Commentary by Ellen Domb

Itinerant Innovation or Traveling TRIZ

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.

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