Commentary by Ellen Domb

The conference banquet on Monday night was held in the university's reception hall. We sat at large round tables and shared many dishes, which enhanced the opportunities for conference delegates to get to know each other. The banquet was an educational and cultural opportunity which introduced many of us to a variety of cultural elements. The entertainment included music, dance, and demonsrations of classical caligraphy (See 3 Pictures--more will be on the ICSI website soon) followed by members' talents--I was serenaded in Mongolian, and we were all amazed by Daniel Sheu's karaoke skills.

I gave the day 3 keynote speech on global success stories in TRIZ and Systematic Innovation, which led to significant discussions throughout the day about whether other companies' success stories are useful or not in getting people to try something new. The keynote was followed by 3 parallel technical sessions--I heard some very interesting follow-up to topics from the Computer-aided innovation conference in August by Denis Cavallucci and Derek Tate, among others.

The conference concluded with a tour of local technology site: The Realtek company showed us their approach to innovation and employee education, and part of their art collection, we toured the headquarters of the Hsinchu Science Park, and we visited the ITRI Creativity Lab, a cooperative for companies that want to learn to "play" with ideas.

Start planning now--the Second International Systematic Innovation Conference will be in Shanghai March 24-26, 2011, and the organizing committee is already working to make it even better than this one!

The tutorial speaker for day 2 at the Systematic Innovation Conference is Professor Jay Lee, whose primary work is at the U. of Cincinnati in the US and Shanghai Jia Tong University in China. His talk on "Dominant Design for Product and Service Innovation" introduced the audience to a very organized system of methods for integrating product and service offerings. "Dominant" refers to your market position if you do this! Examples from John Deere, GE Aviation and GE Medical, and GM, all adding information and service components to well-established hardware products were quite persuasive. His Cargill example (matching a US farmer who grows very specialized corn products with a Japanese chicken farmer to produce branded low-cholesterol eggs) was a great example of moving from product (Cargill doesn't sell the corn or the eggs) to an information-mediated service.

Key attributes of service innovation in Lee's model are:

1. Be Customer Intensive
2. Use System Instrumentation (smart agent)
3. Work through Smart Operation Analytics
4. Incorporate Knowledge Management in Business
5. Avoid Potential Issues for Customers

His primary tool is a matrix (no surprise to this audience) that maps the customers' raw needs, both visible and invisible, against the market opportunities. His stories about moving from industry to the university consortia then back to industry as an academic were both illustrative and entertaining! (Picture of Prof. Lee)

The featured talks after lunch were "real world" success stories from Samsung and Hyundai. Mr. SeHo Cheong from Samsung told his personal story of TRIZ learning mixed with the Samsung company story in a very effective way, starting with his trip to Russia in 1999 to hire TRIZ experts. (Picture of Mr. Cheong)

He showed us a great variety of case studies, starting in 2001, with washing machines, refrigerator door design, and the whole developement cycle of the OLED product family. Some early case studies were considered significant because they persuaded senior management to support TRIZ, and some are significant because they gave Samsung early market dominance in their fields. Now in all product development reviews, engineers are asked if they use resources, if they focus on major contradictions, if they have a concept for future super systems and sub-systems, and other TRIZ-based questions. Since they know the questions will be asked, they use TRIZ extensively in development. In SMD (Samsung Mobile Device) only 9% of projects were defect improvement projects; the majority were new products, or processes for creating the new products. Mr. Cheong offered serveral lessons from experience:

1. Verification is important. Verify new ideas immediately. Waiting kills creativity
2. Top-down project selection is very important. This protects projects from getting cancelled early.
3. Select people for the "Creative elite" (internal TRIZ promotion and education team) who have both the technical ability and the personality to help other people succeed.
4. Use a task force for big projects , with the project team and the TRIZ team as partners, dividing the work.

The Samsung teams use a very basic flowchart, with many tools of TRIZ/ARIZ/OTSM used where appropriate for the specific project. There was considerable interest by the audience in the training system, and particularly in the note that the CEO had graduated from the basic level class! The TRIZ training is accompanied by a support system of consultants and patent writing advisors. A TRIZ Festival is held annually--last year the 12 best of 62 projects were selected, and 7 awards were given, to promote TRIZ. Samsung has an internal "webzine" and a conference for their own TRIZ association (6 of the Samsung companies share their experiences.) Future plans are to develop a broad base of projects (not just top-down), to increase the number of people with higher-level tools, to modify tools and methods for business problems, and to continuously improve the effectiveness of the education and support systems.

The second paper in this remarkable session was from the TRIZ organizer at Hyundai, and formerly at LS Cable, Mr. Young-Ju Kang, who personally has more than 52 patents from his work in the automotive industry, using TRIZ with Value Engineering and Axiomatic Design. (Picture of Mr. Kang, holding the plaque showing the conference picture.)

He echoed Mr. Cheong in the rejection of benchmarking, choosing instead to create new paradigms to win in the market. TRIZ is used in multiple areas: patent circumvention, system improvement, cost reduction, process innovation, technical forecasting, and general creativity improvement. History: 1995 -2005 TRIZ in the LS and LG companies, with more than 60 patents, and an internal TRIZ Association started to support all the related companies. In Hyundai, 2007-9 there have been more than 40 projects and the development of internal training and support systems. In contrast to Samsung, at Hyundai the TRIZ team selects the projects.

Mr. Kang also discussed the problems of TRIZ propagation, especially the difficulty of assessing the return on investment, and the difficulty of overcoming ignorance and psychological resistance (what can you do if people are convinced that the system cannot be changed, or that all problems can be cured by spending more money?) An equally important problem was selecting easy, unimportant problems as case studies--then the results were not They are now very disciplined about finding the right question before starting work on the solutions. He reminded the audience that early pilot projects were published in the TRIZ Journal in 2005, and that this helped draw attention to the work.

He had a very nice analogy between the complete technical system for a product and the complete technical system for a TRIZ implementation (Picture of Mr. Kang's slide).

Both LS and Hyundai use cash awards and public honor as motivational rewards, and have internal TRIZ conferences to show project results and reward the participants. Similarly to the Samsung efforts, they are now modifying methods to use for business problems, and reaching out to universities and other companies to develop a network of resources.

Mr. Kang concluded with a case study of a wheel system improvement that simplified the brake system, reducing cost and improving energy efficiency, and a patent circumvention case of waterproof optical cable--both cases emphasized trimming in very different ways. His conclusions were somewhat different from Mr. Cheong's, particularly starting bottom-up, then going to top-down in the organization--the audience reacted very positively to his step 4: be ambitious and confident.

Mr. K. Lee then joined Mr. Kang invited us all to the Korean TRIZCON 2010 in March.

The technical progam concluded with parallel sessions in 6 classrooms on a wide variety of subjects related to innovation, and the social program concluded with the banquet

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...

Trimming is a TRIZ technique of improving something by simplifying it (and a small joke in English.) Most often in TRIZ it refers to products or systems where the complexity has increased cost or decreased maintainability, serviceability, ease of use, etc. My husband and I got a gift that let us experience an extreme form of trimming used to create an innovation in experience.

We walked into Opaque, a dimly lit empty nightclub in Santa Monica, California. (There are others in Vienna, Paris, San Francisico and elsewhere. See www.darkdining.com) We are greeted and given menus with limited choices--2 salads, 4 entrees, 2 desserts, wine by the glass only. After choosing the meal, we are introduced to Michael, our guide/waiter/helper, who is blind. I put my hand on Michael's shoulder, Bill puts his hand on my shoulder, and we "elephant walk" into the darkest room I have ever been in except for a cave exploration trip. Yes, what has been trimmed from this dining experience is light, and the diner's ability to see the food, the table setting, the presentation of the food, and one's companion. The theory of the restaurant is that taking away light will enhance the diners' other senses and focus the diners' attention on the taste, texture, and aromas of the food. And yes, they reject all the dogma of the restaurant industry that presentation of the food is important, "we taste first with our eyes."

