News: See the Facebook page for Ametriz for pictures and election results. The next Ametriz congress will be in Queretaro, a city 200 km from Mexico City, that has more than 30 technology-oriented industrial parks and major university centers for TRIZ activity. There may be both an Ametriz congress AND an Iberoamerican Innovation Congress (maybe in Brazil?) so stay tuned for news.

Marco de Carvalho was the lead speaker, sharing his research on new product ideation, combining TRIZ with other elements of business planning. The research incorporated an extensive review of both the popularity and effectiveness of many idea generation techniques (IGTs) and original research carried out over 10 years with students and professionals in mechanical, electrical and civil engineering and product design. Marco found that the heuristic methods were most productive, but they had the problem of low connection to customers and markets. He used his own methodology of value creation to develop the method that hybridizes the best of all techniques. The five strategies for increasing value use ideality as a basic guide: increase functions while decreasing connectivity (which is a stand-in for cost and harm) is the most stressing strategy. Five test sessions were conducted at the university, and the method showed 50% useful ideas, compared to 20% for brainstorming and 30% for trends of evolution. Tests with automotive, dental, and wood products companies are now underway. Marco showed a very effective example done with a manufacturer of window opening mechanisms for automobiles, being stressed by the manufacturer's demands for low cost products, where the system generated ideas that the company has implemented, increasing value by adding services to their product rather than cutting costs, and the company has successfully sold the idea to major manufacturers.

Darrell Mann fascinated the audience with his approach to business innovation, showing the primarily engineering-oriented group what the questions are that management must answer to manage innovation. He defines innovation as value-adding, successful (implemented, profitable in the private sector, meeting needs in the public sector) step change (not optimization--that's needed in the business, but it is not what Systematic Innovation does.) Darrell started with an extensive review of businesses' failures in the introduction of new products/services--the depressing news for the TRIZ audience is that only 20% is due technical solutions. The two leading causes of failure are route to market and market demand, where small and medium companies and also universities are particularly vulnerable.

Darrell spent the rest of the morning on the current research into intangibles, and how intangible elements of products/services influence the customers' buying decisions. We did group exercises (with considerable humor) looking for new functions that could add intangible benefits to existing products, and self-assessment to find our levels of thinking in the Spiral Dynamics model, that Darrell thinks has a strong influence on all the trends that affect successful innovation. He concluded with the "Fourth Turning" model of Strauss and Howe, that claims an 80 year cycle of generations, with very different decision-making patterns. Exaggerating the characteristics of each generation makes contradictions visible, which then makes it possible to find solutions that will be successful products/services.

René LópezFlores, Antonino Salas López, Daniel Hernández Marín, Guillermo Cortes Robles, and Giner Alor Hernández presented their work on integration of web-based services to assist companies solving innovation problems. TRIZ methods and social network ideas have been combined to give teams an environment for problem-solving, based either on contradiction removal or on Su-field modeling and the 76 standards.

Ibarra Ladrón de Guevara Ingrid Eunice, Reyna de León Luis Alberto, and Zoila Libertad García Santos presented their research on the learning styles of students, evaluated in terms of theories of Gagne. They found that students who explore topics on their own have a deeper level of understanding than those who just memorize what the teacher presents.

Laura Lorena Ballesteros Medina and Heriberto Aranda Gutiérrez presented their work on the evaluation of the management of technology in micro, small and medium enterprises in the city of Piedras Negras. Laura reports that there is considerable resistance to innovation, which many businesses view as a lottery, not a controlled process. The evaluation instrument was the national innovation model, amplified by additional detail in th management section, producing 6 categories of evaluation. It was surprising that the weight for contribution to the community was higher than the weight for commercial success, but the 4 case studies showed that the measurement is practical for identifying areas for improvement.

Application of TRIZ to problems in environmental engineering was the theme of the presentation by Rafael Muñoz Gómez. He has used current environmental initiatives to create examples of several of the 40 principles for environmental problems that threaten global climate, pollution of the oceans, and air quality in all parts of the world.

Marcos García Salgado presented his work with Edgardo Córdova López on industrial maintenance problems, and their proposed "System of intelligent maintenance" based on TRIZ concepts and lean concepts of prevention of problems with minimum inventory. Continuous monitoring and maintenance when the evaluation of the data indicates in incipient problem replaces maintenance at scheduled times, and in many cases, such as lubrication, the maintenance activity itself can be automated. The SIM can monitor temperature by means of IR cameras, vibration by means of accelerometers, etc. This can result in more continuous use of the machines and improved use of maintenance functions.

The event concluded with much hugging and promises to collaborate on projects and to meet at the next Congress.

Pictures from Day 1 of the Puebla conference are on the Facebook page for AMETRIZ (the Mexican TRIZ Association.)

The 3 conferences in Puebla, Mexico separated in the morning - - my workshop on how to improve TRIZ teaching by leaving the classroom for the Iberoamerican Innovation Congress attracted 50 people, who were enthusiastic participants in the various experiments with Bloom's taxonomy, Clark's curriculum, and the Kirkpatrick measurements (the paper will be published in the TRIZ Journal in December, so I'll just tease you with these remarks.)

The conferences converged to hear from Jack Hipple (TRIZ Journal commentator and editorial board member). Jack gave an educational and entertaining tour of the patterns of evolution, with particular emphasis on trimming , and the constant challenge "how would you like to be the supplier of..." Would you like to supply metal to the bucket makers for mopping when the mop carries its own liquid? Would you like to supply supply scrub brushes now that the shower cleans itself?..." Jack gave the TRIZ audience a lot of very good examples and the non-TRIZ audience learned a lot about patterns of change.r

After touring the creativity classroom at the Institute of Technology and a lunch hosted by the student TRIZ group, we returned to the conference for the presentation by Jesús M. Seáñez-de-Villa on the use of TRIZ to create a simple, disposable, highly accurate system for detecting cervical cancer.

He was followed by Juan Pablo Eskildsen, who spoke about his research on application of TRIZ to social problems, and used recent violence in Guatemala as a case study. Juan did extensive function analysis, looking at multiple levels of cause/effect (everything from drugs and gangs to dysfunctional families and inadequate police pay), then applying elements of both the 40 principles and the 76 standards to the situations. This would be an ordinary story of a TRIZ case study, but then he asked "What will I do?" and also "If I do nothing, then I am contributing to the problems." He is now publicizing both the problem and the TRIZ-generated solutions, looking for government and community support for solutions.

Lilly Haines-Gadd showed the application of TRIZ to government problems in the UK, which the multi-national audience appreciated, since government agency cost-cutting is hardly a uniquely British problem. Working with Birmingham county council members untrained in TRIZ, Lilly showed how the concepts of Ideality and of time and scale gave the participants a foundation for re-creating the Legal and Democratic Services department. Function mapping gave direct birth to several ideas that might look ordinary to people in industry but which had never been considered in the government sector - - different fees for different categories of clients, icrease efficiency to generate more revenue for the same number of hours work, etc. The next steps, already in work, are to complete the implementation of the TRIZ-based ideas, and to be the first locality in the UK to commercialize their services.

M. en A. Elba Mariana Pedraza Amador presented the study of the use of the 40 principles for technology management in "Silos y Camiones" (a company name that means "silos and trucks") which is a large company that has been created from a series of mergers with other companies in storage and transportation business. The company formed a partnership with university specialists in management of technology, innovation, and continuous improvement to create a system of alignment of all corporate activities.

