IRI Meeting-I was priveleged to present a workshop on TRIZ problem solving at the annual IRI meeting in Philadelphia this year and was able to attend a number of very interesting presentations from senior executives from materials and service industires. I'd like to report on several of these presentations.

Joe Miller, Exectuive VP and Chief Technology Officer of Corning, discussed how Corning had dealt with two major business "earthquakes"--the bursting of the "dotcom" bubble and the recession of 2009. He shared ways of adjusting to the "new normal" and the discipline that Corning used to stick to its knitting and what it knew how to do better than anyone else. From the depth of the bubble burst in 2002 to 2010 their sales grew from $3 to 6.8 Billion, net profit after taxes from (-)400M to 3.3B and free cash flow from (-)700M to 2.8B.A key decision made was to centralize core capabilities and reduce the number of laboratories. Many other companies "globlized" R&D around the globe. While refocusing and preserving their core capabilities, they focused on tough problems where their product was a "system enabler" with demanding requirements and also requiring specialized capital with strong intellectual property and selling into critical markets with high selling prices.

Two of the products he mentioned as having been born from this focus included ClearCurve(TM) fiber and Gorilla Glass(TM) for consumer devices. The holy grain for Corning is thin, strong, damage resistant glass. He made mention of the fact that doing work at 2300C (melting point of glass) is expensive. This means that R&D is expensive, but it also means not everyone can do it.

Learnings that he passed on to his listeners:

1. Constant balancing of the R&D portfolio if required. 5-10 years (new businesses) with "adjancencies" (2-4 years out) and support of on going businesses (1-3 years out). There will be tension. Recongize and deal with it.
2. Very early stage R&D is expensive and risky and must be supported by corporate, not on going business, funds. Giant leaps are risky. R&D must have independence
3. Explore multiple avenues, not just the obvious one
4. Mistakes happen. Learn from them.
5. Know who you are and what your recipe is.
6. R&D is a social activity
7. Need multipe input of ideas
8. Involve all the functions in the process
9. Need different talents at different stages of a project and product development
10. R&D peole are different. Deal with it.
11. Success requires will, patience, and guts
12. Business silos must be minimized

Martin Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents presented some interesting global data comparing the US in a global context.

1. China's generation of science degree holders is exploding while the rest of the world is nearly flat.
2. There is no more separate "learing". Learning is the job.
3. We are at risk of species degradation without control of CO2 emissions
4. WIth 6% of the world's population, we use 25% of its energy. We have to move away from the strategy of take, make, and waste.

Dr. Jacomo Corba, Chief Scientist, Quantum Black, made some interesting observations about using communication to design organizations. He suggested using comuncation tracking within a company to see how it really functions (as opposed to what the org charts say). Visuallizing this can create an eye opening experience.

In the same week in the Wall Street Journal, we see two interesting and diverse examples of how information can transform a major industry and a household hobby.

In hospitals, blood tests are routinely ordered by phsyicians who rarely ask about the cost. They are simply "passed on" to "somebody" (insurance companies, patients, government). In an interesting experiment at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, researchers, after developing an accurate baseline of daily per patient costs for two common blood tests, complete blood countand total chemistry panel. They then started a program with daily announcements to surgical staff, about the costs of the tests. Over an 11 week period, costs dropped from around $150/patient to about $110/patient. The experiment included no orders to change any tests. Total savings amounted to $55,000!

In their May 12 issue, the WSJ also reported on the impressive number of new sewing machines (yes, sewing machines!--sales up 22% in 2010 over 2009) that are using smart phone features such as smart screens, USB ports to transfer images, and sewing speeds up to 1100 stitches per minute. Part of the driving force here is cost savings to the consumer for high end dresses and embroidery.

So, information is the key to high quality in both healthcare and sewing machines. Here are the questions for you:

1. What information do you wish you had? Is it available for breakthrough innovation? How can you access it? Make it accessible? How much could you save if you had it? A 30% reduction in blood test costs and sewing speeds going from under 100 to over 1000 stitches per minute are not incremental improvements!
2. What information is your "system" (that includes your customers) generating that you are totally unaware of? What is involved in capturing and using it? What would be the impact?

You may have seen the new commercials from Progresive Insurance offering to discount your rates if you put a small camera in your car to observe your driving habits. Now there are privacy implications here, but the point in all these examples is that information, as it becomes cheaper to collect and disseminate, offers some breakthrough innovation possibilities

What's the first thing you think of when you think of the state of Wyoming? Yellowstone Park? Ranches and cattle? Coal mining? Natural gas? Open space? Mountains? Did you thnk COLD? It may not be the coldest place in the US, but parts of it are close to the coldest in the winter. Unless you're a skier, this may not seem like an attractive feature, but to whom might it be with a serious commercial aspect? When is cheap cold a good deal?