Michael guided us through sitting down: "Put your hand out. This is the back of your chair. Touch the seat, now move forward a half step and sit down. In front of you on the table is a napkin, wrapped around the fork and a butter knife...." We started with an amuse bouche that was a tiny tomato stuffed with herbs and goat cheese, served on a ceramic spoon, as a single bite. This was the easiest part of the meal! When Michael brought the bread basket, the butter was in a small dish which Bill and I each put fingers in trying to find it, and we eventually just dipped the bread in butter rather than using the knife. The salads were very good, but it took a combination of fork and fingers to get the greens.

I was surprised that Michael did not give us orientation to the entree plate. The steak was cut into fairly large pieces, and we did get sharp knives in case we were brave enough to cut it smaller, but we didn't know where the broccoli or the spinach was. Aroma didn't help, since everything was heavily garlicked.

Desserts were both soft (eat with just a spoon) and probably the best food of the meal, but again, there were surprises: the chocolate lava cake was decorated with raspberries which we found after eating the cake, and the mango panna cotta also had hidden fruit. Michael guided us back to the lobby, where we washed up (very little damage), paid, and departed just as the nightclub part of the operation was getting started.

Did the "trimmed" experience work? The diners definitely focused (hmmm, optics analogy) on each other and on the experience. We tried to guess how many tables there were, what the relationships between the other diners were, why the chefs and designers had made certain choices about the food and the method of presenting the meal, etc. Unfortunately, the food and the wine were just OK, not excellent, and that interferes with my ability to evaluate the experience of the blind dining. It was definitely interesting, but too expensive to repeat for the actual dining.

Trimming lesson: In this case, they removed one element of the experience in order to be unique, not in order to simplify the experience. They succeeded in being unique, but the question is still open whether they will be a commercially successful innovation.

You could duplicate this experience at home, if you have a room with no windows, or try it in your city if you have one of the other "Dark Dining" venues. Readers' comments are welcome! Best wishes to all our readers for a happy, healthy, and INNOVATIVE 2010!

It is hard to convey the elation and enthusiasm of the audience at this conference, particularly for the student papers. Some are elegant "classroom" exercises, and some are real projects done for real industry, and some are entrepreneurial ventures where the students are both the engineers and the business developers. It is a great joy for all of us to see the spread of TRIZ into the next generations, and to see the students' willingness to learn new ways of thinking at the beginning of their professional careers.

Christopher Nikulin's second paper explained a model for design of new products based in TRIZ, using the value in the market as the decision criterion. The multi-window method was used in an example of developing low-carbohydrate pasta for a student project that is now being commercialized. Other projects being developed are:

• plastic bag recycler
• uninterruptible power supply
• easy to install vehicle covers
• golf cart brake for hillside use
• hoist system using the axle of a 4 wheel drive truck
• magnetic car roof rack

Rodrigo Silva did not "give a paper." His passionate exhortation to the conference could be called a sermon or a call to arms or a harrangue, but not a paper! His topic was the philosophy of value and innovation, and he addressed himself primarily to the students, telling them that they should focus their careers on adding value to the world, not on getting a job, or even getting a good job.
Edgardo Cordova demonstrated that TRIZ itself is a system, and evolves as a system. He gave us a brief guided tour of the spiral of evolution through 6 stages, culminating in the merger of TRIZ into business and design. There's a lot to reflect on in this model, and he has promised me an English version to share with our readers in the near future.

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After lunch, I showed the group that the first day's report was already in the TJ Commentary. The conference audience appreciated seeing themselves in the TRIZ Journal "live" during the conference. I encouraged the faculty to make the TJ available to their students and colleagues!
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Generation of Energy Alternatives was presented by Alvarao Vera. He pointed out that Chile's long shoreline is a natural resource that can be used to generate energy, and reviewed the state of the art of European, US, and Japanese wave and tide powered electrical systems. They selected opportunities where TRIZ could help make concepts more applicable to Chilean deployment. This was not theory - - we saw pictures of the prototype and the cold developers in a small boat leaving the large ship for real open-ocean testing. He gave credit for their success to the interdepartmental nature of the team, with knowledge of how to get financing and organize the project, as well as all the technical disciplines. See www.gea.usm.cl for more of the story, and new projects in air, water, and solar, in Chile and Guatemala, sponsored by business, the UN, and entrepreneurial initiative.

Srs. José García Torres and José Rangel Cordero from Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico demonstrated the application of invisible resources in TRIZ, specifically for optimizing the use of fuel for internal combustion engines. (And they started with my example of using resources to save the passengers on the Titanic!) They focused on Internal combusion because of air pollution, and the extreme smog problems in both Sangtiago and Mexico DF. Two different improvements have improved efficiency by 12% and by 30%, using resources from the air, which is frequently an invisible (overlooked) resource, and from the momentum of the moving vehicle. Additional catalysis may increase the efficiencies even more. An added benefit may be reduction of maintenance. After the paper there was discussion of the total power balance, and the source of the energy for hydrolisis of the air.

The following paper by Germán Guerra, also from the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico was a complete change of pace. He introduces children to TRIZ by means of a card game incorporating ideas from the 40 principles. The cartoons are funny, drawn by German (and he says he's not DaVinci.) The audience laughed at the cartoons of Innobot (a robot) and SuperTRIZ (a caped hero) as they demonstrated the concepts in terms that children understand. Segementation was cutting a cake, and Asymmetry was a very fat lady with a very skinny man. His personal favorite was universality: a microwave oven with a cooking surface, because the first time he tried this with 10 year old students, they each had their own examples: a bicycle used as a clothes rack, a backpack used as a pillow. The energy that he got from working with young children was communicated to the audience, to encourage them to take risks of leaving the comfort zone of engineering for the risky world of children.
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The afternoon keynote talk by Sergei Ikovenko returned us to the world of technical problem solving, focusing on applying TRIZ to Patent Strategies. The audience appreciated his sharing personal history of taking Altshuller's seminars several times, and then joining the research group. Sometimes he had personal interests, such as patent law, that Altshuller did not share, so he worked on both his assigned research and his personal interests. Sergei told us that the examples in Altshuller's books are very clear as illustrations, but they are not practical, because Altshuller was interested in the clarity of the teaching, not in the business of making and selling products. When he came to the US, he returned to his interest in patents, because there was great interest in the economic advantage of innovation.

For those who are not familiar with patent law, Sergei gave an excellent brief review of major strategies, and showed us some of his research on the TRIZ methods that are most helpful for each of the major strategies. For examples: patent circumvention does not create the next generation product. What it does is legally avoid violating competitive patents, so, with the fewest possible changes, you have the freedom to operate. The safe, straightforward way to do this is not to add components (since you will be in the zone of dependent patents) but to subtract them. Sergei gave a brief lesson on trimming, so that all functions are performed by a simpler system. His examples are all REAL products, not just patents that exist on paper and an introduction to the intricacies of patent law (doctrine of equivalents, estoppel research) for non-specialists. The case of the Dior sunscreen that senses the amount of sunlight and adjusts the amount of blocking material, and could be bought in the hotel store, was a great illustration of a multinational successful product.
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Prof. Noel León presented work by himself and Roberto Durán and Eduardo Uresti from TEC in Monterrey, Mexico, that challenged the audience with the concept of genetic algorithms, a form of simulation that makes it possible to test many variations of a design, and, by formalizing the definition of a "good" design, makes it possible to evaluate which alternatives are best, and simulate evolution of design. (I first heard about this last year at the Guadalajara meeting and have been fascinated by the possibilities.) They combine TRIZ with genetic algorithms, using the patterns of evolution and principles as the triggers for change algorithms, and the concept of ideality for evaluation. Noel gave us a historical insight into the development of genetic algorithms, and the parallels between TRIZ concepts and concepts in GA. They are now extending the genetic analogy to the concept of antibodies to stimulate alternative solutions to problems.

Carlos Contreras presented the work by himself and his colleagues at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogata, Colombia (Srs.: Luz Torres P - Diego Flores H-. - Oscar Castellanos D.) on the production of derivatives of sugar cane, and on development of the markets, which depend on many political factors (regulation, tariffs, etc.) as well as the technological ones.