The final paper of the afternoon showed the work of R.A. Viana Barcelo, C.P.Cote Pena, and J.L.Navarro Espana on the motivations of academic investigators in Colombia for the generation and transfer of knowledge to the commercial sector. Extensive work has been done on encouraging academic/industry exchange, but all of it was based on the presumed benefits to society of the collaboration, not on the understanding of the people involved. Multiple variables including publications in refereed journals, patents, and products developed were examined as a function of the demographics of the academic and industry personnel, and found that generation of revenue is the primary factor driving the collaborative efforts. Scientific recognition and professional advancement were minor contributors. The conclusion was that Colombia lacks many of the incentive systems in place in Germany and the US, which were used as benchmarks.

The Ametriz business meeting concluded the day.

Puebla, Mexico: The 5th Iberoamerican Innovation Congress is co-located in Puebla's new conference center and co-produced with two other conventions, Inova 2010 and PYMES (small and medium enterprises). This will be a personal report on the papers that I heard--for the full program see www.ametriz.com and follow the links to the conference. The keynote/kick-off speaker was Prof. Klaus North from the Weisbaden University in Germany, His theme was that ecological innovation is critically necessary, because most people will not make short-term choices that are in the best interests of conservation if the costs are visible but the benefits are abstract. At the same time, he encouraged businesses to consider climate change as a business risk, and to take environmental initiatives to protect their businesses. Prof. North gave considerable attention to the need to innovate the business model as well as the products to succeed in the environmentally-conscious environment of the business future.

The second speaker reviewed both thermo-solar and electrosolar technologies, and introduced new applications that he saw as breaking the dependency on oil. I saw his extensive review of current solar technologies as excellent TRIZ examples of the use of existing resources (solar heat and gravity, but also the electric grid) plus the application of technologies outside the fields where they were developed. He provided a set of questions for installations -- everything from "who will do the maintenance?" to "how long to recover my investment?" to guide people in selecting appropriate technology.

The third event of the morning was a panel presentation which got considerable press coverage (both the panel and the audience were on local television!) The good news is that innovation is getting a lot of attention in academic, government, and business forums, throughout the region. Participation from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brasil, Colombia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, U.S, and U.K. demonstrated that "Iberoamerican Innovation" is part of the global innovation imperative.

Manuel Cendoya's presentation was based on the experience familiar to many TRIZ practioners, finding parallels between discoveries in diverse fields. He used Bach Fugues to illustrate the development of our understanding of the Triple Helix of academia, business, and government, organized around a system of technological parks. Examples from Europe and Latin America illustrated his points.

The presentation by the delegate from AENOR on the management and encouragement of innovation looked at specific methods and processes of innovation, emphasizing that technology may be an enabler of innovation but should not be mistaken for innovation. He used many examples from global companies of technology providing the foundation for innovation, but strategic managment of the technology and the business system were both necessary for profitable innovation that established competitive advantage.

After lunch, there were several technical sessions, and as usual I will report only on the ones that I attended, and refer our readers to the proceedings for a more complete view. Marco de Carvalho from Brazil (former member of the TJ editorial board) gave a fascinatig case study of TRIZ applicaon to a real manufacturing problem, mating the upper and lower parts of a vehicle without damaging gaskets at the interface. Ideas generated without TRIZ generally made the system more complicated and did not solve the problem. Using TRIZ they identified a simple technical contradiction (reduce friction without increasing complexity) and using the classical 40 principles they found solutions based on principles 35 (change the gasket material) and principle 10 (change the nozzle design so that it can be assembled at a later time), and others. They then re-analyzed the problem as a physical contradiction and generated many ideas using the separation principles. One of the ideas from the technical contradiction analysis and one idea from the physical contradiction analysis were chosen for implementation. The TRIZ-based ideas were simple, but non-obvious, and the company is now using TRIZ in other areas of process engineering.

I presented my paper on the integration of TRIZ with stage-gate methods, QFD, and other families of tools, to an appreciative and interactive audience who obviously had much experience in the wilderness of tool proliferation.

Judith Sanches presented her work with Edgardo Cordoba on the development of intangibles. She showed extensive statistical analysis of the patents generated by Mexican universities, and the ways that the universities interact with local businesses.

Carlos Eduardo Requena from Argentina presented his views of USIT (Unified Structured Inventive Thinking), which is well-known in Latin America thanks to early translations of Ed Sickafus' work. Carlos gave a short tutorial on USIT, emphasizing the need to do comprehensive analysis of the problem without jumping into the solution methods. His case study examined the formation of excess foam when washing with detergents. Solving the problem required understanding three phases in the life-cycle of foam: formation, maturation, and persistence of dry foam. It is a classical physical contradiction, because the surfactant causes both the useful (cleaning) functions and the harmful (persistence.) Multiple solutions were generated, each causing new problems, until a strategy of unifying the solutions was applied, removing all the problems.

What do all these topics have in common? They are all examples of new products that eliminate some other product or part of a system and still accomplish most or all of the original intent but with greater simplicity, lower cost, and less waste. In the TRIZ world, we call this redesign concept "trimming".

A recent I Pad (R) application, Magic Fiddle, visually shows the outline and fingerings for a violin and a song can be played by simply following the symbols. The thumb is the bow and controls volume. Interactive learning teaches trills, chords, and glissando's. So much for real violins and violin instructors.

Netflix(R) and Redbox(R) have replaced video stores and the inventory shelves and service people. So much for metal shelf manufacturers and some jobs.

Kimberly Clark has brought on the market technology to wind toilet paper that does not need a core to maintain a hollow center. So much for the cardboard manufacturers.

Starbucks, driven by the same environmental focus of not throwing stuff away, has had a contest to design a coffee cup that can be reused. 1 BILLION a year by 2015. So much for the pulp producers.

Training bikes without training wheels are now on the market after discovering that children actually learn faster without them. So much for the wheel suppliers and metal producers.

Clothing with built in UV protection is now on the market, minimizing the use of sun screens. So much for the chemical makers and formulators.

The dramatic drop in land line phone usage (25% in 5 years) with cell phones becoming a total substitute. So much for the plastics makers of the land line phones.

The Black and Decker Paint Stick(R) eliminates the aluminum paint pan. So much for the aluminum producer and metal forming business.

All of these changes are reported as "surprises" in the media, but they aren't really. They are the natural, known progression of products and technologies as seen in the study of millions of patents and new products

Now I am exaggerating some when I say, "so much for....", but the point is that every material, product, or service has the POTENTIAL to be absorbed into its super-system or into a system or other product already in use. With the exception of the painting and phone examples, all of the above examples have occurred with in the past few months and they are across a broad range of commercial products and businesses.

What about yours? What can you replace or absorb? How could someone replace you? Don't wait until you read about your demise in the newspaper or on the web.

There is a global desire to exploit innovation for gaining competitive advantage, and a significant effort to deploy innovation without knowing how to. Most business colleges are still pursuing entrepreneurship programs without much education in innovation. Recognition of need to teach innovation is becoming apparent but slowly. I am surprised that more academic and corporate resources have not been allocated to developing teachable innovation concepts, method, tools, measurements and management.