Well, many traditional industries such as oil refining and chemicals generate large quantities of heat during thier processing and this heat must be removed to enable safe operation and production of usable products. The most heavy concentrations of these industries are in places like Texas, Oklahoma, and Lousisiana where the raw materials are located. But what industry generates huge quantities of heat that doesn't necessarily require a specific location for raw materials? Data processing centers!

In a fascinating Wall Street Journal article, March 8/2011, pA3, reporter Stephanie Simon describes a concerted effort by the state of Wyomng to attract data centers (and their relative high paying high tech jobs) to the state. As a basic refresher for those of you who didn't go through physics or thermodynamics, the amount of surface area in a heat exchanger and the amount of cooling fluid required is directly proportional to the temperature difference between the hot fluid and the incoming cooling fluid. If a data center computer is rejecting heat at 120F for example, the difference between the cooling medium being 70F vs. 100F can change the capital cost of the cooling equipment by a factor of 2! On the Gulf Coast, it is not possible to use air as the sole cooling medium saving the cost and environmental impact of water use. However, when the air is constantly below 80F and of low humidity, it allows air instead of water (or refrigerants) to be used.

This effort is analogous to the use of braking waste heat to recharge batteries in hybrid cars.

What does your list of "negative" things look like? In what way might it be a positive?

Wyoming is cool!

In recent discussions about an upcoming workshop for the Management Division of AIChE in Minneapolis, I got into a discussion about networking and the use of psychological assessment tools in assisting employees with job searches and transitions. I guess I am a bit old fashioned as I believe that enjoying and surviving your new position is more important than finding it in the first place.

The ease with which it is possible, with a few key strokes, to find out about virtually any job opening anywhere in the world is truly amazing. Even the old fashioned head hunters are using LinkedIn(R) and other web resources to identify candidates. These sites and personal resume postings tell a great deal about the technical background, work experience, and academic credentials of an individual as well as the technical needs of the position. Obviously these things have to match as a minimum. But people have preferred styles of behavior and organizations have cultures. The words we see so often, such as "team player" don't tell us much about what's needed to be a team player. These words also suggest that there is no need for differing opinions. Is this really what an organization wants?

There are well established tools for measuring a person's style and approach to relationships and problem solving. Though my two favorites are the Myers Briggs (or one of its spin-offs) and the Kirton KAI(R), there are others including Fyro B(R) and HBDI(R). The amazing thing I have observed over the years is that though many people have taken these assessments, less than 10% of the people I meet remember what their characteristics are, and even fewer have done anything serious with the information. I have to ask myself why do people bother to take these assessments if they don't intend to learn from them?

When changing jobs, when moving to a different job within the same company, or joining an innovation team, these assessments can tell us a great deal about the stresses and changes that may be required to work with someone different than ourselves and how we might assemble teams to accomplish certain tasks. The preferences summarized in these assessments are very hard wired in us and are unlikely to change over time. We can be someone "different" for a short time with some stress, but being someone different for a long period of time is a recipe for personal disaster. So if you're networking on the web for opportunities, or joining a new innovation team, ask yourself whether what you see and read tells you what the culture is within the organization. Ask yourself if the "style" you use for innovating is going to be acceptable within a new organization ore within the team. If you see and sense stress, then have an open disscussion about those differences and discuss the value of different approaches to problems. Don't bury the differences--use them pro-actively!

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.

Two times in two weeks on two continents then twice more by e-mail people asked about TRIZ and open innovation. Sounds like a trend? I honestly had not given it much thought, and before my current exposure I would have said that my impression of open innovation was that companies invite outsiders to contribute ideas in order to get more ideas from a population that is more diverse than their employees, and that if they used TRIZ, they could solve their own problems and not rely on the mob. I was a bit uncomfortable with this, remembering that when I was new to TRIZ, an expert (he thought he was being kind!) said that it was too bad that I had put so much time and effort into QFD, since now, with TRIZ, you can solve all the problems and predict all the customer needs so you don't need QFD.

Regular readers may remeber that at TRIZ India we heard lot about open innovation from the Yahoo India participants.
" http://www.triz-journal.com/commentary/archive/triz_india_summit_day_2.html" One of their unique concepts was conducting 2 hack events, inviting their own employees to one and outsiders to another, creating new applications, presenting them to a judging board (talent show style) and being rewarded immediately for high potential ideas. My TRIZ bias started to dissolve: the participants were not solving a problem that the sponsor had defined; rather, they were solving their own problem, and the judges were deciding both whether the problem was general enough (there would be other customers) and the solution was good enough.

When I got back from India, my accumulated LinkedIn messages included a note from a friend in Minneapolis pointing out a meeting in San Diego (which is 150 km from me and 2000 km from her) and yes, the topic was open innovation. Bright Ideas develops software that a lot of companies use to manage open innovation systems, and the Birds of a Feather meetng is a non-commercial users group meeting. http://bi.brightidea.com/bof My estimate is that a bit more than half the participant were users of the software, a few used other methods, and some, like me, were just there to learn about the topic. Next meetings are in Zurich and in Hong Kong, and I recommend them - - very good speakers, very good experience sharing by participants, very restrained selling by the Bright Ideas people. If you can't get to a meeting, look at the on-line discussions, or do both.

