xTRIZ: Systematic Innovation, TRIZ, Collaboration

Intermediair on TRIZ

2010-09-06T17:40:00.000+02:00

The latest issue of Dutch weekly magazine Intermediair from September 2, 2010 published an article on TRIZ based on the interviews with me and J. Stevens. The article is in Dutch. The full text of the article is available at the following link:

http://www.intermediair.nl/epaper/2010/35/#/32/

TRIZ and Systematic Innovation Training for Fall 2010

2010-08-31T10:50:00.000+02:00

The following public courses will be conducted in the Netherlands in Fall of 2010:

TRIZ for Technology and Engineering:

3-day Basic TRIZ and Systematic Innovation for Technology and Engineering. September 15-17, 2010, Utrecht, Netherlands
5-day Advanced TRIZ and Systematic Innovation for Technology and Engineering. November 15-19, 2010, Utrecht, Netherlands

TRIZ for Business and Management:

One-day Introduction to TRIZ and Systematic Innovation for Business and Management. September 1, 2010, Utrecht, Netherlands
4-day Extended TRIZ and Systematic Innovation for Business and Management. October 12-15, 2010, Utrecht, Netherlands

Systematic Creative Imagination Development (TRIZ-based)

One-day Techniques of Systematic Creative Imagination Development (for all areas). December 1, 2010, Utrecht, Netherlands

For more information, details and registration please visit http://www.xtriz.com/Training/

TRIZ Café on November 11, 2009: Full of Energy

2009-11-15T18:54:00.031+01:00

On Wednesday, November 11, 2009 we had another meeting of TRIZ Café at the hotel “Eindhoven”, at the outskirts of the city of Eindhoven. Since a primary goal of our TRIZ Cafe meetings is to bring together people who are interested in TRIZ to get to know each other and share knowledge and ideas, we did not have a fixed pre-set agenda except starting and finishing times and some presentation titles, and thus preferred to make our decisions “on the fly” depending on wishes of the participants.

In total, there were 20 participants representing 16 different organizations, including Delta Electronics, Evonik Colortrends, Sioux Embedded Systems, Stork Food Systems, Oce Technologies, Sensata, TNO Science and Industry, University of Twente, and smaller companies. There were more people on the list, but not everyone could make it.

In the beginning of presentations

Koen Arends (Stork Food Systems), Han de Ronde (Delta Electronics), Peter Vollard (Tedac)

After starting and 13:00 and spending approximately two hours for coffee/tea, meetings, talks, and introductions, we switched to the presentations prepared by the participants. First, I made a presentation about a link between TRIZ and Creative Imagination Development (CID). Although CID used to be a very important part of TRIZ education during the “Altshuller’s TRIZ era”, lately it has been paid less attention due to a general demand within industry for “fast learning”. But how are we going to solve complex creative problems without creativity? Thus I presented my vision of how CID techniques could be coupled with principles of “power innovative thinking”, and how these techniques could boost and develop further our innovative thinking skills and enhance the use of TRIZ methods and tools.

Valeri Souchkov (me) presenting TRIZ and CID

Next, Guido Giebens (Antrim, Antwerp) presented a board game “ANTRI3” which his company developed on the basis of TRIZ. The game uses many TRIZ concepts (such as IFR, Su-Field Modeling, etc. ) and is used to enhance creative teamwork during innovative projects. An idea of a TRIZ-based game is not new, but it was quite inspirational to see how a strategic approach to “walking towards a solution” was implemented by combining fun and “serious TRIZ”.

Guido Giebens (Antrim) presents TRIZ Game

Next, we decided to switch from presentations to something new, which we called “Express TRIZ Case”. In short, it is one-hour exercise on solving a real problem which is brought to the session by one of the participating organizations. During the session, all other TRIZ Cafe participants take part as well – and it does not matter if they are TRIZ newcomers or TRIZ professionals. One of the prerequisites of such exercise is that no one (except a problem owner) knows in advance what a problem will be.

We selected a problem brought by Stork Food Systems which was related to food processing industry. Of course, one hour is too short to go through the entire TRIZ process, but nevertheless we managed to use Root Conflict Analysis to quickly decompose the problem to underlying contradictions, and then inventive principles, Ideal Final Results, Modeling with Miniature Dwarfs, and inventive standards to propose a number of new innovative solution concepts. Unfortunately, we cannot tell more to general public about the problem and solutions found since all participants agreed for confidentiality – and as Koen Arends, Innovation Manager of Stork Food Systems said after the session, one or two ideas generated were of a high potential to be patented and implemented.