The second report from Colombia was on the management of the process of technology evaluation and assessment in the agricultural industry by Srs.: Aida Fúquene – Diana Ramírez – Oscar Castellanos, presented by Laura Egea. Extensive research on the search parameters and statistical data was used to develop opportunities for Colombian products.

Jose Vicente from Valencia Spain had the honor and challenge of being the last presenter of the day. His theme was transition to the supersystem, a primary law of innovation. Jose had a marvelous global set of examples of products and services for each of the concepts that he discussed. He illustrated the need to listen to the voice of the customer, but be careful, with the case of Kawasaki's breakthrough in the world of "wet bikes" that came from recognizing that customers sit on motorcycles, but stand on water skiis, and that hybridizing them would create a large new market. He illustrated the difficulty of innovation with an extensive list of both products and services where the second company to come to market succeeded, while the innovator did not have the business success. The audience had great appreciation for this world-wide collection of well-known names (Royal Crown lost to Coca Cola, RIM lost to Apple, Sega lost to both Nintendo and Sony, DeHavilland lost to Boeing, ...)

Jose used a dramatic, non-technical example of the use of the supersystem: the new horror movie that was made for US$15,000 and promoted via Facebook, and distributed by "friends" and has now made US$ two hundred million. The innovation was not the making of the movie, it was using the supersystem instead of the conventional distribution system. Moving to the technical world, he gave persuasive examples from medical imaging (PET/CT) and from renewable energy resources, and showed how the concepts apply to the business world as well as the technical world. The conference ended on a high point with the decision scene from the movie "the Matrix." Thanks, Jose!

Prof. Sariego concluded the conference by asking the keynote speakers to each say a few remarks, then we took lots of pictures, hugged each other, and promised to meet again.

Daniel Palma opened the Day 2 program with a fascinating study of "TRIZ: a competitive advantage in the Mexican labor market." He and his colleagues looked at the employment experiences of 183 engineering students starting in 2005, and found that those with TRIZ training had more interviews and more job offers, even in the last year of great economic stress. Further study will be needed to distinguish whether the employers value the engineers' problem solving capability, or whether they actually recognize TRIZ and use it as a criterion for granting an interview.

Juan Enrique Aguila showed a work in progress, studying the application of ISO 9000 to education, particularly in Chile. He pointed out many TRIZ-type contradictions in the application of ISO 9000 and the competition with other quality certifications, some of which are general and others that are country-specific or discipline specific. Audience discussion addressed the need for business to know about whatever is new (TRIZ, ISO9000, other quality and innovation methods) to ask the universities for both student preparation in these areas, and to apply these methods to the improvement of the universities themselves.

Rafael Munoz Gomez from Mexico presented a wide range of examples of the application of the 40 principles to environmental engineering, including numerous examples of improving water purification systems, reducing gas emissions from storage areas, and reducing dust and particulate matter scattered during cleaning, increasing efficiency of wind generators, and others. TRIZ has a long history of examining new inventions to identify which TRIZ principles could have been used to generate the invention - - it is a proven method for both teaching and learning, and this list of examples will be useful to many people in environmental technology.

Jack Hipple (member of the TRIZ Journal editorial board, a TRIZ Journal author and commentator, and consultant) reviewed other creativity techniques, and compared them to TRIZ for both structure and usefulness. He then introduced the audience to assessment techniques, including Meyers-Briggs social style assessment and the KAI creativity evaluation, and showed how knowing the characteristics of the people you are working with on a TRIZ project can improve teamwork and improve results, if people can anticipate the human reactions of other team members. Jack's example of the use of TRIZ in designing the human interface for air traffic control computer systems by using experience from video games and from chemical factory control systems was a great example of overcoming psychological inertia.

José Alberto Ochoa, president of the Sociedad de Inventores de Chile presented the perspective of Chilean private inventors - - the people who are not academics or employees of large companies. There are 100 members, who all have at least applications for patents. They stimulate inventiveness through fairs and school activities. He talked about the difficulty of countering the impression that everything has already been invented and the need for a paradigm of inventing and of getting from the invention stage through production and to the market. They have identified opportunities for invention to support the development of the Chilean economy, although their members work independently. I invited Sr. Ochoa to tell all his members about the TRIZ Journal.

The University Federico Santa Maria division at Vina del Mar made a unique presentation of 3 student projects, from their program of student innovation projects for local industry. Innovation is encouraged in all 3 phases--conceptual design, basic design, and production/parametric design. Sr. Reinaldo Espinoza, director of the Center for Innovation and Creativity at the University, gave the overview of how the university teaches design concepts, which uses the 5 elements of a complete technical system as a fundamental concept, superimposed on the flow model of classical design (energy, material, and information are inputs, designs are the output.) and thanked his colleagues from Mexico for sharing the methodology that they use with their student/industry projects. These projects take about a year, and 500 projects have been "banked" for the use of industry. The university has a unique laboratory for student use for prototypes and experimentation. The student presentations were:

Sr.: Diego Araya - Appplication of TRIZ in the conceptural design phase of designing a laboratory for region 6 of Chile, for students from grades 5 and 6, learning biology, physics and chemistry. There were a number of requirements on the internal and external properties of the lab, because of the diverse climates in different parts of the region, and because of the needs of both teachers and students. One requirement was that the lab could be transported on an 18-wheel truck, which generated many more specific requirements both for durability and for easy deployment when it reached the site.

Srs.: Mario Gonzalez – Christopher Jiménez - Design and innovation of machinery to filet fish (salmon up to 1m and 20 kg) QFD- like matrices were used to translate from general needs to specific subsystem requirements. Eleven of the 39 parameters of the classical TRIZ matrix were identified as important to the design. Application of multiple principles gave the students ideas for making the system self-adjusting for a variety of sizes of fish, and incorporated numerous safety features. Video of the simulation of the design was quite vivid.

Sr.: Ricardo Ayala – Carlos González - Design and innovation of machinery to fill bins for export fruit, which must not be bruised during handling. Process flow and functional analysis and constraints (use of a specific apple sorting system) were basic elements of the design process. They used the 40 principles to remove contradictions, with a very elegant emphasis on ideality for chosing between multiple concepts.

Authors and other participants are invited to add their comments and corrections using the "comments" function at the end of this column. Since my name was spelled wrong in the program, I'm sure that there were others as well, and I have relied on the program for basic data. For the papers given in Spanish and Portuguese, I've use a combination of my high school/tourist Spanish and Google translate for the titles, and the help of the excellent conference translators for the themes.

The audience was fascinated by "Contribution to the development of conceptual design of new high tonnage truck for mining projects" presented by Carlos Dublé. Extensive research on the patterns of evolution of trucks of all kinds, as well as specific economic problems of the mining industry (especially load vs. weight of the truck) gave the analysis team ideas for a number of improvements in the trucks and in the management of the transportation system. They made great progress with the use of gravity as a resource, and the use of the existing structures of trucks in new ways. The audience was also interested in Carlos' observations on the team's learning process and the patent analysis that reached back to 189o, and he even got one offer of collaboration on development.

"Aplicación computacional de modelo Sustancia-Campo basado en las 76 Soluciones Estándar" --
Christopher Nikulin demonstrated an interactive algorithmic modeling system developed at the university for the use of the 76 standard solution. He showed the application to the milling function that had been explained before, applied to preventing the failure of the mill. The program guides the user through a series of question about the substance-field model and guides the user to a class of solutions to apply to the problem. He noted that the nature of the technical language of TRIZ as well as the technical language of the problem can be enablers for knowledgeable users but can be roadblocks for those who try to use the software without understanding the TRIZ vocabulary.