Great big learning that I'm almost embarrassed to admit: There are two different meanings to open innovation
1. Inviting employees to contribute ideas outside their own areas of specialty. This can be everything from the old-style company suggestion box to the current style of campaigns where ideas are solicited for particular projects for a specific time period.
2. Inviting non-employees to contribute ideas. Popular versions of this are Innocentive, Nine Sigma, Idea Connections, and many others such as the recent attempts by BP and the US Environmental Protection Agency to get public contributions of ideas for solving the problem of the oil well catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. They got more than 80,000 ideas, creating a new problem: how to sort and evaluate the ideas, and they also created frustration - - I got many communiques from TRIZ practioners who had ideas but could not get them noticed by anyone in a position to do anything about them.

Jeffrey Phillips from OVOInnovation and John Russo from CCH Wolpers Kluper gave the morning presentations that were actionable lessons learned. Russo's talk stimulated a lot of discussion of how many people in any group will participate, and the conflicting data on the use of incentives to stimulate participation. Philip Horvath from INOS spoke more to the philosophy of communication and knowledge transfer, and stimulated a lot of discussion.

I'll summarise highlights of Jeffrey's paper because it has application to the whole adventure of finding out how (and IF) TRIZ and open innovation can interact. If you want to get more see http://www.ovoinnovation.com

Success depends on alignment of the innovative idea with overall company strategy - - NOT that the idea can't be completely different from past work, but that the death of an idea is most likely to be caused by lack of resources (time, money, talent, attention, ...) and resources are allocated according to strategies and operating plans that support those strategies. We may talk about company culture, but it is an iceberg, with a tiny bit showing above the water, and most of it hiddent below, and in most cases companies only talk about the part that shows. Biggest failure cause for specific idea campaigns is lack of criteria (or clear criteria, well-understood by contributors) and organizers should put a lot of work into creating the criteria before announcing the campaign, to avoid disappointing/frustrating the contributors. Some members of the audience were surprised by one point, and other agreed vigorously: evaluation is a skill, and experience matters, so develop a skilled cadre of evaluators.

Jeffrey and I are both on the program for the Business Innovation Conference in Chicago in October, and I look forward to learning more.

My viewsnow on the role of TRIZ in Open Innovation (two somewhat new, one pretty much expected)
New: Formulate better questions or challenges. Ideality gives a different perspective!
New Don't just select a best idea. Use function and attribute analysis, use feature transfer (or the Pugh method) to hybridize ideas to create better ideas than the best of what was submitted.
Expected: Generate ideas using TRIZ to solve the problems presented in the challenge.

I will be working with people who are now using open innovation in the coming months, and I invite readers to comment, so that I can combine what we are all learning into something we can all use.

What's so special about this announcement? It says that, after decades of off shore oil drilling, the industry is going to collaborate on safety matters. Do you know what the largest chemical shipped by volume in the world is? CHLORINE--a yellow green, toxic gas that is poisonous in large dosages, but toxic to hazardous bacteria and fecal material, and without which there would be no clean drinking water, nor one of the most widely used plastics for plumbing, house siding, and blood tubing. There are numerous producers of chlorine, which is shipped in tank cars all over the country in huge quantities. The next time you are stopped at a RR crossing, take a look at the stenciling on the side of the tank cars and see how many are labeled CHLORINE. This industry figured out decades ago that there was so much chlorine being shipped into so many different places in the country that it made no sense for each company to be responsible for its own tank cars in the case of rail accidents or emergencies. What made sense was for the CLOSEST supplier with trained emergency crews to respond to a derailed or leaking chlorine car. This rapid response system has been active for over 40 years and has served both the industry and the US citizenry well by minimizing the amount of time it takes for a trained crew to arrive at the scene of an accident and provide assistance.

In a recent headline, "Oil Companies to Create Industry Response System for Deep-Water Oil Spills", we see that a few of the major oil companies have "discovered" this strategy for their own industry: "Four of the world's largest oil companies are creating a strike force to staunch oil spills in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico in a billion-dollar bid to regain the confidence of the Obama administration after BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster. Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips are expected to announce Thursday that they are forming a joint venture to design, build and operate a rapid-response system to capture and contain up to 100,000 barrels of oil flowing 10,000 feet below the surface of the sea".

It continues to amaze many of us in the TRIZ commumity how long it still takes for one well known practice to migrate from one industry to other industries. For the hundredth time since these columns have been written, "Who else has a problem like yours? How do they solve it? Who else knows something that can help you?"

