Commentary by Ellen Domb

TRIZCON and National Innovation Conference Day 2

TRIZCON 2010 and the National Innovation Conference Day 2 opened with brief remarks by sponsor Bart Barthelemy of the Wright Brothers Institute,e challenging all the participants to learn multiple innovation systems to take advantage of the opportunities that surround us.
Opening speaker Steve Shapiro "chief innovation evangelist" of Innocentive emphasized that innovation is about rapid, repeated, dynamic change, not about specific events. Organizations have "problems, challenges, and opportunities." We talk about diversity but we practice homogeneity - people who talk the same way and think the same way, things work quickly. It is great for efficiency but bad for creativity. The audience was a bit uncomfortable with his equating corporate cultures to cults, but he made the point quite well throughout the talk. He had the un-politically-popular position that crowds may be good at generating ideas but they are really bad at determining value, and voting systems are particularly bad because they can be easily manipulated. Both the TRIZ and non-TRIZ sides of the audience developed appreciation for his emphasis on problem definition and scope, and creating challenges that are self-managing (the contributors evaluate their own contributions, rather than creating a giant mess of evaluation.) Two failure modes to watch out for: eliminating good ideas because the evaluators don't have context-sensitive knowledge, and letting good ideas whither because no one has ownership/ accountability for the success of the implementation.

Quote from Steve Jobs: "Creativity is having enough dots to connect." and Steve Shapiro added, "we need to become masterful at connecting those dots."

The conference then returned to tracks: I'll report on the papers that I saw. Good news for readers: the Altshuller Institute will be posting all the papers (not limited to members) shortly after the conference.
Bryan Pollard from Intel showed us a new perspective:
- No problem is too small for TRIZ: micro-innovation
- TRIZ can generate solutions that beat industry experts
Bryan demonstrated problem reformulation using a semiconductor processing problem, starting with a great tutorial on semiconductor processing, so that the non-semiconductor audience could participate.
The function model and the problem definition were iterated to get the reformulated problem definition, and the case study dramatically illustrated the benefit of investing the time in a good problem definition. Thanks to Bryan Pollard and to Intel for presenting a real case!

My paper on teaching TRIZ by leaving the classroom was next - I used the paper to kick-off discussion with the participants. The paper will be published in the TRIZ Journal and the Altshuller Institute proceedings, so I won't put any detail here.

Kas Kasravi from Hewlett-Packard showed TRIZ applications in information technology services, a growing (but non-traditional) area for TRIZ applications. The world market size may be US$131 billion within 3 years. They apply TRIZ to both specific problems and to "next big thing" type investigations. Good news is that in 20 projects, participants said that they had new ideas in every case. The "next big thing" cases focused on the future of the IT service business, using the 9 laws of technology evolution for the analysis.

The exciting prediction is that current patch-work systems (onshore, offshore, etc.) will be replaced by a new business model of eShoring (TM) (which they have trademarked) that will both deliver services by automated, self-learning/self-correcting systems. Kasravi then showed a second, somewhat parallel case examining the future of business intelligence; the audience joined in the discussion of the role of trust and the development of legal theory of liability for the systems to be adopted. Kas reported that the BI community was also quickly engaged in this discussion.

He then demonstrated the other class of problem solving with a case from a beverage company that wants to make its IT system easier to use AND more secure. They learned that the problem was not technology, it was in the management/IT organization relationship, and successful solutions were generated in a 2-day workshop. A more traditional problem was the reduction of excessive CPU cycles and costs. After 8 months of unsuccessful conventional problem solving, 15 hours of TRIZ analysis found the fundamental problem and solutions that were beneficial to both supplier and customer (new business and a patent and avoidance of a threatened lawsuit!)

Alla Zusman and Boris Zlotin led us through history and current practice in the use of TRIZ to solve secondary problems, and the reasons that this application has been buried in the various teaching methods. They demonstrated the use of network diagrams ("Life is not simple" per Alla) to examine secondary, tertiary, and other problems created by solutions to the primary problem. Examples of assembly of a magnetic circuit breaker and of centrifugal separation of materials in a chemical reaction were used to show various aspects of formulation and solution of secondary problems.

Emily Riley and Bart Barthelemy explained the collaborative innovation model used at the IDEA Lab of the Wright Brothers Institute. Emily did a heroic job of explaining to the civilian acronyms and jargon of how projects and the money to support projects are organized so that research becomes development and eventually deployed systems. For the Idea Lab, they created a convergent/divergent front end of innovation that interacts with open innovation elements.

The history of the development of some of their methods was fascinating; Emily showed us how things like battlefield data visualization benefited from information display methods used in civilian research methods, and the impact on the researchers of the use of visual analytic tools and systematic problem analysis and deconstruction.

Gerald Haman (the "solutionman" to a lot of web-dwellers) concluded the program, integrating TRIZCON with the NIC, demonstrating a few collaboration - innovation tools and techniques and engaging the conference participants so that everyone concluded the conference with new tools to take home. Thanks, Gerald!

Any comments or suggestions from participants or non-participants for improving next year's meeting? I'll be glad to send them to the Altshuller Instititute. Any comments on this blog? Anybody who went to sessions I didn't go to? Without the readers, the blog doesn't do any good!

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