Noel León (frequent TRIZ Journal author and frequent speaker noticed in this column) brought his experience at TEC in Mexico to Santiago, speaking about the "Proposal for automation of the invention process using QFD, TRIZ and parametric modeling " being developed by his students. He gave us a survey of the taxonomy requirements for the system, which focused on functional analysis, and exposed some of the controversy between axiomatic design and TRIZ (if you can resolve contradictions with TRIZ, do you need functional independence prescribed by AD?) Prof. León showed several of the popular flow charts for the use of TRIZ tools and proposed a more general flow that would be managed by the automated system. He agreed with Sr. Nikulin, the previous speaker, that the user must understand the language of TRIZ, OR the automated system must be able to understand the language of the user. Two case studies have been completed (wind turbine and crankshaft) with active interplay between the users and the program.

Blanca Isabel Vicario Lopez from Mexico presented an application of TRIZ to problems of clean production in the chemical industry. This is a very practical case study of preventing explosion in the production of ethylene oxide. The current, expensive method is to use nitrogen gas , which is expensive, and requires heat exchangers which add complexity. Multiple technical contradictions were examined, and some of the 40 principles were applied to the problem. The resource-oriented solution was to use the ethylene oxide gas to protect the ethylene oxide liquid, which requires much less gas exchange than the other methods, saving U$60,000 directly, plus recovering costs in 2 months, and the solution required 2 days of development.

Montiel Hernandez Fabian from Mexico presented a paper which has won the Millennium Prize 2007 World Challenge in Numero 14: Science and Technology, "Using TRIZ to Improve Human Condition." He propses a series of conference of 150-200 people, with breakout groups of 15-20 people, with facilitators to guide them through the application of TRIZ to specific problems of the country. Massive diffusion of TRIZ could result - 27000 people in year 1, and up to 270,000 people by year 10. Latin America already has many people who can be the facilitators, and meeting rooms, etc. He showed examples from trial seminars, for improving water purification systems using direct solar energy and for disposing of contaminated construction materials.

Just before the coffee break Noel Leon gave congratulations to the Chilean TRIZ association for its formation. The websites of both AMETRIZ and the Chilean TRIZ association will invite solutions to the world economic crisis. He also announced a permanent committee for the Iberoamerican congress.

"Análisis de Vida residual, mejora continua en la búsqueda de aumento de confiabilidad y vida útil de nuestros Rodetes Pelton de la Central Hidroeléctrica de Alfalfal" = improving the life cycle of the hydroelectric facility at Alfalfal which has the most aggressive requirements in the world, due to both the speed of the water and the large amount of quartz that is in the water. Maurizio Edwards is the maintenance manager and he gave a dramatic presentation of the challenges in keeping the power plant working. Numerous improvement projects were conducted between 1991 and 2008. Extensive analyis of the metallurgy, the method of manufacturing, the details of the geometry of the buckets on the turbine, and the variables of operation gave them the data for a model of the system and to an understanding of the fatigue phenomena in the plant. The turbines are now very successful, with much longer life, but there were still problems of cavitation at unpredictable intervals. They found that human variability due to exhaustion, dehydration, and particularly to noise in the manufacturing environment was the source. Using robots for the machining removed the variability. This is a classical example of combining designed experiements, finite element analysis, stastical process control, and the discipline to apply the methods when the "experts" are saying that the results aren't right. The useful life of the power plant has doubled (and Maurizio says he is not popular with the experts.) The question session focused on the use of classical (non-TRIZ) methods, and Maurizio said that he is just learning about TRIZ for the first time at this conference, and he will be applying TRIZ in the future.

Jaime Glaría's paper "Causality" reminded all of us that "how" can be more important than "why" in solving real problems. His humor (and rejection of jargon) were appreciated for the late afternoon session. He started with an example of force, defined as a flow of momentum, and used it to challenge people from all disciplines and all kinds of jargon with an elegant example of water flowing out of a tank, and then expanded the example to problems of water management in times of drought.

Edgardo Córdova's paper gave us a view of the history of industrial maintenance, starting from the review of old maintenance manuals, and seeing progress from fixing what is broken, to preventive maintenance, to predictive maintenance, to proactive maintenance. They applied TRIZ to the maintenance systems, looking for ideality opportunities, such that the system can maintain itself, without stopping. He used the analogy of the ideal shoe, which enables the user to both run and rest, to challenge our thinking, and he demonstrated progress in automotive technology - maintenance is done at much longer intervals than 30 years ago, such as the 100,00- mile tune-up, or the sealed (no maintenance) battery, and the car that protects itself from damage by not starting if the driver is drunk.

Rodrigo Bulnes continued the maintenance theme with "TRIZ-based Tribological Maintenance" which is a specialty of the University. He related many of the concepts to TRIZ methods. He began with the analogy between doing blood tests on people to determine the state of health with testing lubricants to determine the state of wear/friction of a mechanical system. The cause/effect diagram for scuffing in a basic machine, such as a journal bearing, was truly impressive. Rodrigo developed the su-field model, showing how a third substance accomodates the speed difference between the first 2 bodies (which causes the damage) and suggests some approaches to overcome friction.

Prof. Sariego gave a brief summary of the day's activities, thanked the presenters, and invited us to conclude the day with a cocktail reception with folk dancing--will try for pictures in tomorrow's posting, with a faster connection.

Readers--do you want pictures of speakers hugging each other? Distinguished people introducing each other? People drinking coffee together? Or summaries of the papers (like this one.) Let us know! AND please volunteer to report on meetings that you attend.

"TRIZ in automotive quality problem: aligning the nozzle of the fuel tank"

Congratulations to our colleagues in Mexico and Chile for successfully moving the Iberoamerican Innovation Congress from Mexico (1,2, and 3 were in Puebla, Monterrey and Guadalajara--see reports on all 3 in the TRIZ Journal Commentary column. And I got e-mail last night about an exciting new conference in Israel at the Holon Institute of Technology this month--see www.hit.ac.il/TRIZ09 for details.)

The participants were welcomed to Chile and to the campus of the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, and to the challenges of innovation by Patricio Guzmán, Director of the Santiago Campus, and by Prof. Noel León from AMETRIZ (Mexico TRIZ Association) and TEC in Monterrey. The initial address of the congress was presented by Prof. Pedro Sariego, chairman of the congress. He had 2 direct challenges to the audience: think about South Korea, which had half the GDP of Chile in 1960, and is now the fastest-growing economy, and think about the map of the globe, which should be viewed with South up, to see the world of the future! Professors Sariego and León conducted tutorials the day before the congress, so that people new to TRIZ could participate and begin their studies of TRIZ and other innovation systems.

Sergei Ikovenko did triple duty, delivering greetings from Mark Barkan, President of MATRIZ, and from Mansour Ashtiani, President of the Altshuller Institute, and presenting the keynote address, "Directions for Future TRIZ Development and Applications." Sergei focused on the expansion of the family of methods that are included in TRIZ in 2009, not the TRIZ of the past century, driven by companies' needs for revenue growth and profit growth. He used Michael Tracy's model of 5 ways to grow:

1. Retain the base
2. Gain Share
3. Market Positioning
4. Develop adjacent markets
5. Develop new lines of business

and he brought in ideas from QFD as well to discuss how modern TRIZ users have different sets of tools to use depending on which of the 5 areas they are working in. He showed how the Main Parameters of Value (MPVs) of products or services form a hierarchy, and how engineers and product marketers have different challenges at each level--his example of how to design soap so that the customer has a "feeling of cleanliness" requires knowledge of physiology and psychology as well as knowledge of chemistry and manufacturing technology and packaging technology.

Sergei's version of the history of TRIZ, with personal views of the migration from the former USSR to the world, fascinated the audience. He showed that the addition of problem definition tools in 1960-80 period was an important stage in the popularization of TRIZ, as was the addition of tools for determining the practicality of the solution in the 1980-2000 period, and the understanding of MPVs in 2000-present. His story of the change of the S-curves, from Altshuller's philosophical view to the current tools/technicques view, with specific business strategies for each stage of development was appreciated, and his recent insights from Korea tied directly to Prof. Sariego's opening remarks (Samsung, POSCO, and Hyundai--the only automotive company succeeding in the downturn. In only 3 years of TRIZ use they had 81 patents last year, 183 patents this year, with $US 380 million attributed to TRIZ.)