During "TRIZ Case Express Session": Thomas Dekker (Stork Food Systems)

I personally liked this session since it demonstrated the power of TRIZ to attack complex problems in fast and efficient way if we follow a predefined TRIZ process and let everyone present in the room to be involved. Although in the very beginning of the session, after formulation of the problem there were some attempts of brainstorming and directly jumping to solutions, it became very quickly clear that we actually, were jumping to a dead end. Therefore we had to stop it and drive audience along the TRIZ process – and it worked. As expected, most effective solution ideas emerged after we defined a core physical contradiction, operational zone and operational time (which one would never do without TRIZ). As one of participants from Stork Food Systems noted, that during the first 15 minutes of generating ideas with TRIZ, we reproduced one of the ideas to find which Stork spent three years (without TRIZ). Thus it was a clear demonstration how TRIZ could drastically help accelerating a process of finding high-quality inventive ideas.

After a short break, we continued with presentations. Dr. Wessel Wits (University of Twente, Enschede) presented a program and results of our two-week “full immersion” TRIZ Summer Course which was introduced this summer at the University of Twente. He also demonstrated some examples of problems which students were solving during the course and some new ideas of solutions found by the students (and the TRIZ Cafe audience really liked these examples). The course was quite successful and students rated it rather high comparing to similar courses. Wessel also announced the next course which will take part in the last week of June-first week of July of 2010. We plan to make this course open so if anyone is interested in joining, please let me know.

Wessel Wits (University of Twente)

And the last presentation of the day was made by Albert van der Kuij, business development and standards engineer from Sensata, Almelo. He shared his experience gathered during last 5 years of application TRIZ within the company focusing on how TRIZ can be embedded to projects, and focused on the links between Six Sigma, QFD and TRIZ. He also proposed his vision of how QFD, FMEA, TRIZ and Six Sigma’s DMADV process can be used at each step of new product development: from ideas conception to product supply.

Albert van der Kuij (Sensata)

In fact, we had more presentations on the list, but it was already after 20:00 – time to close our sessions. Therefore we postponed them to our next meeting, which will take place in early 2010. In the meantime we plan to use the LinkedIn group “Dutch TRIZ Community” for communication.

As a conclusion, I believe that our second TRIZ Café was a good step towards strengthening and expanding our TRIZ network. Modern TRIZ is not an easy subject to learn and use so we all need such meetings to share our knowledge and experiences, to get to know about new TRIZ developments and tools, especially from practical point of view. What I really liked was to see how enthusiastic and energized people felt during the meeting. I hope these energy and enthusiasm will stay with us and grow further.

Videos of presentations from the TRIZ Café will be shortly made available together with corresponding powerpoint slides. I will post to this blog and make announcement as soon as they are ready.

More photos from the event are available at http://www.xtriz.com/img/TRIZCafe_November2009/

I’d like to thank everyone who made our second TRIZ Café possible and hope to see you next time!

Our coffee machine. It had a very strange behaviour: all of a sudden it started to work and produce high-pitched noise... when no one was around. Definitely, an "ideal" coffee machine.

New Articles on Thinking Skills

2009-10-26T19:09:00.007+01:00

It has been a while since I posted to this blog. Anyway, just to keep you updated, there are two my articles published this month which belong to the category of what I call "Power Innovative Thinking".

The first article published by the Altshuller Institute:

Power Thinking Skills for Innovative Leadership

And the second article by the Real Innovation:

Fantogramma: a Technique for New Fantasy Ideas

Both articles deal with the ways we think. The first article focuses on highligting certain differences between "regular" and "innovative" thinking. It is important to note that I do not mean that "regular" thinking skills which I mention in the article are bad and have to be replaced by "innovative" thinking skills. Both types of thinking are needed. What I want to stress on is that usually our innovative thinking skills are underdeveloped, and if we want to learn how to become creative and innovative leaders, we should understand what the differences are and how we can practically develop these appropriate skills.

The second article presents one of the techniques developed by Genrich Altshuller to help moving out of the box when generating new fantasy ideas. But again, it is very important that this technique is not only for fantasy or science-fiction authors: it can be practiced by everyone who is willing to develop his or her creative imagination. I also teach Fantogramma as a part of my training course on Creative Imagination Development.

Please send me your comments if any, I am open to discuss both articles to move further.

Video: TRIZ Today

2009-07-28T14:55:00.004+02:00

A one-hour video recording of my presentation "TRIZ Today" is available. This presentation was given during TRIZ Cafe meeting on June 17, 2009, in Amersfoort. This presentation focuses on explaining what modern TRIZ is. To see the video, please follow the link:

http://www.xtriz.com/trizcafe/trizcafevideo.htm

The video file should start playing automatically. If there are problems with viewing the video, a a stand-alone mpeg-4 file is also available for download at the same page as well as slides used in the presentation.