I have been teaching innovation for about five years. Ed Coates a Master Business Innovator will start teaching a course on innovation in healthcare in Pennsylvania. A university on West Coast killed the whole concept of innovation center before the course could even start. A couple of community colleges are also teaching Business Innovation course. I sense that activities for teaching innovation increasing however not sufficient action taken to make any visible impact.

European Union (EU) has recently released a report on Europe 2020 Flagship Initiative, Innovation Union. The report highlights need for getting more innovation out of its research. Innovation Union has made some commitments such as by the end of 2011, Members States should have strategies in place to train enough researchers to meet their national R&D targets. It still appears that there is a lack of resources committed to understand how the innovation works, or advancing science and engineering of innovation. In absence of a clear understanding of the innovation process, strategies are just a text.

I believe teaching or learning innovation must be the first action item to initiate any innovation journey by any organization, including a national or EU like Government. Without education in innovation it is like driving a car without learning how to drive and the driver's license. The risk of accidents is very high.

It is time we recognize that the right way to deploy innovation must be through education in innovation in addition to education in math, science, technology and engineering. We must recognize the paradigm that innovation is a learned skill, not a gift to some! Everyone can become a better and faster innovator through education, practice and networking.

I would love to hear what is your organization doing about educating employees in innovation in order to accelerate and sustain profitable growth and create jobs.

Professor Romano Nanni started the program with an illustrated talk ":Anthropo-zoomorphic models and kinematic models in Leonardo da Vinci's mechanizations" The illustrations were from da Vinci's own notebooks, and they wre both technically fascinating and beautiful as works of art. Nanni showed us that biomimetics is not a new concept; it figured prominently in da Vinci's work. Gaetano Cascini's remarks at the end of Prof. Nanni's paper put the studies into the TRIZ context, and suggested a method to be used for learning from historical studies.

Reminder: this is a personal report on the sessions that I participated in. For the full program, see www.etria.net.

Wessel Willems Wits from the University of Twente in the Netherlands presented "TRIZ based interface conflict resolving strategies for modular product architectures" developed with Tom Vaneker, president of ETRIA. He started with formal definitions of modular architecture and integral architecture, and the different design challenges of the 2 approaches, focusing on the different levels of complexity of interfaces. They model the system using function, behavior, and structure, using kinematics, dynamics, or both. The link to Simon Litwin's talk yesterday was very clear, when Wits went into detail about the context-sensitive nature of function, and discussed how the same structure can be used to achieve different functions under different circumstances. An electronic design case study, emphasizing heat problems in design, was used to illustrate the method.

"TRIZ Tools to Enhance Risk Management was presented by Daniele was presented by Daniele Regazzoni and Davide Russo, from the host university at Bergamo. They based a 6-step method on TRIZ :subversion: methods as well as classical FMEA and reliability engineering. He illustrated the steps with examples of common products and explained how they plan to test the method in the next 2 years for product problems, with people of varied backgrounds, and, in the discussion, explained that they think that a modification may be needed for risk management of processes, and how this will be part of the research.

I was chairman of the next session, so my notes are much more limited than usual, and the papers were 10 minutes each. Caterin Rizzi spoke with a new hat - she is president of APEIRON, the Italian Society for Reason-based Innovation, and she presented the evolving mission and methods of APEIRON, to promote TRIZ to academia and to industry throughout Italy.

Hans-Peter Steinbacher and Stefan Huber presented their work "Supporting Innovation Processing with Integrated Information Models for Activity Support and Information Structuring." Their work started with the observation of the chaotic nature of product development in small and medium enterprises, They created a system TIE to give SMEs structure for both the marketing and technology phases of product development, which creates re-usable knowledge for the organization's future developments, as well as guidance through any particular project. They used TRIZ (particularly the contradiction matrix) to design the tools, becoming their own case study.

Victor Berdonosov and Elena Redkolis explained their concepts of "TRIZ-fractality of computer-aided software engineering systems." Berdonosov used analogies to fractals in nature to explain fractals in information/knowledge systems, then showed how the TRIZ laws of technology evolution might apply at various levels of the fractals.

Sergei Ikovenko (frequent conference speaker and one one my first TRIZ teachers) spoke about using TRIZ for competitive patent circumnavigation and other patent strategies. Sergei showed how even very simple patents can be circumnavigated using the trimming concepts of TRIZ, with an excellent set of examples developed by Hyundai during recent workshops.

The opening session of the conference combined thanks to the organizers, led by Caterina Rizzi of the University of Bergamo, and a welcome from Stafano Paleari, rector of the university, with welcome and celebration of the 10th anniversary of ETRIA by Tom Vaneker, president of ETRIA. Tom announced that the membership meeting on Friday (open to all) will focus on getting more attention for TRIZ papers in the scientific / academic literature (send him your ideas through comments to this posting.) Pierluigi Petrali gave a brief outline of the work of H.E. Daly, "Economics in a Full World," and used it to motivate the TRIZ audience to share knowledge and put the knowledge to work to make the resources of the world better available to all.

The plenary session was "How to formulate crazy problems" by Vladimir Gerasimov, translated by Sergei Ikovenko. What is a normal problem must be defined so that crazy problems are the others. He started with simple cartoons of a system, with some disadvantage, then a search for resources inside the system, and if that doesn't work, search for resources in the supersystem, and if that doesn't work, look farther away in other industries, other technologies, etc. But, if there are no solutions, the next step is feature transfer, also called alternative system design. Briefly, find a second system that performs the same function as the initial one, but without the defficiency of the original system (see the morning talk by Simon Litwin for how to look for these systems). These systems could be real, hypothetical (but possible) or unrealistic (contradicts laws of nature) but has all the needed properties. Crazy problems require making these unrealistic systems real. The fantasy system can be the source for resources that can later be implemented in the real world. Gerasimov's examples were very real-world: position of a sensor in a nuclear reactor control mechanism had 2 impossible solutions, one with no friction and one with a negative height. Hybridizing these apparently impossible systems created a physically realizable solution that eliminated all problems. A second example was from the mundane world of industrial fabric dyeing, which requires both injection of fresh dye and removal of depleted solution. The impossible / crazy solutions require dyeing from the inside of the fabric, but there are no openings in the fabric tube. Gerasimov challenged the audience to develop their own solutions.

Seung-Heon Han from Korea started one of two simultaneous sessions (reminder - these are the notes about the sessions I attended, for the full program see www.etria.net) explaining the Samsung Electro-Mechanics division's approach to TRIZ, and how it has evolved from 2001 through the present, through education and application to real problems, to the present situation where the CEO is now the leading TRIZ fan. In past conferences, Samsung has shared its mass teaching methods. This time S-H Han presented some of the results of all that TRIZ training, showing prize winning new designs for antennas and for high density devices, and also showing some of the policy changes that they have made along the path. The audience reacted very well to his demonstration (humorous!) of the problem of getting people to actually use TRIZ when they have :other: jobs to do. He used a Korean folk story of the sparrows passing through a water mill to illustrate the problem, and to explain their current system which uses TRIZ specialists working with subject matter experts in an on-line environment of a game, with rewards through a lottery to people who contribute ideas. No one has to motivate or persuade people to participate - the experts make the problem so interesting that people want to participate. The examples of electronic processing were very persuasive.