I gave the second keynote address, and expanded on the theme of the simplicity of TRIZ, that I started developing at earlier conferences this year. The audience was very responsive to stories of the use of resources that are already in the system, to take the system to a higher level of ideality.

The second session started with Héctor Montanares' presentation "Application of the methods of systematic innovation to the solution of problems in mining operations." He gave us an extensive orientation to the magnitude of the problems of waste management and recovery of wasted resources in both copper and molybdenum mining, some of which involve tailings that have been accumulating for 40 years or more. Past experiments with trial-and-error methods got a lot of audience sympathy! Simple analyis of the solid waste, the liquid in the waste pond, and the pumping system led to a water-aided cleaning system. The photographic review of similar systems from 1890, 1940, and 1960 helped the audience appreciate that TRIZ helped the company appreciate a solution that had been developed by the miners themselves, after the failures of the "experts."

Pedro Sariego told us that Montanares was the first person who had received a degree in TRIZ at the university. Sariego's paper continued the emphasis on the mining industry, with a project to improve the durability of the plates and lifters in the mills that are part of the mining process. Time loss due to breakdown of the mills is a serious limitation on the profitability of the mines. Function analysis revealed well-known contradictions, and the direct application of the contradiction matrix and the 40 principles revealed "obvious" solutions, as well as alternatives--both segmentation and consolidation (2 plates instead of 4 plates) were explored, and various aspects of psychological inertia ("miners are more conservative than even the farmers") were also revealed. The simple, elegant solution worked well. Sareigo challenged the audience to start with simple TRIZ in the mining industry while observing the advanced development of TRIZ elsewhere.

Chilean folk dancers entertained at the conference reception:

The European TRIZ Association's TRIZ Futures Conference is exploring new frontiers this week: geographically, in Timisoara, Romania, and structurally, using a single session for the entire conference. The conference is at Politehnica University--see http://www.upt.ro/ for some of the history and current information on this engineering and cultural site.

The theme of the conference is "Innovative product design" and there is a strong mix of academic, consulting, and industrial practioners reporting on their research in many areas of TRIZ.

The program, with abstracts, is at

http://www.eng.upt.ro/trizfuture2009/files/Conference%20program%20with%20abstracts.pdf

Reading the abstracts shows that ETRIA has succeeded in one of its goals--by moving the conference to different universities, cities, and countries, they expose many faculty and students to the TRIZ philosophy and concepts. A significant number of this year's papers are by people who first learned about TRIZ this way.

We look forward to having first-hand reports from some of the participants in the next few weeks, and pictures will be posted on the ETRIA portal, http://www.etria.net.

Jerry Smith's presentation on "Intellectual Property & Innovation Management: The Biggest Opportunity for Differentiation" took us on a spectacular tour of Jerry's background in psychology, software, aviation, entrepreneurship, visualization, film making, academia... Great for after lunch when the audience needs multi-dimensional stimulous. He was eloquent on the non-linear nature of innovation, and how that frustrates typical management hierarchies. In many cases globalizing the business creates the need to have an innovation system -- things that happened (or appeared to happen) without structure in one location will be stressed by operating in multiple locations, enough to reveal the weaknesses of the system.

Factors eroding the current innovation model:

1. Availability of talents (mobility, global sources of talents, global opportunities)
2. Capability of external suppliers
3. Ideas getting off the shelf (and losing value much faster so staying on the shelf loses value)
4. Venture capital makes it possible for talent to leave the big companies and succeed

All these factors combine to create a world where the classical "spend and hope" approach doesn't work. For success now you need 3C's of innovation:
C1 Culture of innovation
C2 Collaboration and Context
C3 Common Innovation Processes

Jerry Smith's presentation was broad and deep and fast-moving and full of great stories. If you get a chance to hear him speak, take advantage of it. Thanks, Jerry!

There were two other sessions at this time and there will be 3 more after I leave for the airport. Revisit this site in a few days to see if the participants at the conference have accepted the invitation to supplement these commentaries with their own observations, experiences, and opinions. Thanks in advance to the Business Innovation Conference community.

What a challenge to the speakers who followed Luis Reis to get the audience re-engaged! I went to the "Innovation in Tough Times" by Peter Balbus and Melissa Giovagnoli. They asked for some crowd sourcing input; the participants were asked for their personal list of top 10 innovative companies. Peter's main challenge to the audience was to look for industry and technology convergence that create opportunities (Will the research on fundamental physics at CERN give us any knowledge to solve the power generation problems?) and the second challenge was to look outside your own company (use the supersystem in TRIZ-talk) for ideas and resources for innovation.

Melissa Giovagnoli is the author of the book "Networlding" and distinguishes her concept from the conventional networking by the intentional nature of building the network and using the network in ways that are mutually beneficial for all participants. She used her collaborative relationship with Peter (networlding and innovation resulting in crowd sourcing solutions) as a case example. Unfortunately, it appeared that Peter and Melissa did not heare Luis Reis' presentation, which took their ideas into the real world in a real company. Likewise unfortunate was the amount of time both consultants spent promoting their books and their consulting practices.

Ellen's advice to consultants at conferences: everybody in the audience knows you are a consultant and have something to sell. Give them value in your presentation and, if they need more, make it easy to find you! If you waste their time during the presentation, they will be much less likely to want to talk to you.

LIVE EXPERIMENT: I put the Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal commentary URLs on the whiteboard at the conference and asked for comments, particularly by people who went to sessions that I missed and by people who disagreed with my perspective. Let's see what happens.

C.N. Madhusudan presented "Innovation in Troubled Times," the last plenary/keynote session of the conference. He is a serial AND parallel entrepreneur with companies in North America, Europe and Asia. His initial stories about innovation emphasized that innovation is not technology--the vegetable vendor who uses idle time between customers to create a premium product (shelled peas) and the lunch delivery service in Mumbai that operates at better than six sigma accuracy with no ERP, no MRP, no consultants (big laugh from audience). GE and Dunn & Bradstreet were outsourcing services to India. They both (separately) created new business entities in India so that they could have a profit center instead of a cost center. The Georgia Aquarium was designed by architects with no aquarium experience, because the experienced people all said it was impossible (they knew too much about the technology.)

His technology example was really business system innovation: PC's were under-utilized 30 years ago in corporate environments. They couldn't do training because there were no professors. They invented "blended" learning with video and computer-based training, with the live facilitators, but still tied to the classroom. People did not have home computers (30 years ago in some parts of the world, and different times in different parts) but neighborhood learning centers created a great multiplier for training with very little investment.

Horror stories of ERP implementation overlapping with poorly documented legacy systems created an opportunity for the outsourcing companies, and a new business called "knowledge portals" which organize the client company's data, so that it can be managed in current generation systems, and enables the outsource IT company to make service level agreements without the risks of dealing with the legacy systems. An unanticipated side effect was diminished demand on the legacy mainframes as unnecessary code stopped being used.

Creativity in dealing with the bureaucracy might be a particularly Indian skill, but it provided an excellent model for innovation in non-technology, non-capital intense applications of what had been previously technology-based innovation. He converted his personal experience moving from the world where "coffee was brought 5 times a day by the coffee-boy and secretaries go to the post office for you" to a one person start up in the US to lessons in innovation.

Madhusudan said that in large companies, innovation in recessionary times is EASIER than in prosperous times, since the limitation of resources makes it easier to challenge "but we've always done it that way." A visionary CEO can make opportunities in all kinds of situations, but it is easier to penetrate the organization when people are UNcomfortable, either because of the economic situation, or because the company has structured DIScomfort (by reorganizing, by putting people in job rotations, by moving people to different countries, etc.)

Conclusion: Success requires Chemistry, Physics, and Math. Chemistry is the people part. Physics is the structure part, and Math is make sure that the measurement system is properly adjusted to promote the desired behavior,

Keynote speaker for Day 2 of the conference was Luis Filipe Reis from Inovacao Sonae (division of the family-owned 10Billion Euro Sonae company, which has shopping malls, other retail, real estate, investment managment, construction material manufacturing, and telecom) in Portugal. As a family/entrepreneur-owned company, innovation has been a core value and a core strategy for the development of complex of companies. The company does frequent experiments with innovative ideas, taking risks in small business areas, then expanding the successful ideas into larger business areas.