"TRIZ Fundamentals" course finalized

2009-07-28T13:55:00.012+02:00

Last week the first part of the course "TRIZ Fundamentals" at the University of Twente was finalized. It included 80 hours of studying the TRIZ theory and practicing with modern and classical TRIZ tools. But in fact, it took more than 80 hours: since students spent their afternoons each day working on the assignments, it took them more time than was planned for some assignments - sometimes I received e-mails with questions from students around 22:00. It was probably my fault: I underestimated time needed for practical work since I used to work with professional audience - people who had experience with working under tight time constraints.

However looking at the results of the course, I feel very good. I'd say each assignment (in total, there were 9 different assignments for each group of students) was done quite well with nice presentations. And overall, each student evaluated the quality and usefullness of the course either "high" or "very high". It was my first experience of conducting such a lengthy course at the university; and frankly, such high marks were above my expectations.

Among the topics which students liked the most, were Root-Conflict Analysis, Inventive Principles, Inventive Standards. Almost everyone mentioned them in final evaluation sheets. Although all the students managed quite well with ARIZ, they found it less attractive (except the method of Miniature Dwarfs or Little Men). It is understandable: ARIZ requires long time of "playing" with different problem formulations and this process gets fuzzy sometimes, especially if a problem does not fit exactly the ARIZ format since the very beginning.

Students present results with ARIZ

During the next phase starting this fall, students will use knowledge they acquired to help with real-life innovative projects at companies: either solving a problem which requires an inventive solution, or participating in innovative product development with the use of TRIZ.

TRIZ Summer Course at Twente University

2009-07-06T23:06:00.012+02:00

Today I've started a new offical course on TRIZ Fundamentals and Practical Applications at the University of Twente. The course is for B.Sc and M.Sc students of engineering and technical disciplines and has a new format: it is a two-week summer course (80) hours with later extension in autumn (additional 40) hours. Thus the course provides 5 credits for students in total (if they are successful, of course). Each day is split to two parts: lectures and practical assignments. Every morning, each group of students (3 persons per group) will present the results obtained during practical work a previous day. Both Tom Vaneker and Wessel Wits will assist me during the course.

The program includes general approach to modern innovation, TRIZ foundations, Ideality, Multi-Screen Thinking, Resources, Models and Trends of Technology Evolution, RCA+, Function Analysis and Trimming, Inventive Principles and Inventive Standards, Value-Conflict Mapping, ARIZ, Creative Imagination techniques and development of innovative thinking skills, evaluation techniques, aspects of TRIZ use and implementation, integration of TRIZ with other methods.

During the first day

Student present results of practical assignments

TRIZ Café on June 17, 2009: Summary

2009-06-18T23:22:00.010+02:00

In our highly dynamic and connected world, it seems to be a matter of top priority to stay connected. Especially it applies to those who are involved to innovation. During my 15 years of stay in the Netherlands, I have had numerous contacts with people who have interest in innovation and TRIZ, and many of them became users of TRIZ and some of them are even my "virtual" colleagues who help us to develop TRIZ further. However most of them do not know about each other. So our primary intention behind launching the Dutch TRIZ network was to bring people together.

Although we run in the past so-called "TRIZ days" here in Holland, their goal was mostly informative: to present TRIZ to newcomers. With TRIZ Cafe we are introducing another format: the TRIZ Cafe should become a place where everyone interested in TRIZ (even those who never worked with TRIZ) can meet in "real life" and exchange their experiences and stories. The idea of TRIZ Cafe is to create a meeting place of the Dutch TRIZ network. Definitely, the Dutch TRIZ network should stay open to anyone who is willing to join. It is not meant to be a "customer club", etc. - it is going to be an inspirational place for people interested in TRIZ. Why Dutch then? Because while living in a small country, we can enjoy meeting each other and work together without the necessity to travel too far, and that’s why we expect most of people visiting TRIZ Cafe will be from the Netherlands and surrounding countries.

About the event. After we had sent its announcement, about 60 people were interested in participating. However by the time of the event we had 15 people on the list. And at the day of the event we had 10 persons in the room representing different organizations: both technology and business. Well, as they say, "small but beautiful". I think it was a good number to start with because everyone could follow the same discussions and provide contribution.

Thus our first meeting took place on June 17, 2009, at the Hotel Golden Tulip in Amersfoort. A quiet and a nice location in woods within a couple of minutes of drive from a highway. During the first hour the participants talked to each other and enjoyed coffee and tea (it was supposed to be TRIZ Cafe!). Then I made a presentation labelled "TRIZ and Systematic Innovation Today". Instead of a standard introduction to TRIZ, I tried to show how TRIZ was originated, how it evolved, and what it is today. I also tried to show that today's TRIZ is not only limited to technological inventions, but can be quite effectively used in a business area as well. The presentation took about one hour. It was taped on video and soon I will provide you with a link where you can watch it. I guess it will be especially interesting to those who missed the event.

