Our friends at TRIZIndia have started a podcast series that will be both a tutorial on TRIZ methods and a discussion of how to teach an apply those methods in real situations in real companies. It is free and easy (no passwords, no registration process.) Try the first one on Ideal Final Result at http://trizindia.podbean.com/

The announcement said, "Everyone, We have started a podcast series on basics of TRIZ tools. Please give your feedback on the series. We will reach out to some of you to participate in the podcasts. You can also reach out to Murali Loganathan, Shankar Venugopal, Prakasan K or me, Bala Ramadurai to include you to participate in the podcasts." So I sent my positive feedback on the first recording, and asked Bala for the story behind the production. It is a very good example of the use of existing resources, and use of the supersystem resources in particular.

"Podcast was one of those ideas which came to me when I was stuck in Bangalore traffic and I thought this is the best resource to listen to podcasts. So, I listened to Getting Things Done podcasts streaming from my cellphone to the car stereo. One fine day, it hit me that TRIZ should have a podcast of our own. Instead of dismissing the idea, I wrote it down at the next light :-) next action - talk to Murali to find out if he was interested and then Shankar signed up. Murali couldnt make it, since he had to be in the other MindTree Office and Shankar said his daughters weren't doing well. I was hell-bent on recording the podcasts that very day or it would become one more of ideas which never lifted off. (Time = 0 in Size-time-cost, I guess).

"Murali quickly booked an audio bridge and we had Shankar dial in as well. We did a trial run on my cellphone (which doubled up as a digital recorder). It seemed to play my voice well, but drowned Shankar's and Murali's voices. Now, optimization time and I had the parameters perfect. One hitch though, since this was universality at play, my cellphone went off and disrupted the recording. Learning for next time, change the mode of the phone to Offline before starting to record.

"Again, my condition was simple for post-production - only one step to upload, no intermediate steps. Due to the cut in the recording, Murali had to struggle with formats and freeware, finally he managed to merge the 2 files. What format do we use to upload? wordpress wanted mp3, but some size limitation. Facebook wanted mp4, only 20 minutes, tumblr, youtube, we tried them all, none worked. Prakash to the rescue, podbean was the instant suggestion and turned out just fine. Prakash also managed to embed the player on trizindia.org."

Now that you know the story, please join TRIZ Journal commentators and authors by listening to the podcasts, send your comments, and volunteer to be recorded.

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

Vladimir Petrov is asking for help from our readers for a new project. His TRIZ Journal articles have been very helpful to many people learning TRIZ, so it is a great privilege to use this column to help him get feedback from readers to advance his research.

He said, " I continue to adapt tools and concepts of TRIZ for IT. Now I am trying to adapt the inventive principles and matrix."

Petrov sent the following questions to ask for opinions from the TRIZJournal readers:

1. Please would you think what parameters out of Altshuller's 39 parameters cannot be used in IT engineering systems?

2. With what parameters they can be substituted and what parameters should be added or removed?

Please post your answers in the Comments section at the end of this commentary, or send them directly to Vladimir vladpetr (at) netvision.net.il (I'll post my comments later this week, so that they don't bias other people's answers.) Thanks in advance for your help.

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!

Understanding and "seeing" things we can't see is a holy grail in a number of technical areas. Vibration tells us a lot about what might be going on inside a piece of mechanical equipment. X-Rays tell us about our body structure. MRI's are used to image organs, soft tissues, and flow through them.

Well, what about jet engines? From a thermodynamic standpoint, we want them to run as hot as possible, but if they run too hot, the metals can melt and catastrohpic failure can result. Blade tips are cooled to just below their failure point to maximize efficiency while protecting the blade from melting. But how do you measure accurately the fluid mixing? Sound like something that an MRI should be able to do? Well, Col. Michael Benson, a Ph.D. student in mechnical engineering at Stanford is studying the use of MRI imaging to analyze flow patterns around jet engine metal surfaces.

See http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-jet-hot-mri.html for the entire write up.