Luis reported on the Idea Marketplace, which is now open to all employees, and may be opened to others (customers, universities, the public) later. NOTE: his report is on the first 2 years of the experiment. As a result of the learning, the system is being re-launched now with some major changes. Ideas are collected for various themes that are of interest to the company. Initially, the executives set the themes, but the departments will do that in the new version for better buy-in to implementation. Initially, ideas were submitted anonymously, but that was not necessary and may have been counter-productive (people lobbied for their own ideas and sometimes dominated the discussions.) Discussion forums are set up for the ideas to refine the ideas. Contributors get tokens to use as money to buy or sell ideas, and a market is opened for 60 days of trading the ideas, then the best are selected for implementation. In the future, decisions may be made sooner than the 60 days as the market for particular ideas go up and down and in particular when short-implementation ideas surface.

The audience (in a polite way) went wild--Luis graciously fielded questions on everything from how they manage the amount of time people spend on the system (they don't worry about it, "We measure results, not time for our employees") to how the market handles mergers (of related ideas) and how employees are rewarded (lots of public recognition, exchange tokens for trips and techie-toys), to his personal portfolio (he has lost most of his tokens on ideas that didn't succeed), to details about intellectual property issues. This is the first time I've seen the chairman of a conference cancel the coffee break so that the discussion could continue!

The afternoon program at the Business Innovation Conference kicked off with a great presentation by Thomas Jacobius and Robert Anderson of the IIT Interprofessional Projects Program, which is a very unusual example of academic innovation. Students at all levels do projects in many different disciplines with sponsors in government, NGOs, non-profits, and small, medium, and large corporations, learning teamwork, project management, customer relationships, and the specific systems and methods needed to solve the problems that they discover in their projects. See http://ipro.iit.edu/ for details on the program and case studies of some recent outstanding projects.

IPRO teams have developed water purification systems for impoverished regions, a homerun predictions system for the White Sox Baseball Team, create a museum exhibit explaining the first artificial kidney, create an inflatable greenhouse (not yet implemented), and the Bosnia and Kosovo war crimes documentation project, which played a key role in reestablishing the legal system. A system that was proposed by students themselves was eMotion, combining hardware (a necklace) with software/social networks to provide a safe environment for young teens to network and communicate. This project has won several business plan competition and is getting venture capital now.

Anderson's emphasis was on intellectual property, and the students' role as fresh eyeballs in the sponsors' organizations. He himself is a fresh set of eyeballs, coming to IIT after 37 years in large, medium, small and start-up industries. Automotive projects include control systems for electric systems, lighter Li-ion batteries, simpler better differentials, plug-in hybrid systems (that the automobile companies say can't be done.) His discussion of rule breaking is better than optimizations was a classical TRIZ approach to eliminating tradeoffs - - my reaction was "maybe there's hope for academia yet!" On the other hand, his emphasis on needing to encourage students to get crazy, to use their diversity to come up with wild, crazy ideas, seems based on an old paradigm of creativity, ignoring the systematic innovation approach.

Participating in this session means I missed the sessions on sustainability and on using innovation to strengthen core values--heard a little about them during the coffee break, then went on to "Deploying Controlled Idea Generation and Idea Managment Processes" by Brian Glassman and Abram Walton from Purdue University.

The paper was based on Glassman's Ph.D. research on innovation systems in successful companies. He had extensive data on the practices for idea generation, collection and management, NOT including idea evaluation in companies in a number of different businesses. The audience got vocal (OK, I got vocal, along with several other people) about how many of these "best practices" were really highly constrained systems that keep ideas confined to conventional channels, which leads to the rather depressing conclusion that we now have extensive academic research on the practices of companies that are engaged in micro- or sustaining innovation, and that the breakthrough processes are the exceptions to the system. (I missed the simultaneous papers on Design Innovation and on Supply Chain Innovation Dynamics, and heard great things about them.)

The concluding plenary session was presented by serial entrepreneur (8 companies!) Alex Bratton from Lextech Global Services. His theme was "Opportunistic Innovation" which has three requirements:

1. Infrastructure (including a willingness to fail and learn from experiments/failures, as well as physical environment, tools, software, systems, etc.)
2. Opportunities (including awareness of opportunities created by technology changes, opportunities created by customer DISsatisfaction and satisfaction, ways to help your customers make/get money so that they can afford to pay you for your work, use social networks) Much of what Alex calls "Opportunities" would be called use of resources in TRIZ-talk, and much of what he calls "Research" would be called benchmarking/use of effects from outside your industry.
3. Execution or "ruthless execution:" Alex used a lot of the high-speed concepts from the disciplines of Agile software development--you can't improve if you aren't doing things. Don't let anything be stable. Many rapid prototype cycles beat few deliberate cycles. Know when to kill an idea; don't let the fact that you've spent money/time on something prevent you from killing it if it isn't moving toward success.

Audience members loved/hated Alex's ideas--nobody was neutral.

Praveen concluded the session (and got us ready for the reception) by having the participants introduce themselves.) Great first day!

Three breakout sessions = tough choice. I will report on the session by Irena Suznjevic from SimBex company in Croatia, who reported on her research AND application of methods of personifying innovation. That means I passed up session on Homeland Security innovation and on leveraging centers of excellence--kudos to our colleague Praveen Gupta and the Illinois Institute of Technology organizers for a speaker line-up that makes choosing a session so hard.

Irena defined innovation as new solutions to known problems, and as new views of the problem to make the solutions visible. SimBex makes medical products and supplies for mothers and babies, and operates clinics. Fast and simple solutions are preferred because of the speed of change in the customers' lives and the speed of change in the producers' and competitors' environment. They make a lot of use of web-based technology, but have made extensive investigation of how to make it user friendly, and non-technological at the point of user contact.

Two types of innovation are those you can feel and see, and those you can't feel/see. The first type includes all technology innovations. The company has great emphasis on the second kind--they are known throughout Europe for their smiles and for their caring for each other and for their customers. They create an identity for a personification of their products, using a general concept that I would call "avatars." The identity has a name, a color (be careful because of the extensive psychological baggage that some colors bring with them, and be willing to use different colors for people--your end user, distributor, and salespeople might need different colors), a purpose & goal, a face and arms and legs--then the innovation is alive! An unusual example was the internal innovation process of getting the ISO 9001 certification: it was blue (clear, water, transparent), the purpose and goal was to have processes that are not dependent of specific people, the image was a person relaxed and smiling at his desk, the arms and legs were the employees. This was an experiential talk--there was no research comparing this to other methods, but Irena's examples were quite persuasive.

The Chicago Innovation Awards are 8 years old now, and have had an exciting career both rewarding and stimulating innovation. See http://www.chicagoinnovationawards.com/ for details, history, and this year's process. Winners have lunch with Mayor Daley (and the organizers) and get lots of publicity through multiple publicity channels, as well as the award. Founder Tom Kuczmarski told stories that ranged from charming to astonishing about the Bionic Wrench (product), Threadless Tee-shirts, (business model), Ocean Tomo intellectual property auctions (business model), CDOT Green Alley Program (product and service and business model), Tundra Fire Extinguisher (packaging revolution), TurboTap beer dispenser (product, multiple benefits to different customers), Walgreens prescription lables in 14 languages (service, system).

Tom's data comparing "the Best" companies to "the Rest" got a lot of audience discussion, particularly the observation that Best companies have almost double the portfolio of new to the world OR new to the company products and services, even though the failure of these innovations is typically 80% -- makes it obvious that the 20% is worth a lot! (He left it to other presenters to talk about decreasing that 80%) He used Yahoo, Blockbuster, and Motorola to illustrate the transitory value of being first in a new market. I won't reproduce his list of ten best practices of innovation (yes, he has a book for sale) but it was fascinating to watch the audience's reaction, especially in areas where he disagreed with Hartung, the earlier keynote speaker. In contrast to some rather passive conferences I've been at where people politely listen then go back to what they've done before, it was a joy to see people get interested -- even angry! -- about innovation practices.