After a break we started "free-format" presentations by the participants. Dr. Wessel Wits, associate professor of the University of Twente (www.utwente.nl), presented a story about teaching TRIZ at the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design of the university and TRIZ-related work done by students within their M.Sc. projects. If so far TRIZ was introduced as a part of other courses, this year TRIZ will be introduced as a full 80 hours (with 40 hours of practice extension) course for B.Sc and M.Sc students. The university also plans to extend cooperation with local industries regarding TRIZ.

Next, Jan Gerritsen, Innovation Manager at GEA Grenco BV (www.geagrenco.nl), presented how innovation is being understood and implemented at his company. His presentation was very interesting and at the same time challenging. It caused many questions from the participants and the discussions, especially put from the TRIZ point of view, were very inspiring. As a result, we plan to create a "TRIZ Cafe task force" which will study how TRIZ can help GEA Grenco to boost and accelerate innovation.

Time was flowing fast, and soon we discovered that it was a moment to close the "formal part" of the informal event. At the end by the request of the participants I gave a brief overview of tools we currently use within the "xTRIZ" framework.

The evening ended up in the hotel's lounge with drinks and a dinner.

Summarizing, I really enjoyed the event, and especially the enthusiasm expressed by the participants. Even although some of them were new to TRIZ, they participated very actively and lively in all discussions. The result of the meeting was a decision to launch a LinkedIn group of the “Dutch TRIZ community” as a platform for virtual communication between our meetings. Thus if anyone is interested in joining, please check this LinkedIn group.

We have not decided yet when the next TRIZ Cafe will take place. Most likely it will be in October-November 2009. We will discuss it in the meantime and announce as soon as possible.

I would like to thank everyone once again who joined the meeting, and I am sure we gave a good start to further networking and cooperation.

There are some more photos from the event:

http://www.xtriz.com/img/TRIZCafe_June2009

Introducing xTRIZ in Jordan and the Middle East

2009-06-18T22:30:00.018+02:00

Last couple of months were pretty busy with travel and all kinds of activities leaving too little time to write about my thoughts, news and events.

My first visit to Amman, Jordan was in April 2008, where I run a 3-day public training for 25 representatives of Jordanian enterprises. I was quite surprised by the level of TRIZ awareness in the country and by a real drive of people to innovate. After that event, three more public training courses in Jordan followed up. Based on the success of these workshops, this year the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (http://www.qrce.org/) in cooperation with ICG T&C decided to establish "TRIZMatic" institute to further promote TRIZ, xTRIZ and Systematic Innovation in the region.

Graduating the participants of the training course in TRIZ, xTRIZ and Systematic Innovation for Business and Management in cooperation with QRCE on May 2-4, 2009.

On May 5, 2009, the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan (RSS, http://www.rss.gov.jo/) and QRCE conducted a one day conference on Systematic Innovation, where I presented a keyonote talk on TRIZ as well as two more specific talks on applications of TRIZ in technology and business areas. The event was visited by over 100 people.

During the conference: Prof. Abdullah F. Dwairi of Jordan University of Science and Technology talks about impact of TRIZ on product development

I am very thankful to Basel Kilany, Hussein Natsheh and Mohd Khawaja from QRCE, who excellently organized my latest trip to Amman (and all other trips as well!). And also my special thanks to HRH Princess Sumaya Bint El-Hassan and HRH Prince El Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan who take promotion of TRIZ and Systematic Innovation in the country very seriosuly.

Right to left: me, HRH Princess Sumaya Bint El-Hassan , HRH Prince El Hassan Bin Talal.

TRIZ Café

2009-04-28T16:42:00.002+02:00

Would you like to learn about the latest TRIZ and xTRIZ tools and updates? To meet other TRIZ and Systematic Innovation professionals, practitioners and enthusiasts? To discuss and share your ideas and experiences about TRIZ and Systematic Innovation in informal environment? Or to learn what TRIZ is and how it can be used? If you live or stay in the Netherlands or nearby, then you might like to visit our "TRIZ Café" event.

We plan to hold our next meeting on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, from 14:00 till 19:00. The exact location will be defined as soon as we know how many participants and from where will visit the event. The meeting will involve both presentations by the participants and free-format discussions.

The cost of participation is Euro 50,- (excluding 19% VAT/BTW). It includes coffee/tea, refreshments, additional materials.

