week from the Business Innovation Conference in suburban Chicago, IL, USA, at the Rice Campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. To see the agenda, abstracts, and speaker information, see the conference website at www.businessinnovationconference.com. Chairman (and Real Innovation commentator) Praveen Gupta put together a stellar conference committee with academic, consulting, and commercial participation, and brought together a remarkable group of speakers. "Business Innovation" isn't just a brochure title—the speakers are carefully selected to cover the topics that are needed to create an innovation culture and innovation successes within companies of all sizes.

Day 1 (Monday) was 6 tutorial sessions, a half-day each. My reporting will be limited, since I was a presenter (on TRIZ, of course!) in the morning session. The participants represented a wide range of organizations—a college that is starting a business innovation curriculum, a pharmaceutical company, and insurance company with a new innovation initiative, some automotive systems producers, and (of course) a whole bunch of consultants. Their prior TRIZ knowledge ranged from none (most had never heard of TRIZ before getting to the conference) to extensive—it was delightful to have Altshuller Institute past president Larry Smith and Project Management Institute Innovation Special Interest Group chair Kim Johnson both participating.

I attended the afternoon session "Synthesis for Innovation" by Bill Burnett. He has exercises to help develop your ability to put 2 old ideas together to get a new idea. Definitely applicable to TRIZ or any of the other methods of idea generation.

Tomorrow: a great line-up of speakers and a lot of networking.

RSS