Lunch break was very informal in the atrium at the university conference center, with many people talking about the morning's papers and presentations, with a refreshing lack of consultants all pushing their own systems and methods.

Real Innovation Commentator Praveen Gupta is the chairman of the Business Innovation Conference that is running this week at Illinois Institute of Technology in Wheaton, a suburb of Chicago IL USA. This is a personal travel report, on the sessions that I am participating in--for the full program, see http://www.bnpevents.com/BIC/

Monday was the tutorial day. I had a great group of more than 40 people who really wanted to learn TRIZ. In a half day they learned ideality, use of resources, and resolution of physical contradictions, and they did their homework (go online and learn how to access The TRIZ Journal and find articles on their field of interst). Other topics with equally vigorous audience participation were on developing organizational innovation cultures, right brain integration of customer data with design methods, and innovation measurement systems. Praveen led the group on a late-afternoon car/train/cab journey to the Microsoft Research Center for a fascinating view of Microsoft's global perspectives on near, medium, and long term innovation.

Adam Hartung, newly appointed columnist for Forbes, was the keynote speaker for Tuesday Oct. 6. He instantly engaged the audience with his topic "Overcoming Barriers to Innovation" and his reflection on the negativity of the title, which led to reflection on past management catastrophes. He has identified "the Phoenix Principle" which is NOT about the issues that other authors credit: it is not about core, not about focus, not about leadership, all of which he claims come from spurious correlations of past behaviors, not from rigorous causality analysis. His thesis for innovation success, and all of business success, is the process of managing lock-in, the well-known but poorly managed phenomenon of smart people getting locked in to the paradigm that had been responsible for the success of their company. The dramatic story of the last 60 years in making copies -- from carbon paper to offset printing and mimeographs, to Xerography and desk-top publishing to non-paper systems, and the relationship between business innovation (the Xerox click meter, which made leasing on a per-copy basis possible) and technical innovation -- made the point very dramatically. His history of Xerox's rejection of desk-top publishing, as a Xerox PARC project to drive more demand for printing (raster scan, laser printer, graphical user interface, mouse, ...) which resulted in the foundation technology that Apple, Adobe, and dozens of other companies benefited from surprised and engaged many of the innovation community members in the audience.

Hartung's research with more than 850 companies shows that 4 practices, organized as his "Phoenix Principle" account for success:

1. Be future oriented (the whole browser world, pre-Microsoft)
2. Obsess about competitors (not customers, competitors! Great story about how Tom Monahan at Domino's Pizza, after going broke 3 times in 18 years, realized that his advantage was delivery, not the dubious quality of the pizza)
3. Disrupt yourself (Honda making full-sized trucks, walking robots, health care systems, airplanes...)
4. Create and maintain white space (Idea submission at Virgin from insiders and outsiders follow the same pathway, Fould's Pasta learned to compete on premium, not commodity pasta, etc.)

Hartung concluded by challenging the participants to evaluate their own opportunities to apply these 4 practices to their own businesses, and to experience the conference in terms of the 4 practices. This is what a keynote speech should do!

I'll report later today and tomorrow on both plenary sessions and breakout sessions.

The October 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review has a very nice article on what TRIZ calls the use of resources: "The Power of Unwitting Workers." An important part of teaching about the use of resources is explaining that resources are not just things. Energy of any sort, from the system or from the environment, is a resource. Information from the system or the environment, or information generated as a byproduct of a function of the system are all resources. And the obvious resources in the system--the parts of the system, waste materials generated when building the system, etc.

The HBR article has 3 example of using the customer's energy to power the system:

1. The revolving door at a railroad station in the Netherlands turns a generator to power the lights in the train station.
2. Cars in the parking lot at a supermarket in England run over a system of plates. Deflection of the plates engages a flywheel, which runs a generator, producing electricity, AND the system of plates slows the car down, so energy is not wasted on braking by friction.
3. Power-generating floors in the Tokyo Station of the Japan Railway Company use piezoelectric devices to generate electricity--it is not yet at the economically useful level, but shows great promise.

In these cases the customer knows he/she is doing the work, and the company is getting "green" public relations as well as power.

The information examples are more subtle: the customer is aware of doing work for one purpose, but not that the company is getting other benefits.

1. About 10% of the questions on the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test, used for college admissions in many regions) are not really part of the test. The scores aren't used for the test-taker's evaluation. Those questions are used for calibration and for developing future tests. The test-takers act as unpaid information providers.
2. When you use a website with "CAPTCHA" security (they ask you to type in your interpretation of a messy-looking set of letters or numbers) they are not only deciding that you are a human being, and therefore entitled to use that site, they are getting you to help decipher phrases that have caused problems for optical scanners that are putting old books into databases. Last year CAPTCHA users helped trascribe almost 150,000 books.

These information examples are reminiscent of the example I used in my talk at the Computer-Aided Innovation conference (Harbin, China, August 2009). There has been a recent simplification of the method used to measure the speed of vehicles on highways, which is a great example of patterns of evolution, trimming, and use of resources.

A. 1950's Vehicles run over a hose stretched across the road. The pulse of air pressure is recorded to measure the vehicle passage and the time between pulses measures speed.

B. 1970's Both light and sound signals are bounced off the vehicles, and technology borrowed from military radar and sonar systems are used to measure the speed of the vehicles.

C. 2000's Drivers use cell phones while driving. The signals move from tower to tower with the cell, and from cell to cell as the vehicles move. The speed of transfer is the speed that vehicles are moving on the highway. In other words, the drivers give the highway operators the information as a by-product of using the phone. The need for a measuring system goes away (absorbed into the supersystem, in TRIZ-talk). Next phase has already begun--there are cars that receive the date directly into their navigation systems, and integrate it with the GPS, to suggest alternate routes around congested regions.

Do you have a great resource story? Share it with us using the comment feature!

ICED – the International Conference on Engineering Design – is the flagship event of the Design Society. The Seventeenth Conference was held last week at Stanford University in the USA. Over 200 papers were presented by a wide range of participants. Cause for celebration for Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal readers: Two of the 5 papers on TRIZ (written by friends of the TJ!) were honored as 2 of the 4 best papers at the conference, and 2 of the 37 "Reviewers' Favorites."

The full program, with abstracts, is available now at
http://stanford.edu/~merkuron/icedprogram/ICED%2709%20Program%20Web%20View.pdf so readers can see the august company that the winners were in, and how significant these awards are. It was eye-opening for me to see the academic side of the study of the design process.

The papers honored were:

• "A Dialectical Approach to Solve Inventive Problems Using Genetic Algorithms and TRIZ: Searching for a Computer Aided Innovation Shell" by Roberto Alejandro Duran-Novoa, Noel Leon-Rovira, and Eduardo Uresti from Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, México (presented by Roberto at the conference)
• "Functional Modeling for TRIZ-Based Evolutionary Analyses" by Gaetano Cascini from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, Federico Rotini from Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, and Davide Russo from Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy (presented by Gaetano at the conference)

Our congratulations to the winners on being honored by their colleagues. It is very interesting that there was a special session of the conference on the relationship between design prizes and design methodologies and popular acceptance of design innovations. I wonder whether the award of prizes to papers will have a similar effect on TRIZ as a popular method in future design conferences? Please use the comment feature of this column if you have any thoughts on this.

Day 2 of the Computer-Aided Innovation Conference in Harbin, China, kicked off with the keynote by Prof. Gaetano Cascini, newly elected chairman of the IFIP working group 5.4, president of the European TRIZ Association, and great friend of the TRIZ Journal. His talk engaged the audience in lessons learned from past experience to develop new systems for inventive problem solving from concept definitions through solution implementation, in general and within the computer-aided system context. The role of problem solving/invention as one (but only one) phase of innovation has been one of the primary discussion topics for the conference, and Gaetano added useful discipline to the definitions that underpin that discussion.