For more details: http://www.xtriz.com/trizcafe.htm

Additional TRIZ courses in Spring 2009

2009-04-28T16:30:00.007+02:00

By request, I will run several additional public courses in May-June 2009:

May 2-4, 2009, TRIZ-based Systematic Innovation for Business and Management in Amman, Jordan (organized by Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship)
May 18-22, 2009, Advanced TRIZ for Technology and Engineering in Utrecht, Netherlands
June 2-5, 2009: Extended TRIZ-based Systematic Innovation for Business and Management, Utrecht, Netherlands
June 23-25, 2009, TRIZ-based Systematic Innovation for Business and Management in Athens, Greece (organized by ECO-Q Magazine).

Details are available at www.xtriz.com/Training

Of course, if anyone would like to meet me if you are there at the same dates, just let me know.

Innovation Sources and Triggers

2009-04-24T11:39:00.005+02:00

During my lectures and courses on TRIZ and Innovation, I am often asked, "What are main triggers which push people to innovate?". Thus I have tried to categorize main categories of such triggers for technical innovations:

Accidents - Many new inventions were created on the basis of unexpected discoveries, made both in science and technology. For instance, x-rays, penicillin, microwave oven, vulcanized rubber, even potato chips resulted from accidents.

Analogy - Many inventions resulted from observing nature and copying its principles. Leonardo da Vinci drew his flying machines and ships by copying nature. Composite materials, building structures emerged from observing natural systems. George de Mestrel invented Velcro fastener by studying why seeds of burdock kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur. Today such disciplines as biomimicry and biomimetics study principles of nature and copy them for technology use. Analogy is also often used by inventors to copy and transfer principles from one technical area to another one.

Problems caused by negative and harmful effects - probably, the broadest trigger of innovations. We do not want anything to fail or behave incorrectly so we improve things. We do not want car accidents so we improve cars, roads, even traffic rules. Very often we can only achieve a necessary improvement through innovation. Chassis of heavy planes would not be possible without carbon-reinforced materials; refrigeration of food prevents it from degradation. Think about ultrasonic distance sensors for car parking, non-breaking glass, traffic jams detecting and predicting systems, and so forth.

Performance barriers - they are created by the limits of principles of existing products and technologies. To break these limits, we need to invent a new product or a technology based on a new principle. A horse cannot run faster than 70 km/h, but a car can. The car can't run faster than 300 km/h, but a plane can. A wooden pointer cannot be longer than 1 meter (it can, but it will be useless), but a laser pen can project light much further. Computer memory in microchips has much higher capacity than memory based on vacuum tubes.

Hidden demands - there are plenty of them! Someone can be the first to recognize that a demand exist and respond by creating new products and technologies. Often new demands emerge as a result of demographic, cultural, social changes or introduction of new products to the market which create new needs. One of the common innovation practices today is to observe customers behaviour and identify functions which can be delivered by new or improved products.

Technology Diversification - when a known technology or a product (or its principle) is used in a new context, or a new market. For instance, when the first laser was invented it was thought to be used in spectroscopy only. Today lasers are used in a very broad range of applications. A computer has existed for a long time as a computational device, today it is a primary tool of communication, gaming device, music recording, and so forth.

Trends of Technology Evolution - they exist (check TRIZ). Many seemingly different technologies and products evolve in similar ways. For instance, one of such patterns is evolution of the degree of dynamics by segmenting an existing system or a product to several connected parts. Such pattern applies to situations when we have our product to be small and big at different times. For instance, a mobile phone: we want a large screen, convenient large buttons and at the same time the phone should be small to provide portability. A solution is a sliding phone, or a flip-flop phone. Now think about travel bag which we can make bigger by unzipping its part, telescopic rod for an umbrella, foldable bicycle, foldable tourist tent, foldable camping table, etc.

Scientific research, especially material research - today a major source of hi-tech innovations. Without it microelectronics would have not existed, and neither advanced materials like polymers, fine chemicals, new construction materials, new and more effective medicines, etc.

Cost-effectiveness - we always want more value for lower costs, and costs depend not only on production scale or using cheaper solutions which decrease quality. Innovations help to cut costs while preserving quality and performance or even increasing them. Many ICT innovations emerge from this source. Online meeting systems cut costs for travel. Other examples are voice communication via the Internet, plastics which are stronger but cheaper than steel, disposable mobile phones, reusable plastic bottles, and so forth.

Market competition – we should not forget this important trigger. Often there are no clearly visible problems or performance barriers related to our product or a system, but we know we must innovate to stay competitive. Probably, competition is a kind of meta-trigger which leads to the use of all above-mentioned triggers.

TRIZ Future 2009 in Romania

2009-03-18T16:08:00.003+01:00

As was decided during the latest edition of TRIZ Future conference, the next edition of the conference will be conducted in Timisoara, Romania, on November 4-6, 2009. Recently the conference organizers announced the official conference website:

http://www.eng.upt.ro/trizfuture2009/

The website provides further information and the first call for papers. Authors who are willing to submit papers should note that the deadline for abstracts is April 1, 2009.

