Commentary by Ellen Domb

TRIZCON2008--Sunday Report

The experimental workshop on the US$10million Automotive X-Prize at the Altshuller Institute TRIZCON2008 started Sunday morning with delegates from Germany, Israel, Ireland, UK, Korea, Taiwan, and multiple parts of the US; from the electronics, automotive, aerospace, control systems and textile industries; from universities, private industry, and consulting. The X-Prize will go to the vehicle that can demonstrate 100 miles at 100 miles/hour, in a production-ready vehicle.

Ben Berry is the CEO of the AirShip Technologies Group, one of 84 teams competing for the prize. ATG is using a combination of well-known and experimental technologies, and an aggressive Open Technology organizational method for design and production. Prof. Tim Schweitzer from Luther College recruited Ben to be a keynote speaker for the conference, then Tim and Ellen Domb took advantage of Ben’s expertise and attendance at the meeting to organize the workshop—TRIZ practioners had 2 hours to learn about the problems that the AirShip team has worked on, and 5 hours to develop ideas for alternative approaches. Ben will take those ideas back to the team to accelerate the development of the airship (and he might recruit some of the workshop participants to join the team, too.) See the Steering Team (standing) and the Track Sphere Team (seated) below.

For details, see http://www.progressiveautoxprize.org/ to learn about the prize and http://www.airshiptg.org to learn about the AirShip Technologies Group. See Ben (standing) explaining the problem to the group.

Ralph Czerepinski and Joe Miller presented the TRIZ workshop for newcomers (it used to be called “Everything you need to know about TRIZ to get through the conference”) to 24 people from industry and academia. Some of the teachers (both high school and college-level) were graduates of the Saturday workshop on TRIZ for Teachers taught by Don Coates of our host organization, Kent State University, and Sergey Malkin.

Darrell Mann did triple duty, teaching “Navigating the Competitive Jungle: Systematic Innovation for Business and Management” on Saturday, a short course on “TRIZ Trends, The Voice of the Product and Innovation Timing” on Sunday, and participating in the Automotive X-Prize workshop. Thanks, Darrell!

Isak Buhkman did 2 short workshops on Sunday—one on psychological inertia and one on Su-Field modeling and standard solutions. The 4th short workshop was Sergei Ikovenko’s “Pragmatic S-Curve Analysis.” Since I was in the X-Prize workshop all day, I’ll try to get the information from the short workshops to summarize for our readers later in the week.

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