I was able to build on many of Gaetano's points as the second speaker, focusing on the challenge of using ideality and the ideal final result in the context of Computer-Aided Innovation.

Noel Leon spoke next on many of the exciting applications of CAI at Tecnologico de Monterrey, including the genetic algorithm and simulation work that we reported on last year. The system is designed to create a Computer-Aided Inventing Environment, merging TRIZ concepts with the genetic algorithm research. His application of the 3 laws of dialectics put a new perspective on some frequently over-simplified TRIZ concepts. His matrix of hybridization opportunities is an exciting tool, easily adapted to many approaches in addition to his proposed transgenic hybridization system.

Professor V. Berdonosov from Komsomolsk-na-Amure State Technological University in Russia has extensive experience teaching TRIZ in China. His paper explained his method of teaching TRIZ, and his experience teaching in both Russia and China. His data on the change of IQ scores showing an increase of 10 points after TRIZ training will cause considerable controversy (study of students in the Machine Building Program.) His formulation of the fractal nature of TRIZ and the fractal nature of university teaching will be useful to many people in many disciplines.

There were parallel sessions again in the afternoon. Session 5 featured Udo Kannengiesser (Australia) on Understanding Innovation as a Change of Value Systems, written with John Gero (US). Their thesis is that both the innovator and the customer change their value systems in the process of innovation. This work is based on a function-behavior-structure ontology developed over the last 2 decades. The value systems are the design properties that are related to usefulness, in a specific situation. This is a VERY brief summary of a lot of work! Changes of function can be either sustaining or disruptive (sustaining = parameter change, disruptive = situation change.) Value systems can only change if the situation that encapsulates the value system changes. Change can be induced in both the adopters and in the producers, by a variety of means - - social, economic, communications, feedback, etc. Numerous questions demonstrate the appeal of this work to the CAI audience.

Xianjie Shi presented his team's work at Harbin Engineering University on an innovative solution of a typical engineering problem based on function modeling, using the improvement of the energy required by a coal mining shearer (the device that moves the coal from the point of mining to where it is collected) as the example. A great number of physical and technical contradictions were identified from the function model; TRIZ methods easily eliminated these to create an innovative method for operating the shearer. Questioners were disappointed to learn that this was theoretical only - - they wanted the real machine!

Zihui Wei explained a method call the Length-Time kinematic system and table, in which all physical constants are represented by powers of L and T, and transformation of a system is represented using the biological analogy of parents transmitting characteristics to a child. Horizontal lines in the table are the TRIZ patterns of spatial evolution, vertical lines are the temporal patterns of evolution, and diagonals are some of the Su-Field trends (based on the work of Alexandr.) He illustrated the application with a paper winder: the faster it goes, the worse the force on the paper, and the harder it is to control the force on the paper. The LT method suggested solving the problem using friction, and an elegant application was shown, with a functioning prototype. Prof. Tan then thanked the TRIZ Journal, where he and Wei discovered the paper that introduced them to this method.

The afternoon concluded with 2 special sessions. Daniel Scheu conducted a session (in Chinese) about introducing companies to TRIZ, and his experiences in Taiwan. Prof. Tan started a roundtable discussion (in English) about the current issues in TRIZ. He told us about the Association for Innovation Methods, which currently includes people from TRIZ and Six Sigma studies, and is sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology. The afternoon concluded with thanks to all the organizers and good wishes for the next session, 2011 in Strasbourg, France.

Prof. Tan Runhua, Prof. Denis Cavallucci, and Prof. Zhao Xinjun

Prof. Tan Runhua, Prof. Roland De Guio, Prof. Derek Tate, Prof. K. Venkata Rao

Report on the Computer-Aided Innovation conference in Harbin, China. Day 1, afternoon session.

Two parallel sessions for the afternoon gave a wide variety of speakers an opportunity to tell the conference about a wide variety of research in both TRIZ methods and CAI applications, in 10 minutes each. A few examples:

The group from Hebei University Mechanical Engineering presented a method for fusing plastic pipe based on TRIZ. They pointed out that the problem is not a simple contradiction: they used the 40 principles, the separation principles, and 5 of the standard solutions to develop a real breakthrough solution

Denis Cavallucci presented a system for monitoring the impact of solution concepts within a given problem. He illustrated this with a case study done by INSA with Arcelor Mittal, dealing with steel roll processing. He showed how graph theory can be used to analyze the function model and the cause-effect diagram to identify the problem that has the highest priority for solution, and will remove the greatest part of the over-all problem. 90 contradictions came from 30 problems, and were resolved using 4 techniques. The system is self-improving, since the solutions are categorized and matched to the graphs, and the confidence of the researchers increases with the improvement of the system. This improves the willingness of the group to use innovative methods.

Prof. Derek Tate from Texas Tech University presented work by Christopher Adams and himself on Computer-Aided TRIZ Ideality and Level of Invention Estimation using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. This is part of a project to give feedback to innovators for improving the probability of success of an invention. I predict a lot of interest in this work, and a lot of future development.

TRIZ-based hybridization of topologically optimized density distributions was presented by Gaetano Cascini, on behalf of co-authors A. Cardillo, F. Saverio Frillici, and F. Rotini. The overall goal is to define a paradigm for CAD systems that overcomes the rigidity of conceptual design that locks out inventive concepts early in the design process. They obtained in one step the same result that took 600 generations using a genetic algorithm, for examples of wheel design and plate design, and a number of other simple structures. He proposes applying the density distribution method in combination with genetic algorithms to explore a more complete solution space.

Lihui Ma presented the paper from a group at Hebei and Tianjin: UXDs-driven transferring method from TRIZ solution to Domain Solution. This is a problem for many people learning TRIZ. (UXD's are unexpected discoveries.) He presented an example that used their advanced algorithm to create a domain solution for the problem of dispensing traditional Chinese medical products, which are very viscous, through a small dropper, which gets blocked by the product. The early results are very encouraging.

Humberto Aguillo presented his paper with Noel Leon on Predicting Innovation Acceptance by Simulation in Virtual Environments. Virtual Selection is an emerging concept that eliminates poorly-performing variants early in the development process. Toyota's success with the Scion, tested and refined in the virtual marketplace, was shown as an example, and explained with the Kano model. A current example is the Future Green Chatham homes now being tested in the Etopia community on Second Life. Humberto presented a plan for future research that will combine the results from the customer experiences with the strategies for genetic variant development.

One sign of a good conference is that the coffee breaks become debates…we reconvened for the second session. Reminder: since I could only be in one room at a time, these are just examples of the papers. Please see the full program for the many excellent papers that I missed.

Fuying Zhang reviewed the concept of Ideality and the IFR, and the challenge of designing to achieve ideality. Her research proposes a 4 stage design process familiar to TRIZ practioners that starts with formulating the IFR, analyzing the problem, resolving the problem, and then improving the solution to increase ideality. Her example of a reciprocating seal was very clear, and showed how the focus on ideality prevents the designer from using complexity to solve the problem.

Weidong Yang presented the application of TRIZ in patternless casting manufacturing. Patternless casting refers to systems in which a device is deposited or grown, rather than cast. There is a pattern, but not a mold – most rapid prototyping systems and 3D printing systems qualify as patternless, in Yang's terminology. The practical problem addressed was getting the resin content right for the product.

The final presentation of session 3 was Yan Yang's study on the application of extended matrices based on TRIZ in constructing a collaborative model of an enterprise network. Her group is at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. They applied the concept of contradiction to the concepts of trust, control, relationship and interaction which their research identified as the essential parameters of enterprise network function.

The afternoon concluded with the brief business meeting of IFIP working group 5.4. The new chairman will be Gaetano Cascini, who is also current president of the European TRIZ Association, and a well-know author for the TRIZ Journal. Congratulations, Gaetano! And many thanks to Noel Leon for his chairmanship. After dinner, Prof. Tan hosted a tour of Harbin for some of the speakers who had arrived too late for the pre-conference tour.

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