The annual meeting of the World Future Society was held in Boston this past week and I attended to teach a short TRIZ Futures Course and listen to a few speakers address future issues of concern. It was interesting that 1/2 of the TRIZ Futures class were from the military. Military atttendees and government contractors, charged with future strategy and planning, represented 6-7% of the 700+ attendees. Next to the US, major countries with attendees were Canada (50), Mexico (13), South Korea (11), UK (9), and Finland (8). Major segements of attendees were from academia, insurance industry, entertainment, and the food industry

Some highlights of presentations I attended:

"The City Sustainable"--a presentation by Jennifer Jarrat and John Mahaffey (Leading Futurists LLC) illustrating many examples from around the world of communiites integrating sustainability concepts into their strategic planning. One of the more interesting illustrations was from Greensburg, KS, a town almost totally destroyed by a tornado some years ago. The city, able to build from scratch, incorporated many "green" and information infrastructure aspects that would never have been doable while trying to maintain an existing infrastructure. This raises the question we should all think about and that is, "what would be do if we started all over again?". Total water recycle, use of vertical and 3D geometry, and alternative fuels were all part of many of these examples. That's an interesting think to think about, isn't it? If everything around you went away tomorrow, what would you replace it with? The same thing?

"Keep It Simple Stupid: Energy and Environmental Strategies"--a stimulating presentation by Ysvi Bisk (Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking) about simple and obvious solutions to the energy crisis. He made the analogy to the monopoly enjoyed by salt traders for food preservation to the current stranglehold that oil has on the US economy. He made a passionate plea for the electric car (to be generated by the vast coal and natural gas reserves the US has) to replace the oil infrastrucure. He pointed out that Mexico and Indonesia were now importing oil, and serious shortages of welders, mining engineers, and civil engineers were being seen. He said that we now use the energy equivalent of 1 bbl. of oil to produce 3 bbls where it used to take only 1 bbl to produce 100 bbls. and that the average age of technical personnel in the oil industry is now 50, and the knowledge and skills required to replace this deep knowledge was simply not happening. He broke down the use of a bbl of oil to be 23% industrial (chemicals and materials resources), 68% transportation, and 3% electricity generation. Eliminating the use of oil as a transportation fuel, he argued, was the best way to free ourselves of the current day "salt" monopoly.

"Oceans and our Global Future"--lunch presentation by Susan Avery, President and Director of the Woods Hole Institute. Susan made an impassioned plea to pay attention to our ocean resources that provides 20% of the aninal protein and 5% of the total protein in the human diet. The challenges in possible global warming, drought management, and eco-systems. She had great concern about global warming stratetgies that did not directly take into account the impact on ocean systems which represent 71% of the earth's surface and contain 97% of the planet's total water.

"Navigating the Future: Moral Machines, Technosapiens, and the Singularity"--keynote by Wendell Wallach from Yale University's Center for Bioethics. Wendell highlighted many of the future challenges that we have faced over and over again with increased knowledge--how will we use it? A skeletal bone can be used as a tool or a weapon, the Internet can provide information or invade privacy, etc. One interesting statistic he mentioned was that by 2050, 1/3 of all weapons in use would be unmanned (I.e. drone missiles as an example). He suggested that we have not begun to think seriouisly enough about the extension of the average life span (it was 46 in 1900 and is now 78 and rising). A population with significant perecentages of those over 100 and 110 years of age has significant consequences to society in terms of costs, medical care, indirect employment impacts, etc.

Other topical tracks were focused on the Future of Education, a look back at Brasilia after 50 years, the Future of Terror, Humans in 2020: The Next Ten Years of Biotechnoloogy, Future Military and Civilian Policing, the Changing Landscape of Nonprofit Organizations, and the Unemployment Conundrum

Website for additional information and purchase of particular presentations is at http://www.wfs.org. The 2011 conference will be in Vancouver, BC, Canada in July 2011.

How many of you are old enough to remember some of the original cast episodes of Saturday Night Live? There have been several famous ones including the mimicing of Julia Child's cooking show and bleeding all over the food she was cutting, as well as hundreds of spoofs of politicians from every party and political spectrum. One of my favorites was the one where one of the actors (Rob Schneider) went into an office area and asked someone at the copy machine and asked what they were doing, and the famous reply came back (sorry I can't imitate the accent, etc.) that he was "making copies".

Why do we make copies? Buy copies? Ever thought about this for more than a second? Well, they're cheaper is the simple answer. Could we afford to pay for an original performance from one of our famous actors or actresses every time we went to a movie? Could we afford to hire Neil Diamond to come into our house or car to sing for us every time we felt like hearing one of his great songs? Have the NY Philharmonic set up on our lawn on Friday night? No, we just buy a record, CD, DVD, etc. and pretend they're with us. Could we afford to have original copies of every handout and invoice in our organizations? Sometime we even "lip synch" because we're too lazy to sing in real time. Making copies is a commonly used inventive principle usually used to just save money or effort. But sometimes it gets to be a more serious endeavor with a little bit of serious science behind it.