If this sounds similar to the parallel universes described in a previous column (Dec 6) regarding fluid flow in the human body and the flow of oil and gas, it's because it is! The fact that accurately measuring flow mixing in jet engines is important is not new. The fact that we have been using MRI as a flow measuring technology in medicine for decades is also not a secret. Why does it take so long for one area of industry or science to see the parallel universes that might assist it? Is it ego? To illustrate my point, I just typed in "jet engine cooling" into a web search and got 8.5 million hits. Typing MRI into the search box, I get 5.8 million hits. But when I type "MRI jet engine cooling", I get less than 150,000 hits (including the article mentioned above). Isn't that interesting? Depressing? It makes me wonder if GE, who makes both MRI equipment and jet engines, has thought about this before? If so, why would a Stanford grad student be working on it rather than a GE patent already having been issued? Has anyone seen such a patent or publication? If the grad student didn't study the patent literature, then shame on him. But if this is news to GE......can anyone enlighten us?

It still amazes me how few new problems there really are. You are never alone and the problem you have is never unique.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a TRIZ/lean/six sigma consultant, who told me with some excitement about his new project, digital book publishing. I was glad to hear his enthusiasm, but astonished when he told me that the book is ABOUT applications of TRIZ, but that he didn't use TRIZ to solve any of the problems he had during the project. My question: What about "I want to deal with Amazon, I don't want to deal with Amazon?" prompted his reply "Wow, I never thought about using the simple clarity of TRIZ to help me with my own business. Wow!"

That's the stimulus for this column: do you recognize TRIZ "situations" in your daily life? Here's a guide to recognizing TRIZ opportunities, and what to do about them. I wrote this for managers who had modest (sometimes no) TRIZ training, so they could encourage their employees to use TRIZ, but I've found lots of people who need this advice - - think of this as the new, empowered workforce, who get no help from supervisors!

So, listen for the "trigger phrases" (it doesn't matter if you say them to yourself, or if you hear other people say them), then have the "discussion" (same comment - - either talk to yourself or to the other person!)

Trigger	Tool	Discussion
X gets better but Y gets worse	Tradeoff	1. What assumptions are being made about the linkage between X and Y? What could be done to eliminate the linkage? 2. Consider the Contradiction Matrix. Could X and Y be expressed in terms of the matrix? 3. Try using the 40 principles
We want Z but we don't want Z	Inherent contra-diction	1. What assumptions are being made about Z and not Z? 2. Try the 4 separation principles
Solutions are proposed for a problem, but the solutions are very complex	Trimming, Resources	Let's look at the functions that this solution is trying to provide. Maybe we can use the resources in the problem to provide those functions
A problem is being discussed, but the emphasis is on the complexities, not on why the problem has to be solved. OR the customers' needs are not visible in the discussion	Ideal final result, ideality, function analysis.	Let's try to simplify this discussion by looking at the problem in terms of ideality. Let's list the benefits (use QFD-customer oriented language for this), the costs, and the harmful factors, then we can decide if we want to work on one of them, or if we want to work on an Ideal Final Result (all benefit, NO cost or harm). [Note that function analysis may be necessary in order to clarify the issues]
A problem is presented for solution, but it is really a collection of symptoms	Root Cause Analysis	In TRIZ this is called "understanding the zones of conflict." Use whatever systems you have for root cause analysis��"it is a waste of time to try to solve a problem that you don't understand.
We want to do ABCD to solve this problem, but we don't know how (or "the laws of science say it can't be done")	Effects/ bench-marking	Use TRIZ function language in order to search for the somebody, somewhere who has solved this problem in different circumstances for different reasons.
A specific function needs to be improved or eliminated	Su-field analysis, 76 Std.	Start with function modeling and the desired change, pick the type of change, and go to the section of the 76 Standards that deals with that type of change (system must stay the same, additives are permitted/not permitted, etc.)
This problem is complex and we have no idea where to start	System operator (also called 9 windows)	Either go to the full method, and start working through the full analysis of the problem, or, if much of that has been done, go to the System Operator tool and consider solving the problem at different levels of system, sub-system, super-system, or in a preventive or corrective mode. See also the OTSM discussions
Great news, we have multiple solutions to the problem, but we don't have time (or other resources) to test them all	Ideality and Pugh matrix	Ideality: eliminate the solutions that are not very ideal (or improve them before doing any more work.) Pugh matrix: let's combine the best of the ideas into a small number of very good solutions before we go any further.