Daniele Murara and Alessio Tonetti from the Italian part of the global company Coster, producer of many kinds of valves, showed their implementation of TRIZ along with lean, helpd by D. Rizzi from the Bergamo U. faculty. Since very little has changed in many years in their customers' world, they can only improve competitiveness by reducing either weight of parts or labor to produce them. The company has a very flat structure, with all workers having the same title. They have considerable experience with lean methods, and they started adding TRIZ a few years ago. They have a unique approach to TRIZ: "we produce ideas the same way we produce valves - each team passes its work on to the next at the end of the shift." The case study was an example of real life in a manufacturing plant. Daniele showed several kinds of defects that can cause jamming of the production machine. Changes in the production line that appear simple (rolling instead of sliding, and an opening to remove defective caps) came from a detailed function analysis and operationl zone analysis, and made use of the resources that were already in the system. The multi-shift method of doing the analysis assured that people would be working on each shift who understood the method and the reason for the changes, at the cost of some inconvenience with transfers between groups. Personally, I think this paper was a high point, with a truly unique way of engaging employees in TRIZ and taking advantage of the knowledge, enthusiasm, and expertise of the employees.

Caterina Rizzi, conference organizer, then spoke in her University and local leadership capacities, on support for TRIZ / systematic innovation for small and medium enterprises in the region, to enhance the local economy. (This is a short report because the papers were limited to 10 minutes, not because of low interest.) With 2 meetings per month for 28 users, they already have 4 patents, 3 utility models, and 7 trademarks. The main problem is getting patent attorney services for the SME's, and the next problem is to make this service permanent, since the experiment has been successful.

Viktoria Zinner presented "Understanding populations better than they understand themselves" based on the German modifications of Darrell Mann's work on trends, based in part on the technology and business/social evolution concepts. Viktoria framed the work in terms of systematically identifying where to innovate, where to look outside the well-known box. She demonstrated the practical method of starting with a trend, then looking at other trends in conflict or in harmony with it, then using TRIZ to resolve conflicts, and she also showed the more analytic method of creating network maps and doing geometrical analysis of the map to find opportunities.

My paper planned for Thursday was given next, due to a speaker who missed a plane - - "Improve teaching TRIZ by leaving the classroom" will be published later this year in the TRIZ Journal. The main point is that if you focus on the learner, rather than the teacher, and structure the course using many of the concepts of modern education, you will take the class outside the classroom to learn from examples outside their own field, so that they will overcome their fears of application to their own work.

Jose Vicente addressed himself to the new TRIZ practioners in the group (and I'm sure to many teachers) with his "Rule of thumb for formulating physical contradictions." He stressed the use of function analysis to describe contradiction at the function level, His examples of umbrella structures and milk processing were both memorable, and easily understood by people with no technological background, which will make them useful to many other teachers. His technical analysis of the coffee machine is a great teaching story. I suggested that if many teachers start using his method, we could plan a full session at next year's conference!

Last paper from day 1 was John Cooke's explanation of the tongs model (not an acronym, just referring to a device for holding something) of OTSM that first appeared in the1940s, and then recurred throughout the development of the various stages of ARIZ and OTSM. John suggested that it might be a good time to revive the tongs to make it easy for people to get started with TRIZ. The tongs model can be presented as a series of questions:
- What makes me unhappy in the present situation?
- What would I want if I had a magic wand, liberating me from all impossibility?
- What seems most impossible? How could I make that happen?
John uses the goldfish story (originally a Pushkin fable?) which starts with a fisherman being nagged by his wife to catch more fish. So, he tries, and by surprise, catches a talking goldfish, who offers to grant his wish if the fisherman will set him free. Long story, but the fisherman wishes for less than what his wife wants,who sends him back for more, and the students are able to use this example to explore the nature of wishing, of impossibility, and the idea of iterations of the MDR (most desirable result) John emphasised that the iterations are not trial-and-error, they are guided, structured, where the iterations are needed as the nature of the problem is progressively revealed.

After this full day, the group will climb the steep streets of Alta Citta (high city) Bergamo to the site of the welcoming party at the hall of justice.

The first morning of the TRIZ Futures Conference European TRIZ Association 2010 is devoted to tutorials. Jose Vicente (frequent TRIZ Journal author) is doing a half-day tutorial for beginners, and I am at the session presented by Simon Litwin, nominally on Function-Oriented Search, but started with Simon's annecdotes about his studies with Altshuller. Simon was introduced by Gaetano Cascini, member of the TRIZ Journal editorial committee and past-president (several times!) of the European TRIZ Association. If you are thinking about attending a future ETRIA meeting, don't worry about all my notes about old friends - there are many new people at the meeting, and the conversations (best learning part of the meeting, not the lectures) are very inclusive.

As always, this is a personal report on the papers and events that I attended. For a full program, see www.etria.net. The papers will be available shortly after the end of the conference.

Function-oriented search is a problem solving tool based on global knowledge search, using functions as the key search itmes. Simon claims that this resolves the classical TRIZ contradiction: the solution should be disruptive to insure significant improvement and the solution should be already proven to reduce implementation time. Function-oriented search is based on a generalization of functions using both the action and the object of the function, which expands the search beyond what would be found using a single definition. Simon reports that the power of Function-oriented search is so great that Gen3 very seldome uses ARIZ or standard solutions now.

As an example with great appeal for the parents in the audience, Litwin showed the case of improving disposable baby diapers by increasing the density of holes in the plastic sheet using a technology developed in the space industry for testing micro-meteorite resistance of metal sheets. The function-oriented search found an effective technology, already developed and deployed and proven, and the researchers at the diaper company were able to accept technology from outside their industry in a way that they would not if they had only an idea. He showed similar success with using Formula 1 race pit crew coordination for hospital emergency treatment and using ideas from condom production for food wrapping (leaks are important - think about it!)

Litwin presented an 11 step algorithm for the method and then demonstrated the use of the algorithm with the popular case study of seasonal allergies, addressed both from the point of view of the sufferer and the point of view of the producer of drugs and devices. Both parties want to avoid side effects, breathing resistance, wearing conspicuous devices, and high expense. The development of the solution from a concept initially developed for dust control in cement production was a great case study, including secondary problems (the cement industry doesn't have to worry about removing the device, the person with allergies wants to remove and dispose of it.) In my opinion what makes a great case is that it is easy to remember, easy to explain in a variety of cultures, and it illustrates the significant elements of the lesson - thanks, Simon!

The morning Keynote session was scheduled for 8:30, and I walked in at 8:15 and met the planned speaker, Steve Shapiro. Steve immediately was friendly and quickly talked about his three weeks on the road, the components of the Human Brain, how kids' can freely play until we adults spoil it, and about water proof paper to use in the shower in case you get an idea. Clearly a free thinker with a big sense of Humor!

Steve is the Vice-President of Strategic Consulting for InnoCentive and the Author of "24/7 Innovations". Once Introduced by Praveen Gupta, Steve started his talk. He said "I am not big on slides" and "I have 3 points of view, 3 quotes, and two pictures!" He asked the audience to define innovation and received responses. Steve makes the point that Innovation is a response to an event or problem. Adaptability is very important and you need to have a portfolio of challenges, then determine which matter the most, and then go fix them.

