 Commentary by Ellen Domb Subscribe via Email or RSS |  Biography |
January 23, 2010
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Report from First International Conference on Systematic Innovation |
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This conference has been planned for over a year, and features many innovations in conference organization, as well as the many papers, tutorials, and discussions of all aspects of systematic innovation. For example, tutorial sessions were planned for Saturday and Sunday morning, so that people could participate who might have trouble leaving their jobs for conference sessions. Skype was used (with mixed success due to an overloaded wireless connection) so that Mark Barkan, President of MATRIZ, could give his personal and organizational greetings to the audience. A mix of government agencies, universities, professional societies and organizations were all sponsors of the conference. (See photograph of Welcome sign.)
Even the coffee break was innovative, with the snacks arranged to form a map of Taiwan, with each food item placed in the province where it was made (see photograph of food map.)
Yesterday, participants from the China, Japan, Korea, Russia, the US, Taiwan, and the UK took a tour bus from Hsinchu to Taipei and toured the Chaing Kai Shek memorial, the 101 building, and the National Palace Museum, for a cultural orientation to Taiwan. Today, I was the first tutorial speaker, focusing on the TRIZ aspects of Systematic Innovation, and emphsizing ideality, the use of resources, and the resolution of physical contradictions. The audience of over 100 was participative (well, they laughed at my jokes and made a good effort to apply what they were learning to their own work situations) and appreciative. The main conference started with a group photo of the 150 participants from 14 countries. We were welcomed by Professor L.J.Chen, President-elect of the National Tsing Hua University, which was both sponsor and venue for the conference. He invited us to take advantage of Hsinchu's resources as the science center of Taiwan, as well as the universitiy's scenic, technical, and cultural resources. Professor D. Daniel Sheu, Chairman of the conference and President of the Society for Systematic Innovation, welcomed us and gave a detailed overview of Systematic Innovation, to establish the context of the conference. He mentioned some of the innovations in conference organization, including the launch of the new Journal of Systematic Innovation (an academic, reviewed publication), developed in parallel with the conference, and announced the planning for the second conference in 2011 in Shanghai. (See picture of Daniel welcoming us informally at the reception on Friday evening.) Darrell Mann's keynote address challenged the audience to expand their skills in innovation beyond TRIZ and beyond many of the standard tools that are usually related to TRIZ (QFD, strategic planning, TOC, DOE, Stage Gate, ...) to the dozens of tools and methods that are now part of Systematic Innovation. He developed both a high-level matrix for selecting tools (the rows are the people in your organization, with a row each for senior executives, marketing, product development, and operations, and the columns are the 4 stages of the S-curve) and a "periodic table" showing a way of grouping 60 or more conceptual tools. Since many participants were "graduates" of Darrell's classes in Taiwan in the last several years, they were well-oriented to appreciate the elegance of this form of organization of the constituents of systematic innovation. Of course, Darrell took advantage of the opportunity to announce the publication of 3 new books, as well! The afternoon was capped off with six simultaneous breakout sessions, with 4-5 papers in each (3 in Chinese, 3 in English) and a poster session with 15 papers in Chinese and English. There were many case studies from a wide variety of industries. I was chairing one session, so I could not move around much, but I saw examples from automotive safety, steel processing, paint production, and university research management. The session chairpeople were asked to recommend the best papers in their sessions for futue publication, so I anticipate that Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal readers will see a sample of the best of these papers in the next few months. More tomorrow... |
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Comments [2] | Permalink |
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| posted by Richard Karpinski [ http://Nitpicker.pbwiki.com ] | February 2, 2010 at 2:32 pm |
Please try to follow the example of TED and publish videos of the sessions as free podcasts. More people will want to attend the next one in person. To innovate further, add a wiki page for each session and let the interest and content grow with time. When you make it easy for people to contribute in small pieces, more people will do so. This can also take advantage of fundamental truths of the world wide web: no one has time to educate you if you just ask, but everyone has time to correct you if you say something that is wrong. So let people make wrong claims and capture the corrections for all to read and learn from. If you adopt the IBIS/Dialog-mapping form for some pages, then only questions can be entered without preceding content.. Claims or statements must be in response to a question. It is amazing how much clearer a claim is when you can read the question for which it is an answer. Another clever aspect of dialog mapping is that it can encompass multiple viewpoints in a single document. Further, the questions serve as an index into the discussion of each topic. That is all about one innovation I wish to promote for every conference on topics that matter. When the conference is all about innovation to begin with, we have every reason to share access to that information as widely as we possibly can so that more of humanity can participate in improving the whole world for all of us. Thank you all for sharing. |
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| posted by Ellen Domb [ http://www.trizpqrgroup.com ] | February 2, 2010 at 8:58 pm |
I'll pass your suggestions on to the TRIZ Journal publisher and the conference organizers. Personally, I love the TED content, but remember that TED is technology-entertainment-development, and the speakers create their presentations with that in mind. Watching video of a non-English as a first language person presenting powerpoint, although the research may be quite interesting, will not be good audio or video you may be better off with the old technology of reading a summary, then getting a copy of the paper if the subject is of interest. BUT I will pass this to the conference directors, for planning for next year |
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