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.

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!

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.

When was the last time you put air in your tires? Do you have a relatively new car that has an automatic warming light to tell you that tire pressure is low? What did you do? Probably pulled into a gas station, maybe put a quarter or two in the slot, and the air pump turned on and you added air to your time. How did you know how much air to add? Did you stop momentarily after eyeballing the tire, get out your tire gauge (you DO have one in the car, don't you? Or did you run in and buy one from the gas/conveneincve store?), or look at the gauge that may have been attached to the end of the air hose? In case you haven't figured it out by now, that's what I did this morming. In any event, you know you should not overinflate the tire and that's a lot harder to "see" than an underinflated tire.

Next time you visit your local hardware or major discount store, go to the auto parts department and find the new tire caps with automatic pressure readings built into the head. They can even be purchased at various pressure levels (24, 28, 32, etc.) that change from green to red when the pressure is not at or above where it's supposed to be. Are you thinking about what a good business tire gauges are right now? Do you have the same feeling that paint roller pan producers felt when the Black and Decker Paint Stick(TM) arrived on the scene?

These two simple examples are concrete illustrations of an irreversible trend in product development---systems and products are absorbed and integrated into their super-systems, irreversibly, over time. If you're in any kind of business where someone is buying something from you, you need to be constantly asking the questions, "What is my product being used for? What system is it being used in?" "What is its FUNCTION (not what it IS)?" The history of inventions and the study of over 7 million patents tells us clearly that this Will happen, with or without your help. You can either follow the train or get run over (put out of business) by it. In the cases above, the suppliers of the metals and plastics used in making paint roller kits and tire gauges see theitr sales volume drop and probably wonder why. If they're only talking to their direct customer and not watching what is going on one step above their customer, they are due for a surprise. There is no product in existence that someone is trying to figure out how NOT to use. You need to be ahead of this thinking and figuring out how you're going to replace the FUNCTION your product provides. This may be very uncomfortable to deal with as it may mean changing your business, the type of people you hire, the intellectual property you license or develop, and the customers you talk to. NEVER rely on your first direct customer to be the sole driver of your market research because if they are not thinking about how they could be replaced, you are even one more step away from that awareness your self.

How could your product or service and what it does be replaced? Integrated into its super-system? If the answer to the second question is "I don't know", then start thinking about it and how it would affect your research budget, the type of people you hire, and who you collaborate with. Now!

Have you paid attention to some of the new product developments lately and looked for some over-riding trends? Think about Dyson, the i-Phone, and the new electronic book readers from Borders and Barnes and Noble as examples. Dyson is selling vacuum cleaners without bags and fans without blades. Both of these advances eliminate significant parts of engineering systems, and, in theory, minimize parts and maintenance operations. The Apple iPhone eliminated the antenna. And you know what happened next---reception suffered when the antenna, embedded in the frame of the cell phone, was obstructed. Competitive phones began an attack with full page ads describing their "redundant" embedded antennas and Apple had to give away millions of dollars in free cell phone cases to compensate.

What do these examples teach us about "trimming and simplifying"? First of all, this kind of thinking is a great starting point for new product breakthroughs and business concepts. In this context, think about how Amazon has virtually eliminated the book store and book readers have eliminated paper and book marks.

Arbitrarily get rid of a part of a system--preferably one that has significant cost or inconvenience to the user. Then figure out how to get back the "function" that this now eliminated part was performing with the elements in the system that are left. But we can't stop there! We need to think about what might make this new design "go wrong" or not function properly. The antenna could get covered up...what if the dust (without a bag to catch) got into the motor? What if the sunlight interferes with the electronic book reader on the beach? What if sand gets on the screen? Challenge the simplified design and ask yourself how you could make it fail! What could you do in the way of simple redundancy that could make the new system cheaper, simpler, and more robust?

The lesson is not to simplify without also asking the question of what negative things could come out of the design change. Without doing both, you're taking an unnecessary risk.

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?"

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