Steve then talked about several types of Innovation:

- Open Innovation where outside resources are used and leveraged and Inside Innovation within an organization using their methods, people, and tools. An example of the BP spill website was used for Open Innovation. Ideas were asked for and entered on a website. BP received 80,000 suggestions of which they evaluated 20,000. Of the 20,000 only a handful of ideas were feasible. Steve tied this to the "Signal to Noise" ratio in Audio equipment. It's how many good ideas you get out of all the ideas. So an idea system can be quickly overloaded. Steve then carefully talked about the importance of phrasing the question so that solutions become higher quality.

An exercise was done with the audience. Steve pulled out a foam brick and asked "what can you do with a brick? And people stated with a range of random suggestions, "use it in your patio, throw it, fix a table that rocks, etc." Steve then asked the audience to pair up and use the brick example, but to have the first person in the pair bring up a random item that the brick would be used with, then after several minutes switch and have the other person do the same. My partner was given "refrigerator" and then he rattled off ideas for the brick like "hold up a broken shelf, separate items on a shelf, prevent a bottle from rolling, and so on. Steve polled the audience and all clearly felt their most creative ideas were in the second case where a connection is made between the brick and a random item.

Steve concluded by showing several product examples that used this approach and then answered questions. An enlightening and fun keynote for all.

Next there were breakout sessions. I attended "What's Constraining Your New Product Growth" by Mike Dalton, Managing Director and Chief Innovation Coach for the Guided Innovation Group. He is also the author of "Simplifying Innovation".

Mike indicated that companies spend 30% of their net income (3% - 5% of total) on Research and Development and they expect a return. To do that Mike introduced the "Guided Innovation System TM" as a framework for innovation improvement. The system is based on the Theory of Constraints and seeks to find and eliminate the constraint or bottleneck. Mike summarized a 5 step process to resolve any constraint in the Product Development process. Those steps were Identify, Exploit, Subordinate, Elevate, and then start Again.

In the First step Mike suggested that you process map your Innovation process. It should also be measured on Sale Throughput and Cycle Time. Focus on the constraints that offer the most leverage.

In step 2, Exploit some key points were to: Only allow the best opportunities into the innovation pipeline. In the top 20% performing companies Mike has worked with, only 1.1% of their innovation projects were cancelled after all the detailed design work was done. In the remaining 80%, on average, 19% of their projects are canceled after the detailed design. Also, clearly understanding what the Customer is hiring you to do and seeing how your Innovation helps them increase sales throughput, working capital, or reduces expenses and what is that value to the Customer. Then run it through your company's financial model.

Step 3 Subordinate; engage the rest of the organization to get the most help on the Innovation bottleneck. Step 4 Elevate; add capacity to your constraint. Suggestions included hiring top talent, training, and development of the Innovation Team. Also using open innovation methods are useful. And finally, Start again â€" continually use the steps to evaluate your Innovation Process.

Overall, Mike summarized a very useful and systematic approach to evaluating and improving an Innovation Process.

The next Keynote was with Chris Galvin CEO Harrison St. and former CEO of Motorola. Chris was introduced by Martin Swarbrick, CEO of Bison Gear. The presentation was titled "A Business History: The Galvins"

Chris sited Devotion to Innovation, Leadership, and Culture a primary drivers and motivators for him and his Father and Grandfather. They had a goal of creating 1 â€" 2 new industries each decade. This was confirmed in a review of 75 years of history. Starting with several failures at Galvin Manufacturing and then succeeding with the first car radio. Other firsts included the portable two way radio, key semiconductors, paging, automotive controls, the cellular phone, Six Sigma, and the first Malcolm Baldrige award.

Chris talked about the importance of the CEO investing in innovation and that complexity and diversity in innovation are your friends. If it's easy, all your competitors will do it. Innovation includes surprises, volatility, requires patience, and you have to have an Innovation Culture.

Chris talked much about the importance of People and that Culture is the application of Principles and Values. A company must be highly principled and the Galvin's wanted to grow the future. A phrase Chris used was "Identify the impossible and make it possible".

Finally Chris talked about how the performance of Motorola was up until his departure, how the culture that was there has been removed and changed and contrasted the performance of Motorola since the Galvin era was gone. Quite a dramatic financial change to the negative, not to mention the many jobs lost.

Chris finished by talking about "Trust" and "Essence" and took many questions from the audience. From my perspective and that of other attendees, a great presentation and discussion was seen.

The final session I attended was "Relationship Capital: Accounting for your Success" by Rob Peters, Principle Leader, Banking and Financial Services Business, Development Global Direct Services.

Rob talked about a project he is involved with where using a Social Networking tool to profile yourself and your team. A profile can be completed and you can also work to complete a certification on relationships. The profile will account for others in your network for your meeting commitments and their perceptions. This important information can be used for improving yourself in work or social groups to perform effectively.

Rob talked about seven principles that are used including: Accountability, Boundaries, Honesty, Respect, Responsibility, Support, and Trust. Each of these principles were touched on and are core to the future of an Interconnected Social Network environment that we will be living in or are already in.

Rob supplied information on the Relationship Networking Industry Association and www.RNIA.org. An interesting and futuristic presentation that had me thinking differently.

John Forsberg is 25 year veteran of the Quality Engineering and Management Fields as well was a ten year Leader in the Customer Service, Technical/Sale Support functions. John is an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer, a senior member of the ASQ, and a certified Six Sigma Black and Green Belt.

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!

The audience got very engaged in Tim Basadur's "Flight to Creativity." (Yes, son of Min Masadur, but an innovation contributor on his own, too.) His "Why teamwork is often uncreative and time consuming" chart started lots of conversations. The equation for meetings is
Results = Content + Process + Tools + Style
C = K x I x E (Creativity is the product of knowledge, imagination, and evaluation) Discussion: there may also be a multiplying factor for interest in the problem and motivation to work on it. One factor their research has uncovered is the person's knowledge gaining style: (do you prefer direct experience or abstract thinking?) and knowledge using style (do you use knowledge for evaluating options or for creating options?) Combining these give 4 process styles, and understanding the styles can make teams much more effective. Interesting that this research applied in graduate schools (MBA study teams) and in industry.

Wayne Fisher's premise (based on 20 years of observation at Procter & Gamble) is "Innovation is a Team Sport." P&G's growth strategy is "touching and improving more consumers' lives in more parts of the world, more completely." and innovation is DOING it.

His keys to innovation are people, process, and place; and he shared some of his experiences developing the space for teamwork in a product development center. He now works in "the GYM" which is a physical space and a group of facilitators, designed to help other people within the company to enhance innovation (more than 400 workshops a year!) Wayne showed us a phenomenal array of projects--ranging from reducing the cost and improving the lifetime of existing products to finding new product applications for technology discoveries.

Wayne's case study comparing training/deployment/company benefit of Design of Experiments to TRIZ (the study was done for an IMC user group meeting in 1998, that I actually remember!) Discussion throughout the room focussed on the sphere of influence (DoE success because researchers do experiments anyhow, so changing that is easy, TRIZ generated ideas that were outside the influence of the people generating the ideas.) The entire conference audience joined in exploring this; Ralph Czerepinski's suggestion that DoE gives instant gratification and TRIZ creates ideas that require lots of work got big applause!
Concluding remarks:
-Teams out-perform individuals, always
-Know your individual style and use tools to overcome gaps
-Processes don't stifle creative people; they create the "space" for them to succeed.