Detailed Report on TRIZ Future 2008

2009-03-18T15:59:00.002+01:00

Prof. Toru Nakagawa has recently published his personal report on the conference TRIZ Future 2008 which took place in November 2008 in the Netherlands. The report is available at his website, TRIZ Home in Japan by following this link.

As usual, the report is very detailed and comprehensive and I'd like to thank Toru once again for another great effort he did!

TRIZ Intro Short Course, January 14, 2009 in Utrecht

2008-12-17T16:39:00.004+01:00

When you are every day involved to TRIZ and Innovation, it is not easy to imagine that there are still too many people who never heard of TRIZ, or those who heard but vaguely know what a contemporary TRIZ is. Therefore I scheduled an evening introduction course to modern TRIZ on January 14, in Utrecht, Netherlands. This short course will take place from 16:00 till 20:00, and provide not only an overview of TRIZ but also a hands-on experience to get a feeling how TRIZ works.

More details are available at:

http://www.xtriz.com/Training/evening_introduction.htm

TRIZ and Systematic Innovation Training in Spring 2009

2008-12-04T10:39:00.009+01:00

I have just (once again!) adjusted the agenda of my public training and certification courses in Spring 2009. Please keep the following dates in mind in case you wish to join some of the courses:

TRIZ for Business and Management:

February 5-7: 3-day course, Bangalore, India
March 20: one-day introductory course, Utrecht, Netherlands
May 4-7: 4-day extended course, Utrecht, Netherlands

TRIZ for Technology and Engineering:

April 1-3: 3-day basic course, Utrecht, Netherlands
May 18-22: 5-day advanced course, Utrecht, Netherlands

General Systematic Creativity and Problem Solving:

March 2-6, OTSM-TRIZ to Develop Power Thinking (with N. Khomenko), Limassol, Cyprus
June 12: Creative Imagination Development, Utrecht, The Netherlands
June 19: Root Conflict Analysis (RCA+), Utrecht, The Netherlands

More information about the courses and registration: http://www.xtriz.com/Training/

TRIZ Future 2008

2008-12-04T01:46:00.014+01:00

Finally, after a quite intensive November filled with travel and training courses, I have some time to write few lines about the TRIZ Future 2008 Conference.

This year's edition of the conference in Enschede gathered around 90 participants from 20 countries including China, Japan, Korea, US. The number of people was slightly less in the previous year in Frankfurt, however in my opinion, quality of presented papers was quite high. It also has to do with the fact that this year we applied a set of stricter criteria to the paper selection and edition process. It probably reduced the number of participants, but I personally learned a number of very interesting things.

As usual, a daily report from the conference is available in the online TRIZ Journal, prepared by the Journal editor, Ellen Domb:

TRIZ Future 2008 Day 1

TRIZ Future 2008 Day 2

TRIZ Future 2008 Day 3

We also hope that as always, Toru Nakagawa will publish a very detailed report on the conference, including review of presented papers.

The atmosphere during the conference was very warm and friendly. After 8 years of conducting the event, we already have a "core group" of those who visit each edition of the conference. It is great to meet each year, discuss last year events and share new ideas. A team of organizers from the Department of Design, Production and Management of the University of Twente did a great job to ensure the highest quality of the event. I am very thankful to them. And especially pleasant surprise was a conference dinner in a village restaurant "Hanninkshof", which featured wonderful gourmet meals and selection of beautiful wines.

What was a little bit frustrating, although the conference was conducted in the Netherlands, not much of Dutch industry visited the conference. I am curious what were the reasons - current economic crisis, or reducing interest in the front-end of innovation? Or too many innovation-related events this year? At the same time I talk to (and work with) many people from the Dutch industry and business, and most of them are very much interested in TRIZ and use it. One of the reasons was, probably that the conference was "too academic", most of papers were from universities. We have to think how to boost industrial participance at future conferences.

Some highlights from the conference:

Opening by Gaetano Cascini, ETRIA president.

During paper presentations

During my tutorial on TRIZ for Business and Management

Keynote talk by Harry Rutten, DSM

During conference dinner

A larger image gallery is available at http://etria.net/img/TFC2008/

Thanks everyone for making the conference success!

Next year edition of the conference will be held in October-November 2009 in Timiosara, Romania. Details will be posted soon at http://www.etria.net/.

A Personal Record and Crisis (Not Personal)

2008-11-03T19:42:00.016+01:00

This fall I seem to set up a personal record on a number of people I trained in TRIZ. Since September 8 till October 31 (during 7 weeks) I trained about 230 people in TRIZ at different levels: from very basic (8 hours) to advanced (40-60 hours). This figure includes both university students and professionals from a dozen of countries. Feel a bit tired, but must confess: very happy.