Many of you are familiiar with what we call the "placebo" effect. Someone gives you a pill and tells you that it's a medication for what ails you and, amazingly, a small percentage of the time, the individual actually feels better because they think they have taken a new miracle drug. This happens in new drug pharmaceutical trials all the time and has to be figured into the data analysis. Let's see how we see this "making copies" inventive principle is used in a pro-active way. Along the 440 mile stretch of Interstate 40 across Tennessee over holiday periods, the state police would love to have manned police cars every ten miles or so to pursue speeders. But that's expensive, and besides, police like to be home with their families over the holidays just like the rest of us. If you make this drive some time, you may see lots of state police cars, but fewer than 10% of them will have people in them. But by the time you get close enough to actually notice this, you've slowed down because you're not sure. Even the radar guns can be turned on randomly without people being there. Making copies of the policemen. People trying to take advantage of multipassenger express lanes frequently put dummies in the passenger seat to make it look like there are two people in the car. Making copies of passengers.

Now, let's get really serious about this inventive principle. Let's make copies of antibodies. Antibodies are the proteins in our bodies produced by the immune system to recognize and neutralize foreign threats like infections, allergens, viruses, and bacteria. Our body makes them all the time, but occasionally in inadequate quantitities, so that our natural system can be overwhelmed. Producing them artificially is not easy nor cheap though being able to do so would be a breakthrough in the treatment of many diseases. In the latest issue of Popular Science (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-06), we see a fascinating article about the development of PLASTIC antibodies by a research team from the University of California and the University of Shizouka in Japan. This involves creating plastic anti-bodies 1/50,000th the size of the human hair by molecular imprinting antigen shaped craters into the particles which then attached themselves to the real anitgens in the blood. Our rapid development of nano and micro technology now allows relatively inexpensive duplication of what would otherwise be extremely expensive biological materials. These articifical antibodies tracked down threats and allowed mice to have a much higher survival rate. This is molecular imprinting and using the inventive principle of "making copies" (for the TRIZniks out there with your contradiction table, this is inventive principle # 26, resolving the conflict of wanting to improve "manufacturability" (system parameter #32) vs. "device complexity (parameter #36).

Rob would be proud of us--we're "making copies" and possibly saving lives at far lower cost. We'll have to watch and follow this development. Where and how can you use "copies" instead of expensive originals?

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (well-known management author and Harvard professor) presents her observations and challenges to CEOs who are embracing innovation during the recovery in the article "Block-by-Blockbuster Innovation" in the May 2010 Harvard Business Review. See http://hbr.org/2010/05/column-block-by-blockbuster-innovation/ar/1

I agree with many of her points, but I also noticed that with a bit of TRIZ orientation, much of what she says would be a lot stronger--they would stand as part of the database on human innovation that is the foundation of TRIZ, rather than as the observations of one person (although she's a very well-qualified observer.)

Prof. Kanter starts with the observation that some company leaders are ignoring risk, calling for breakthrough innovation, and even denigrating incremental innovation. She sees the positioning of continuous improvement as the opposite of breakthrough innovation as a false dichotomy, that increases the risk of innovation. I disagree with her contention that innovation must be risky, while agreeing with the other points. She is in complete agreement with the classical patterns of evolution in TRIZ, pointing out that breakthrough systems are the result of many incremental changes in product, processes, and the environment (including the customer!) that make the breakthrough possible.

She proposes an innovation pyramid with multiple ideas from many sources at the base (TRIZ concept "somebody, someplace has solved your problem"?) a portfolio of ideas in the middle, competing for resources, and a few strategic ideas at the peak, given dedicated attention to develop future directions for the company. This could be seen as a business example of the separation principles (the parts have different characteristics from the whole) or even an example of multi-dimensionality.

Did this article stimulate your thinking about innovation? Comments are welcome.

I am attending the Front End of Innovation conference in Boston and would like to share highlights with RealInnovation readers. This conference was started many years ago by Joyce Wycoff, a creativity consultant in California, primarily for her clients. It was originally called the Fuzzy Front End conference and blossomed into a fairly large conference over time, was merged into the IIR conferences, and has morphed into the Front End of Innovation. IIR's business model, as a profit making conference provider, includes many "paid" speaking slots and workshops, so the material being reported on is a little biased, but valuable nonetheless.

