Commentary by Guest Commentator

Report From The TRIZ Practitioners Exchange: Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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