So will it help those who were trained dealing with a "financial crisis" we all hear about today? The answer seem to be rather obvious. The more we can, the better we cope. Basically, TRIZ is about how to deal in critical situations. Any breakthrough innovation results from a situation when trade-offs don't work any more but we need a radical, out-of-the-box solution. Another issue is that we used to think about innovation just as bringing new products to the market. But what about process innovations? Supply chain innovations? Cost cutting innovations? We can innovate to drastically cut costs, for instance. Usually we think that once we cut costs, we also decrease produced value. It sounds quite logical, however it is not true. The entire TRIZ philosophy (if we learn TRIZ well) drives us towards creating "ideal" solutions: producing maximum value at virtually no costs. And in many cases it is possible.

I observe two types of organizations today: those who are under a current panic of crisis freeze their training budgets and those which do not. However, those who freeze represent the vast majority. Luckily there is another type of companies: which release their budgets to better train peope. Which strategy is right? There is a simple analogy. If a national soccer team loses against stronger competitors during the World Cup - does it mean that the team has to cut costs, kick out all strong players (who are expensive) and avoid hiring a good coach (because the team certainly experiences crisis)? I think everyone will laugh at such decision and stop supporting such a team if it does so. That's why it is still a great mistery to me why so many boards of organizations are unable to connect productivity, performance, and ability to stay in business with capabilities and skills of people who work for them.

TRIZ Future 2008 next week!

2008-10-29T22:20:00.003+01:00

Are there TRIZ enthusiasts or those who would be interested in learning more about TRIZ? There is a great chance to meet international TRIZ community next week.

On November 5-7 we conduct the international conference TRIZ Future 2008 in Enschede, The Netherlands hosted by the University of Twente. Although the conference will last 3 days, there is also a possibility to register for the first day only, which will include basic TRIZ tutorials, keynotes, opening, and two tracks with case studies (registration for this day costs Euro 250,-). We expect around 100 people from 20-25 countries.

I will run a tutorial on TRIZ for Business and Management in the morning (from 09:00 till 12:00).

More details on the conference and registration are available at http://www.trizfuture.net/ . To see a detailed schedule of paper presentations, visit section "Downloads".

Social Innovation: How to Manage Work/Life Balance?

2008-09-02T11:07:00.009+02:00

Last Friday, I took part in a very inspiring informal event: “UnConference”, organized by friends of mine Ton Zijlstra and Elmine Wijnia at the Twente University terrain as a part of Elmine’s birthday celebration. It was visited by a group of enthusiastic people from different countries interested in how networked world changes our life.

One of the questions posted was how to manage work/life balance properly? We run a series of small workshops in the “Knowledge Café” format, and I hosted one of the workplaces. Here I’d like to share our findings.

Pretty soon we found that definition of a border between work and personal/leisure parts of life had been very fuzzy. All people are different: for some their work is the only true meaning of their lives, but some prefer less time spent for work and more dedicated to families and leisure activities. To better understand this border we choose the Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and reformulated the question: “What prevents us from feeling happy about managing our work/personal life balance?”, where personal life can mean anything but work.

In most cases, working provides us with a means to fulfil our needs. But our work becomes a part of our identity, too. Its role is minimal when our needs reside only at the lower levels of the Maslows's pyramid (to secure our basic living needs), but grows exponentially when we move up to the higher levels of the needs hierarchy (levels of esteem and self-actualization). By following the TRIZ philosophy of a fuzzy situation analysis, we tried to formulate a list of contradictions which prevent us from keeping our work/personal life balance totally perfect – that is, just as we want it to feel happy because for everyone this balance can be individual.

A majority of people whose work interests are not limited to their pay checks face a fundamental contradiction: either to stay at the lower levels of the Maslow’s hierarchy to ensure stability and security or to move up to the higher levels to realize their dreams, especially when people are young and full of energy. However without strong financial independence that would mean putting ourselves as well as our families at risk. What would (probably) reduce this risk is a total commitment and full immersion to our work. However, that would also mean reducing time for any other activities.