Day 1

Workshop: Increasing Value through Continuous Open Innovation Improvement

This theme of open innovation has greatly permeated this conference over time, recognizing the value of incorporating outside perspectives and resources to improve and accelerate the front end of innovation. Participants included Sealed Air, Hallmark Cards, Philips Consumer Lifestyles, and Nine Sigma (sponsor). Key advantages of open innovation cited by this group included more thorough benchmarking, acquiring talent, and the learnig of how to emotionally connect with consumers on products. Hallmark highlighted their positive experiences using the talents of the MIT Media Lab as well as the acquisition of Crayola that allowed them to successfully commercialize sound cards at an appropriate cost and with an emotional connection with the product. There was significant resistance to a traditional "art"design company to the the use of electronic and digital technology. All the participants cited the importance of high level management involvement and support, including regular reviews and support for external technology search. Hallmark discussed going beyond sound to recordability, and how to use the desire of suppliers to help them as opppsed to telling suppliers what they they (thought they) needed. Sealed Air talked about the advantage of putting out more general inquiries that generate more "serendipitous" outside in ideas. They also discussed the challenge of maintaining excitement for this effort and their partial solution of having quarterly meetings with their CTO and regular weekly conference calls. Their use of an organization such as Nine Sigma helped them to identify technologies and capabilities from totally different markets and very different solutions.(TRIZ practitioners take note!). Hallmark discussed how they targeted the music greeting card by clearly defining the goal as 3 pages of paper plus music at low cost, and clearly identifying the cost of the sound module as the cost breaker. Now the innovation challenge is to go "beyond sound" (recordability, dual sounds). Sealed Air discussed unique challenges in licensing technology from small firms outside the US. Small firms don't think like large firms and don't understand their processes. Language barriers need to be dealt with as well as the inability to accept delayed payments from large corporations. The observation was made that open innovation can actually take longer, but in the end usually is justified.The group, when asked about the future of open innovation, answered by saying that better VOC was needed, product linkage with a company's web site, and forcing the organization to be more deliberate as well as more flexible. Blaine Childress from Sealed Air described a coporation as an aircraft carrier trying to deal with attack boats of smaller, more agile competitors. Graham Mott said Philips hade condensed their learnings into a "cookbook" globally available across 40 different sites, put short time limits on CDA's, and the use of third parties for outside assessments.

Presentation: "Bringing Innovation to a Technology-Enabled Service for Seniors" (Bill Prenowitz, Philips Healthcare)

Bill Prenowitz talked about selling the integration of a product and interactive service to seniors. The fundamental difference is the person needing help can describe symptons to a trained professional vs. just calling 911. The service can also provide follow up calls. The system includes monitoring, calling, and response--all of which need to work to provide a great service. They have achieved 50% market share with only 20% total market penetration for such services. They learned early to hide all the complicated electronics and interfaces---this complexity (how it works) is irrelevant to the consumer. In this area it was critical to provide real product prototypes and not just concepts, as well as to triangulate market input. Their market research showed that seniors WANT to receive calls (they're lonely). Device design is critical in this area. Shrinkage of buttons on a phone makes it more difficult to use for seniors, but large buttons hurts their self-esteem. Large buttons with more space between requiring lower pressure is the compromise. They also discovered that slides on the side of the phone to control volume was preferable to dials.Vision and hearing impairments must be taken into account as well as providing response to varying strength and range of voice (TRIZ folks: Dynamism). In designing the software, functional mapping was used with embedded dynamism if a wrong response is detected.

Keynote: "More Meadows" (Robin Chase, Founding CEO, Zipcar)

Robin reviewed breakthrough products and services (in addition to the idea of Ziipcar, a car rental service with no large storage area) on the Web. Chat Roulette is an interactive web chat that started out with an old computer and in 3 days had grown to 30 million users! Web 2.0 where users are providing the content (TRIZ Folks: Do It In Reverse). Bed sharing in private homes vs. hotels now has 70,000 rooms. The analogy to Skype was made. The I-Phone now has 150,000 apps with 3 BILLION downloads.She pointed out that there are a lot more people outside the room of any ideation or innovation session. The wide availability of information and resources on the web is now allowing a person who used to do just one job to do seven and soon seven jobs at the same time. The paradigm is shifting from ownnership to sharing as the path to success.

Keynnote: "Unreasonable Behavior: A Driving Force for Innovation" (Mark Harrison, Innovation Director, Diageo and Eric Wilkinson, Cambridge Consultants)

Diageo is the parent of Bailey's Irish Creme and other premium liquors. Mark reviewed their long term business journey from growth to acquisition to cost reduction and finally to innovation. He reviewed one of their liquor breakthroughs--Bailey's Irish Creme, a blend of creme and liquor that no one thought would be viable. Significant technical challenges had to be resolved to keep the liquids separated until appropriate. He also reviewed a new product concept of frozen mixed drinks on tap whose major cost constraint was the large cost (80%) in the scraping system to clean the dispensing system. Details were not provided but one design parameter, which had originally ruled out the use of plastics because of low thermal conductivity. However, surface chemistry properties had not been considered and more than made up for the conductivty property. Need to be careful to consider all aspects, properties, and resources in the system. Other words of wisdon: Don't wait for a crisis to innovate. Think how your technology can provide the unthinkable.

　

Anyone old enough to remember that song? "Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You..." Well, I am still in a state of amazement and it took 4 days of contemplation to write a column after seeing the article, "Can GE Still Manage?" (Business Week, 4/25/2010, p27-32). As most of you know, Jack Welch thought long and hard about which of his senior executives would take his place and he chose Jeff Immelt, then head of the medical products business. He's had a rough time with GE stock half what it was before, selling long standing businesses, and people beginning to question his strategies and plans.