Emily Riley of the Wright Brothers Institute introduced David Shahady of the Air Force Research Labs. He said that AFRL is a very large "company" that is looking for innovation that is sustained over long periods of time, in supportof the Air Force mission of fly, fight, and win in air, space, and cyberspace. AFRL has 40 locations world-wide with a variety of time-scales, ranging from 30+ years to this week and this month.
Shahady tries to overcome the "buzz word" innovation problem by limiting the use to putting new ideas into practice - - he made good use of the story of Swan vs. Edison in the history of the lightbulb.

AFRL intentionally fosters innovation through understanding motivation, toolboxes, social/technical networking, benchmarking commercial m.ethods and adapting them to military needs (and venture capital methods, too--how's that for innovative?)

Shahady's focus in this presentation is the AFRL's design challenge competition, which has unambiguous results, since the participants compete in a battlefield envionment to find out which solution to the problem is best. The commercial participants seemed to envy this evaluation method! Competion between university groups, service academies, and Air Force commands follow the same format.
Competitive spirit is important, but using problems that are significant and complex ("wicked" in complexity-talk) is very important. Counter-intuitively, he said that unreasonable time limits and friction in the team are important, too. More expected was the importance of realistic environments for the tests, and the benefits of finding people to recruit for future work. After 5 years, they have increased the expectations for the challenges from developing ideas in the education system to generating ideas that can go directly into development (yes, and refinement) for real field application.

The three tracks re-combined for a concluding plenary session addressed by Mark Fox, author of "DaVinci and the 40 Answers" (based in part on his exposure to the TRIZ 40 principles at one of my workshops 5+ years ago) and on his own experiences, initially as an engineer in the space shuttle program and for many years as a consultant. His examples of TRIZ principles seen as "lenses" for viewing situations covered many situations. (Temple Grandin's autism is a "lens" through which she views the world of animal treatment, for example.) Mark did a terrific job of bringing the lessons of the day together for people from all the tracks, with a mix of video, music, advertising and technology stories.

Congratulations to the board of the Altshuller Institute for accepting the initiative of Zennovate and the Wright Brothers Institute to co-produce TRIZCON with the National Innovation Conference in Dayton, Ohio, USA - yes, Dayton is the city where the Wright brothers built their airplane in their bicycle shop, so there's a strong local innovation history. While I am a regular participant in TRIZCON, both for learning new things about TRIZ and for seeing many friends, it was an equal delight to meet many new people (estimate: 40 TRIZ and 80 non-TRIZ attendees) who had no previous exposure to TRIZ, and to learn about their non-TRIZ innovation endeavors.

Mansour Ashtiani, President of the Altshuller Institute, briefly welcomed everyone and gave a short overview of the activities in the world-wide TRIZ community. Jeffrey Davis, MD, Director of Space Life Sciences at NASA presented the first plenary session, surprising those of us who did not know how extensive NASA's use of open innovation has become - - everything from keeping food packaging fresh in space to an algorithm for predicting solar flares. More than 1300 people/teams in 65 countries worked on recent challenges. (See my Commentary from July for other thoughts on open innovation, and how TRIZ can improve the systems now being used.) He had considerable guidance for the audience about how to decide which projects should be done conventionally (grants to universities or industry, or NASA's own laboratories) and which will benefit from world community participation, and lessons learned about how to formulate the challenge problems. No surprise to the TRIZ community how many of their "lessons" involve using functional definitions to improve the problem statements! Findings about where the responses come from are useful to know where to target outreach activities for other forms of research (material science for food packaging in Russia, algorithms in France, etc., as examples) A new challenge for an algorithm reorganize the medical kit for spacecraft is getting lots of response. Davis had some very interesting speculation that I'll look forward to hearing more about:

1. "Breaking" the competitive model and creating a collaborative model, or possibly creating collaborations among the winning ideas in the competitive phase,
2. Unexpected intangible benefits in the joy that the public expressed at working on real space exploration problems.

The conference was organized with 3 parallel tracks, and I will report on the sessions that I was in. See the full program at www.aitriz.org and click "TRIZCON 2010" Jack Hipple is doing the beginner TRIZ tutorial for the rest of the day, bringing examples from many fields of application. The advanced track is shared by Isak Bukhman, presenting ARIZ, Zinovy Royzen demonstrating "Conflict Solving Using TOP - TRIZ" and Sergei Ikovenko with his fascinating approach to "Competitive Patent Circumvention."

I spent most of my tme in the non-TRIZ track (National Innovation Conference). Steve Goubeaux got the audience very involved in "Exploring the Future of New Product Development." based on his experience with multiple industries (everything from bicycles to juvenile furniture to lawn and garden products, to Cre8ive Dayton which is an "experience" not a building...) and marketing/branding for everything from airlines to toys to the country of Colombia. "What is easy; how is hard" is a key point. Steve had examples and challenges for the audience on the need to design for the senses and emotions of the user as well as the logic of the user. Design generation 2 at the same time as generation 1 (and more than half the time launch "2" and forget "1")

Deborah Westphal from Toffler Associates asked us to take a trip to 50,000 feet to see global innovation. She set a high bar: challenge our thinking about the future of innovation, broaden our perspectives, and learn from what we are doing, specifically looking at product innovation.

Her definition of the revolutionary nature of change got us to look back at transitions between the agrarian economy to the industrial economy to our knowledge economy to benefit from differences and from similiarities with previous changes. I predict that her metric of "cost - per - idea - transferred" will be useful in a lot of ways.

So far, a persistent theme of the conference is hybridization, and Deborah's version of this is "it is all about the AND" - - medicine AND robotics, people AND technology, technology AND culture. I'm not sure I agree with her claim that university multidisciplinary programs will advance this trend (maybe it follows the trend?) Likewise I question her emphasis on countries' innovation initiatives (are we post-national, global innovators?) but her questions got a lot of discussion started.

I'll be the first after - lunch speaker in the Innovation & Creativity program, talking about the relationships between TRIZ and many of the other innovation systems/tools/methods.

Thanks to Jorge Oliveira Teixeira for these notes on Day 2 of the Business Innovation Conference:

The day started with keynote speaker Steve Shapiro, Vice President of Innocentive, and Author of "24x7 Innovations." His challenge to the group is: How to post the right questions when you ask to a "crowd" for possible solution for your problem. They explain this with the recent oil disaster from BP. The site that was created by BP, received about 80.000 possible solutions for the problem. Can we treat this amount of information? They think not, and they figure that only 0,5% of the possible solutions are viewed by a group of people in charge of the management of the site expressely create by BP. In his terms, they incentivize us to first quote the right questions and maybe we can have the right answers.

Well, I attend one of the first morning sessions with Alcantaro Correa, coming from Brazil with a suggestive theme, BUSINESS RESONANCE. They made a parallel with physics theory of resonance, and the different types of communication that occurs in the organization in different levels, from CEO to managers, managers to employees and the relation with suppliers and customers. They showed an interactive and well done presentation, demonstrating how the communication flows in organizations and the problems created when this information doesn't flow . At the end of his presentation the debate was very interesting, when attendees show some interest in future developments in this field of studies, then Alcantaro made the promise that next year his presentation will be rich in data about this subject. We are waiting Alcantaro.