Furthermore, we decided to outline contradictions which are experienced and treated by each participant as most important and which have to be resolved to properly manage work/personal life balance:

We want to live in a small quiet town which is good for our kids and work in a big city, but commuting takes of a lot of time.
We want to dedicate more time to our kids, but then we would not accomplish our careers as desired.
We want to be entrepreneurs to realize our goals and dreams, but full commitment to our jobs will unlikely leave enough time for our families and leisure activities.
A "perfect" vacation demands considerable time to truly disconnect from thoughts about our jobs, and such long vacations are good for our families. But are such long breaks good for our jobs, especially in modern, highly dynamic work environments when everything changes too fast?
Perfectionism versus getting things done: trying to accomplish things in the most perfect way we sacrifice time for either other tasks or personal life.
Mobile workplace versus stable workplace: being highly mobile we tend to spend more time for long-distance travel thus leaving too little time to spend with our families.
We need to learn more and more every day but still need to secure enough time for doing our jobs and personal things.
A desire to do many interesting things in parallel; but to really accomplish something we must focus on one-two major tasks only.
Every day we need to process more and more information which leaves less time for other activities.
Individualism to focus and concentrate versus the need to feel and be a part of a larger social group.
Quantity versus efficiency: in most cases employees are paid for hours, not for results. Thus we need to spend more time at work to ensure proper income than it might be really needed .
Working from home: we stay close to our families but physically remote from our social work environments ("missing a water cooler" syndrome).
"Work ecosystem" versus "home ecosystem": we often tend to give a preference of one rather than another due to many factors: attitude, comfort, etc. and thus even subconsciously tend to spend more time within that ecosystem.

It looks like most of these contradictions focus on two critical elements: time and space. We can neither expand time nor to be in two places at once. How do the participants see the ways out? There were some ideas:

Matching work with meaning of your life.
Finding a partner with a similar state of mind.
Creating a family business.
Splitting work between being employed for several days a week and then self-employed for the rest of the week.
Working from home only partly.
Always staying connected with your family via the Internet.

Given a limited time we did not elaborate ideas further. It is clear that these already known solutions solve just a part of a bigger problem. By asking the participants if they were happy with their current work/personal life balance, only a half of them responded positively. Which means that 50% of people are not happy – isn’t that an indication of another real problem in our society? What can be new radical innovations that would help people to feel happy with managing their work/personal life balance? Here we need to challenge known mental models of “working” which create psychological barriers preventing us from thinking out of the box: offices, cubicles, meetings, billing for hours and not for results, relations between working time and real productivity, and so forth. A very interesting area worth to explore!

Creativity World Forum in Antwerpen

2008-09-01T16:33:00.011+02:00

The summer break is over, and it's time to get back to autumn innovation. My agenda looks quite full for the coming months with a number of countries to visit, which means that the interest in creativity and innovation is still there!

Just wanted to note that on November 19-20, 2008, the next edition of the Creativity World Forum will take place in Antwerpen, Belgium. The Forum is organized by the Flemmish Organization for Entrepreneurial Creativity and will feature such keynote speakers as Steve Wozniak, Dan Heath, Chris Anderson, Tom Kelly, John Cleese.

This event is defenitiely worth to visit. I plan to be there, too.

TRIZ Future 2008: List of Abstracts

2008-07-15T14:38:00.008+02:00

The list of 58 abstracts provisionally accepted for the conference TRIZ Future 2008 (Nov. 5-7, 2008, Enschede, The Netherlands) is available at:
http://etria.net/portal/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=58&Itemid=38
as well as at the official conference website http://www.trizfuture.net/ .

This year we decided to split the conference papers and posters to four tracks: scientific, educational, practitioner, and case studies. Seems like there are enough interesting papers to be presented in each section.

A final list of accepted papers and posters will be available in the second half of September.

May 2008 TRIZ and Systematic Innovation Newsletter

2008-06-09T14:22:00.004+02:00

Our latest newsletter from May 2008 (in PDF format) was uploaded to:
http://www.xtriz.com/newsletter/newsletterICGTCMay2008.pdf

The issue contains latest news, references to intersting links on TRIZ and innovation, recommended new books, and description of one of the principles of creative innovation: "Continuity".

Matrix 2003: German Edition

2008-06-09T14:00:00.005+02:00

A friend and a TRIZ colleague of mine from Germany, Horst Nahler, recently updated me that they published a German translation of the book "Matrix 2003" by D. Mann, S. Dewulf, B. Zlotin, A. Zusman (originally the book was published in English in 2003). The book introduces an extension to the original Contradiction Matrix developed by G. Altshuller which still remains today one of the most popular TRIZ technqies for beginners. The book costs 30 Euro and is available from:

http://www.c4pi.de/index.php?page=1899844505&f=1&i=1899844505

A Brief History of TRIZ

2008-05-20T19:13:00.001+02:00

As follows from my experience, anyone who starts seriously studying TRIZ and Systematic Innovation, sooner or later starts wondering about a history of TRIZ. Why there are so many tools, what followed what? I constantly get these questions from my "students". Since there was no TRIZ timeline yet presented in English, I wrote an article "A Brief History of TRIZ" which summarizes major steps in the development of TRIZ and Systematic Innovation. The article is freely available at http://www.xtriz.com/publications.htm (top left corner).

In case if someone notices inconsistencies, please let me know.