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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There 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.

Stop the Innovation Wars is the attention-getting title of this month's Harvard Business Review attempt at controversy by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, both on the faculty at Dartmouth, and co-authors of a new book on innovation, due out in November. (See www.hbr.org July-Aug. 2010) What is the Innovation War? It is the battle between corporate operations groups, responsible for ongoing operations and support of existing products and services, and the teams formed for new initiatives, usually given names like innovation team. The authors' description of the powerful, extremely negative reactions to the idea of creating an innovation team with special responsibility for a new strategy and how it gave rise to their research is fascinating, but familiar; readers of Real Innovation and the TRIZ Journal are likely to ask what is the excitement, and what calls for academic research.

The authors rename the operations groups the Performance Engine of the company, and prescribe a partnership modality, in which the Performance Engine partners with dedicated project teams tasked with innovation projects. They present an interesting series of case studies: BMW's regenerative braking team, West's (the legal publishing branch of Thomas Reuters) creation of database products, Lucent's service businesses, and WD-40's new dispenser to demonstrate the universality of their proposed method as applied in a product, a service, and a component part.

Step one of the partnership process is dividing the work between the Performance Engine and the dedicated project team. One insight that I found quite useful was that it is not just the work to be done and the skills of the people that should be assessed, but also the past working relationships of those people. If they have always worked in a hierarchical relationship, they may not be able to work in a flat organization. If they have always worked on projects that have well-defined deliverables, they may not be able to work in an exploratory environment. And, of course, vice versa: one example showed how people who had typically worked very independently, or with a small technical support staff, were not well-suited to working in a large, structured team with complex, interdependent roles. The new organization will also need new metrics of success, new compensation/reward systems, and its own unique culture. Trimble and Govindarajan task management with creating these elements, but I've seen management fail more often than it succeeds as creating a specific culture - - it seems that the best that management can do is be sure that the metrics and reward systems are not contrary to the desired cultural elements.

For a short article, they did a good job at illustrating the kinds of problems that will occur in this partnership. TRIZ readers will recognize the physical contradictions in the situations of loose â€" tight management, team â€" individual metrics, and the technical (trade-off) contradictions in the schedule vs. completeness and new technology vs. traditional methods and new suppliers' creativity vs. traditional suppliers' reliability, etc. Disappointingly, the authors did not use any of the insights available from business applications of TRIZ to propose solutions to these contradictions. Their solutions to the problems of innovation are remarkably un-innovative. Equally disappointing, they do not present any data or case studies showing that their proposed method work. Case studies from which the method was derived are interesting, but obviously are available because they were successful for those companies in those circumstances. The test should be to apply the method to new situations and evaluate its effectiveness, and iterated the method based on both failures and successes. I am particularly dubious about the effectiveness of changing the names of the operations and innovation teams as a key success factor!

Readers are invited to contribute their case studies and observations, and particularly any methods they have found effective in Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal-reading companies.

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.

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.

RSS