Commentary by Ellen Domb

TRIZ-Future 2008 Conference Day 1

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.

RSS