I don't have enough information to make a total judgment on someone like Mr. Immelt and I doubt that I could run a corporation as global and as diversified as GE, but there are some fundamentals that apply no matter what the business is or how big it is. One of those is having an intimate relationship and thorough understanding of your senior executives and direct reports who, after all, are the ones that actually run the company for you. In this article, Jeff, in an admitted attempt to "bond with this team", invited each over to his house for a Friday night conversation (I'll bet his wife was happy with 150 of these!), and then off to a hotel, only to return on Saturday for a more comprehensive discussion. The article further goes on to discuss his putting his own management style "under the microscope". The perception is that too much "warmth, wit, and attention has been beamed outside the GE family. Inside ...he has been less visible and less available".

What's wrong with this picture? Waiting ten years to have a serious down to earth conversation with the people who run your company? How can you run a company and not be available to the people who make it happen for you? Who are you? What motivates and excites you? What do you want to do ten years from now? How else could the company use your talents? How could we do things differently? What talent do you have that we aren't using? And on and on. Isn't this a conversation that should occur within months of someone taking on a job like this--not ten years later when the seeds of possible mediocrity have been sowed? How in the world can someone expect to achieve corporate goals if he doesn't understand the people who not only work for him, but on whose capabilities and interests rest the success of the company? Shouldn't this conversation take place on a frequent basis? Before you say 300 days divided by 150 is every other day, what else could possibly be more important? I can assure you that over a long period of time Six Sigma, the Crotonville Academy, the price of oil, and the competition in network television pale in comparison.

The questions for you are:

1. Do you run a business with people reporting to you? What do you REALLY know about them? What motivates them? What do they do in their spare time? What do they (really) care about?

2. Do your people wait to be invited to a sleepover to say what is on their minds? If so, why? What kinds of barriers to communication have you set up and don't even recognize?

3. When was the last time you spent talking (not Emailing) with the people you work with for several hours?

4. Do you know what is the most important thing your employees would change if you asked them?

5. What kind of a feedback loop do you have that tells you that you aren't spending enough time with your people? Or do you find it out when they tell you they'er leaving?

Get to know your folks---NOW!

There is a fundamental law of product and business innovation that says that systems integrate into their super-systems over time. What does this mean? Let's take an example. You are in the business of making paint roller pans. You have worked hard over the years to add stability to these simple devices so that they don't tip over on ladders, added coatings to minimize sticking, and even made disposable ones in the hopes that people will buy your paint pans. You may have even gotten together with a paint roller supplier in a joint promotion at a local hardware store. Then you go down to your local Home Depot, Lowes, or Menards and see the Black and Decker Paint Stick(R)requiring no paint pan. Your product has been replaced by the void in a hollow stick, normally thought of as only a means for reaching places too tall for the painter. Being replaced by a void must really hurt an ego!

This is only one example. Here are some others to trigger your thoughts:

1. The elimination of labels on men,s, underwear shirts (don't know about women's!) eliminating the need for sewn labels and the materials used in making them. The shirt is the label.
2. The elimination of bank deposit slips through optical scanning of checks, eliminating the paper, all the chemical used in producing paper from pulp, and the printing inks used in making them. The check is the deposit slip.
3. The incorporation of toothpaste into the handle of a toothbrush, eliminating the need for the toothpaste tube and all the metal used in making it. The toothbrush is the toothpaste tube.
4. The incorporation of a toothbrush head into the end of a flosser, eliminating the need for a normal toothbrush and all the plastics used in making it. The flosser is the toothbrush.
5. The incorporation of a punch out spoon in the lid of a yogurt container, eliminating the need for a separate spoon and the plastics or metal used to make it. The lid is the spoon.
6. The use of the Internet for newspaper publication, eliminating the need for millions of pounds of paper used for printing, and once again, all the chemicals and machinery used in making the paper. The Internet is the newspaper
7. The incorporation of multi-functionality in office machines, eliminating the need for tons of plastic and metal used in manufacturing these separate devices. The fax machine is the copier
8. The incorporation of multi-functionality into home lawn products, eliminating the need for the plastic and paper materials previously used in making these extra product containers. We have also seen the incorporation of a lawn care business under the umbrella of the services of a termite service provider, eliminating the need for two separate business structures and their associated costs. We now have a "home service" provider. The termite provider is the lawn care provider.
9. The selling of duty free products on overseas flights, eliminating the need for a "duty free" store on the ground and all the costs and jobs associated with building and running it. The stewards and stewardesses are the duty free shop.
10. The integration of a tire structure into a wheel by Michelin, eliminating the all the rubber, additives,and the jobs used in the production of conventional tires. The wheel is the tire.

What's the point here? There are two very fundamental ones.

1. First, if you are providing a service or product to someone, rest assured that no matter how much they like you and your product, someone in that company or organization is trying to figure out how to get the function you provide without you. No offense intended, but there's a lot of money to be saved and possibly the invention of a new product or business that will delight their customers. Look at your product or service and and how or why it is used by your customer and ask how could its function (not what it is) be provided within your customer's product or business. Then help make that happen and patent the concept to allow for at least some royalty payments when your product is not needed any more. Or maybe buy your customer and implement the idea!
2. Secondly, if you're the buyer of something, start figuring out how to get the function provided by what you purchase without buying it--preferably by incorporating that function into what you already sell. This will most likely delight your customer and give you some patent rights that could be very valuable.

