Commentary by Ellen Domb

2nd Iberoamerican Technological Innovation Congress - Day 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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