The highest moment of the day,and for the 3rd Innovation Conference was the presence of Chris Galvin, former Chairman/CEO of Motorola, and now CEO of Harrison Street, introduced by Martin Swarbrick, CEO of BISON Gear. They give us an excellent presentation about the Galvin family, "A Business History," and I agree with this title from his presentation. 75 years of history, some members of the same family, some major innovations that totally change the world and industry and of course history of Motorola is mixed with the development and image of America industry´s age.They brilliantly explain to the audience the failures and success of the company, the two bankruptcies that his father survived, and the turnaround that he made an more recently, himself, when they took charge of company. Also explain to the audience the movement of the board in his substitution from the company, and the moves that they made like dismantle the museum. Well, two years ago, I have the privilege to visit this museum, and erase this part of history, for me his like the same of erasing a very important part of America Industry.

They taledk about the rule of the 4 E´s.
Envision
Energize
Edge
Execute
but they don´t forget to mention that management process in years of Motorola, his family never forget to be always Ethical. Someone in the audience told a little story that defined the ethics of the members of this family: Some years ago, when Motorola was closing a business deal with a certain country, a week after the deal was closed, they receive a message that the price was changed because they must pay some bribery to a certain people.The management start to questioning Mr. Galvin, about what they intend to do. They simple answer that they resolve the problem with this deal, they must never do any deal with this country, because even they do not pay the bribery, nobody believes in this, well it is a country to close forever any deal with them.I think this little story tell´s a lot about the ethics of this family. It was a privilege to know someone like this gentleman.

After this stimulating session I attend the presentation from Pat Banergee, professor of industrial Engineering, Computer science and Bioengineering university of Illinois Chicago, about, Virtual Reality and Haptics based High-Fidelity Surgical Simulation. They explain to the audience how his company provide training in medical surgery and the difficulties that future doctors have to practice, due to the lack of cadavers, the price and the risk from real surgery not well performed by doctors. This could be a step in helping training and development of skills from future surgery doctors.

To finish my day, I attend the session with Drew Mitchell, Head of industry Local, from Google, about Google´s 9 Notions of innovation.They talk about the culture of innovation in Google and his clear mission. In Google they have nine notions of innovation, as they prefer to refer:
1. Innovation, not instant
2. Share everything you can
3. you're brilliant, we're hiring
4. A license to pursue dreams
5. Ideas come from everywhere
6. Don´t politic: use data
7. Creativity loves restraint
8. User´s before money
9. Don´t kill projects- better to morph
They presented some projects from Google and the rule of 70/20/10. 70% of the time is for current activities, 20% is for projects that an employee self-assigns and develops, and 10% is for share.

This year the conference has increased value for attendees, and we expect than next year, Praveen Gupta and the IIT team will surprise us with a continuously improving and innovative conference.
Until next year Praveen! Reported by Jorge OliveiraTeixeira

Praveen Gupta welcomed the audience from 8 countries and 20 US states to the 3d Business Innovation Conference by announcing that they should plan now for next year, Oct. 11,12,13, 2011. I echo that - - this is a personal report on my experiences, and this is one conference I have built into my schedule each year. I applaud the excellent program in the business, technical, and social side of innovation. The tutorial day (yesterday) had more than 80 people, half of whom were getting a taste of TRIZ from me, so there is no report on the pre-conference day.

Illinois Institute of Technology Dean Bob Carlson announced that the Center for Innovation Sciences is now organized, inviting industry participation (and sponsorship!) The Center has degree and non-degree options, scholarly and popular publication, technology transfer, and a venture-sponsorship system so that graduating students have mentors in the innovation/entrepreneur area.

He then introduced Jean Holley, a former student and trustee of IIT, who is now Chief Information Officer of Tellalabs, a supplier to the internet backbone providers. She has worked in the steel industry, the waste disposal industry (how do you innovate in garbage? was her challenge to the audience!) and in the computer and network industries. She explored many aspects of the mobile internet, predicting that it will be disruptive to both personal and business ways of doing things. Key points:

-There will be more devices than people

-Increased personalization (through apps now, proliferating)

-Higher quality of experience

-New monetization models beyond just bandwidth.

These aren't separate â€" borderless, secure, accurate, personalized information are all part of the evolution/revolution that has already started. There will be no personal/business border, no device-centric data (just data- the device is how you get to it), and the rapid migration from corporate standards to corporate enabling of all employees. One technique she uses is to require 20 new technologies per year, and expect (but rigorously learn from) failures.

Three sessions competed for our attention after a Jean's keynote. See the full program at http://www.businessinnovationconference.com/agenda.htm I'll only comment on the papers that I heard. (Tough choices â€" great program!) Chairman (and Real Innovation contributor) Praveen Gupta's reported on the Business Innovation Maturity Model, a research project in work now with his colleagues at IIT, is intended as a diagnostic to help companies manage the process of innovation. He had historical data that support the need for improved management of innovation (4% of innovations succeed, 88% of businesses vanish over 50 years,. . .) Comparison of manufacturing innovation ROI to intangible innovation ROI and within each category showed wide variability, and emphasized the need for metrics that were both predictive (ROI trails the innovation by years) and useful for managing the process. The maturity model is based on his flow model:

Target-Explore-Develop-Optimize-Commercialize

and on the level of maturity within each step of the flow. There is considerable overlap with the capability maturity model used in the software industry, with a scale from unmanaged processes to strongly managed processes, to self-managing, self-improving systems.

Many people appreciated Praveen's quick formula for innovation as much as the BIMM:

1. Decide to be creative

2. Combine 2 or more things in a new way (I might put in a step of discovering what the customers need, but this is his formula, not mine.)

3. Practice step 2 so you can do it fast.

We are looking forward to next year's meeting to getting reports on the BIMM and on the changes/improvements that result from businesses using it.

The second plenary session featured the Chief Information Officer of the City of Chicago, Hardik Bhatt. Anyone who thinks she/he has an impossible job should consider the problems of managing a dynamic city â€" you can't ask people to stop living in the city while you implement the change process! Bhatt's perspective on working with the legendary Mayor of Chicago AND of starting the innovation center for city government were both fascinating to the local and global audience. His ambitious benchmarking process helped him to realize that the City of Chicago is in more than 40 distict businesses â€" everything from logistics of garbage pick-up to water distribution (and purification, and invoicing and collecting. . .) to operation of airports and attracting new businesses. He was justly proud of the seamless customer service approach that they have pioneered that lets people ignore the bureaucracy and get results; instead of being told "The city of Chicago doesn't do birth certificates, you need to go to Cook County" the person now is connected directly to the other agency. The mayor now Tweets and has a Facebook account to stay in touch with the social network generation.

But, what about the 30% of households that have no broadband? And 6% with dial-up only? 24 neighborhoods in the city have less access to broadband than rural areas do. They are careful to do text versions of phone "apps" for the 80% non-smart phone users. His statistics on the competitive situation (bandwidth and cost of fast connections for business and household use) were dismal â€" Bhatt had a lot of good questions, and the openness to look for good answers, and a foundation-based "Smart Chicago" collaborative to sustain the innovation initiatives. He got a great laugh when he promised that fire-fighting would not go virtual, but everything else was fair game.

Jorge Oliveira Teixeira from Accelperiberia in Portugal(and Ph.D. candidate at Universidad de Vigo, Spain) gave a stimulating presentation on corporate social responsibility and the interplay of CSR with innovation. Jorge will also continue these notes, after I leave for an early plane â€" thanks, Jorge. (Obrigado, in Portuguese.)