Many of you may have seen Google's earnings report announced on Friday, January 22. In the 4th quarter of 2009, their sales (just one quarter!) were $6.7 BILLION and profits of $2 BILLION. This was 5 times the profit of the previous quarter. Let's think about this a second. How would you like to make 30% profit on this large a sales volume without MAKING anything that you can touch and feel. Just information!!

Companies like Intel and Exxon spend over a billion dollars in capital just to build a state of the art chip factory or petrochemical plant. Now Google has offices and spends a lot of money air-conditioning the building that hold all its servers, but this is a fraction of what is required in traditional manufacturing of cars, steel, chemicals, and semi-conductors. And none of these industries make 30% on sales. In a very good year, they might make 15-20% return on their capital investment (not sales and maybe a 30% return on sales on a few real specialty products for which patents haven't expired). These plants have to be constantly maintained, updated for constantly changing environmental and safety regulations, and plans for ultimate disposal of the property and equipment.

Wouldn't it be a lot more fun just to collect and sell information? Isn't that a lot easier? Well, of course it's easier if that's all the further your thought process goes. If it was that easy, everyone would do it. Despite the challenges of Microsoft and Yahoo, Google is still number one and is stretching its business vision beyond web searches. This tell us that information, itself, it pretty cheap and a commodity. It's all around us. But to sift through it, analyze it, and get only what you want is the real challenge.

Information is a critical resource. We know this but not everyone recognizes this. Sometimes it's egos that get in the way--we don't collect information that might be bad news or we "spin" it (now don't get huffy here, but consider the last several elections where the results ("information" as well as votes) are trying to tell the politicians something and possibly not just that "they don't get it").

I'll bet that many of you collect tons of information in your process control computers and your customer interviews. What do you do with it? Store it? Or analyze it? How? Do you recognize all the informational resources around you? When was the last time you asked one of your employees their opinion about something vs. telling them to be a "team player"? Have you ever asked your folks what skill or talent they have that you are not taking advantage of? Have you ever asked them about what they observed on the midnight shift? What they saw on the last customer visit that wasn't on the agenda or meeting plan? Have you considered what else you might do with the information that's already out there?

Let's consider a very recent example to illustrate these points. If you are a public agency responsible for traffic control and emergency medical repsonse to a traffic accident, how have you managed this for decades? You sit in readiness and wait for someone to call in an accident. Then you respond appropriately. This takes a certain amount of time. What if you could shorten that time? Clear the road quicker? Possibly save someone's life because you responded quicker with an ambulance? What information is at your disposal that could accelerate your response? Before I tell you the answer, think about this for a few seconds without reading further.......

What do people do today (that they didn't do 5-10 years ago) when a situation like this happens? Don't they get out their cell phones and call someone? Maybe it's their kids--"I'll be late to pick you up". Maybe it's a colleague with whom a meeting is scheduled. "I'll be a little bit late". Maybe it's picking up someone from work. "Don't worry, nothing happened, just stuck in a traffic jam--not sure what's going on". Everyone who does this generates an electromagnetic signal that is going to a cell phone tower. The dramatic rise in the level of cell phone calls is a resource and it is measurable. So if there is a sudden increase in cell phone calls, there's an accident! I know where to go because there calls are triangulated by geography and the signals now tell me where to go, almost instantly. Air Sage is doing this and selling the service.

I also recall a talk some time ago by someone from McNeil Pharmaceuticals about their putting cameras in the homes of people who were using their OTC medications (Tylenol(R) for children for example) to observe what customers actually did with their medicines, not what a consumer panel said they did. This allowed them to re-think packaging, dosing instructions, etc. The information was there all along, but no one bothered to make the extra effort to collect it. (It's a lot easier to just send surveys out, isn't it?).

Think about how football strategy has changed now that someone up in a booth, being able to see the whole playing field, can wirelessly communicate to the coach and tell him what the opposition did that he couldn't see from his ground position. What else is possible to do with this new resource of cell phone signals? Norwich Union Insurance is using this information to know when a car is on the road vs. in the garage. Why pay for accident insurance if the car is in the garage? How about monitoring how fast your teenager is driving? (This now combines cell phone signals with the "new" resource of GPS satellites).

What are the lessons here? First, information is an important resource. Second, it is easy to get overloaded. Thirdly, analyzing and sifting through information is what is critical. Fourth, new informational resources appear frequently (the cell phone example would not have been there 20 years ago), so it's good that we take re-inventory resources and ask how this new resource could be used. Last, and most important, ask those around you what they see and observe. Ask yourself if the information you have is really direct information or indirect. Information and its analysis can be the difference between success and failure in innovation.

RSS