Jorge started with a simple diagram linking the organization to society and to the stakeholders by means of expectations, actions, and communication. He went into some detail about effective communications and how to create them, in the context of CSR. He included both the expected activities, such as pollution control, and the unexpected, such as supplier management: think about a rigorous supplier code of conduct for child labor as a corporate social responsibility focus, or supplier risk management as impacting the whole community in which that company functions. He used ISO 26000 as a basis for the definitions of the areas of management of CSR.

There was considerable audience participation with examples of social innovation, "bottom of pyramid" innovation and "reverse" (third world first) innovation. Jorge concluded with a challenging list of possible areas where innovation in CSR can benefit society and where companies can get direct benefit from their CSR work in their business activities.

I posted a commentary on search engine and IFR of a search engine here a while back; as search engine has found a place in my TRIZ examples, I thought of giving a shot to this news article (Google: The party is over) appeared in Fortune recently through another TRIZ interpretation. While I wouldn't state that Google is struggling to find the next innovation, statement like slowing down their core business of search is certainly intriguing me especially when some data points are given by the authors from their research.

What might have been going wrong with them, a very innovative company like Google? While failure like Google Wave is not a measurement to say they are going down, (In fact we all know that in the journey of innovation, you must fail), getting stuck with a conundrum of "search using Google is not the future" is a matter of concern especially if you generate 91% profit through search.

If we can do a simple 9-Windows thinking, considering Search as the system-present, can we see a subtle evolution happening there in the super-system, beyond technology evolution (If it is only technology, Google will certainly catch up) and business model innovation? As said in the article, if 5 years ago, we want a shoe, we will simply Google it, but now I just need to "tweet" or add it in the "what's on my mind" in FaceBook, and you get answers with "human touch"..

The technology enabling these systems (Twitter and FB) aren't great innovation according to me as in the search engine algorithm of Google; then what makes the search engine is not the future for Google? One element I see is the social system evolution as the game changer. What I mean the social system is the ability to have "emotion" in what you are doing like search. It is far better feeling to ask your friend or relative than a machine about something and get answers based on reference-able experiences, and those changes, enabled by platforms like Twitter and FaceBook is the new way in future. Now, could Google have come up with this earlier?

Perhaps yes if they have applied TRIZ trends :)

Well, the trend is that Search engine is transitioning to the super-system not because the current system has reached to its limit, but a newer system (like social system) is emerging faster and is almost outdated the current system. In a scenario like this, what a company like Google should perhaps try to do is to look at the way how in future people will communicate to each other with emotions.

Apart from the "Transition to super-system trend", we can look at other trends like "Increasing degree of ideality" (Try applying this in the super-system) too.

What else do you think Google can apply and come out with the next best search? Remember the "Resources" are aplenty for a company like Google.

There are some fundamental laws of science and engineering that are never violated. One of these says that every time you change energy from one form to another, you lose. The most efficient use of energy is to take energy into a system or product, use its value for something useful, and then throw it away. You still lose some of the value of the energy, but if you convert, say electrical energy into mechanical energy and then into thermal energy, you lose 3 times! We do this sometimes because of the technical backgrounds of the engineers who design products and systems and their bias toward using the energy form they understand the best.

Here's what you should do to "audit" your system and look for opportunites. List the energy source that enters your proccess or product manufacturing process. Is is natural gas (chemical energy), electrical, mechanical (compressor driven by gas or electricity), solar, hydroelectric, or magnetic? Now make a list of each time, within your process, you convert this original energy source into a different form of energy. Finally, write down the reason you are doing this. Why are you doing this? Is it because you needed to? Thought it would be engineering "cool" to do it? Suppose someone passed a law that said you couldn't make this conversion or there was a huge tax to do this? What would you do? This artificial tax that I am asking you to think about is the same thing as the second law of thermodynamics that says that every time we convert one form of energy into another, some of the original energy is lost. What could you do with that most energy? Lower your cost and make more money? Lower your cost and expand your market? Propose a joint venture with a partner?

This type of thinking is a key aspect of using what we call "Lines of Evolution" within the TRIZ methodology. The number of energy conversions drops with time with any system. If you're not thinking about this, someone else is and they will probably put you out of business eventually. In a parallel column today, I describe the predictable decline of movie rentals that has occurred. We could think about this business in this way as well. When someone gets into a car to rent a movie at a retail store, they turn chemical energy (gasoline in the car) into mechanical energy to move the car (twice--it's a round trip!). With a download, we use a higher level, more efficient field (optoelectronic) one time. Game over!

How many times do you convert energy? We have explained the energy evolution line before--mechanical, thermal, chemical, electronic, electromagnetic. Technology moves inevitably down this line. The highest level field, converted the least number of times, is the winner. Move up and don't convert--that's the secret to long term success.

We have all watched as the "book" industry has restructured itself. Two key things are in the news. Blockbuster has gone into "chapter 11" and is closing a large fraction of its stores. Just recently it was announced that books downloaded on to electronic book readers outsold hard cover books. Why does a company like Barnes and Noble now "own" this business, and Blockbuster doesn't? What kept Blockbuster from getting into the wireless book business? Did someone pass a law that said they couldn't? Or was it just that they actually thought that people enjoyed trudging down to the store, standing in line, and hope that their movie was in stock? Or was it that the snacks you could buy there were so much better and cheaper than at your local grocery store? Was it that they thought the movie was different than the one which came via satellite?

I have discussed many times the importance of looking at the "super-structure" around your product and business and recognizing that, sooner or later, your product or service is going to get "absorbed" into that super-sttructure. What's the super-structure in this case? It's satellites, the Internet, the cable system into your house, etc. Any movie or book at any time can be viewed and downloaded wirelessly without the sub-structure of a store, the car driving to the store, your wallet and the need to hand the credit card to the clerk, etc. In an interview I heard today, the comment was made that "Blockbuster could have owned that business". How true!

What keeps companies like Blockbuster from seeing this and making the appropriate business decisions? It's because they are focused only on competing with their direct competitors, not the organizations and systems which provide the FUNCTION being provided. They forgot that people were not going to their local Blockbuster store for the opportunity to stand in line and get frustrated--they were going there to rent a movie. Or was that the real purpose? No, it was to SEE a movie. Going to a retail store to enable this was a necessary evil. The first clink in this armor was Netflix(R), which eliminated the need to get in the car. Soon after, the rental on demand through satellite and cable systems came along. The same thing has now happened in the book industry as we highlighted in a column a short while ago. What's important and what seems to be impossible for many companies to think about is what FUNCTION their product is providing. This needs to be constantly revisited in the context of asking what the customer is really buying. Maybe Barnes and Noble and the Kindle(R) will co-exist for a while. There's still something about sitting in a bookstore (that also happens to serve coffee and desserts and plays soft music in the background!), but there's also something about reading the words of a book on the beach or on one's patio. It's the function of reading words, not reading a book.

This same story can be repeated for the airline business, classroom teaching, and encylcopedias. Never stop thinking about what function you are providing to your customer. Never stop thinking about how else that function (not product!) could be provided. Never stop thinking about new resources could be used to deliver that function. Use these thoughts to drive your strategi planning, not competitive intelligence about your most serious direct competitor.

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