TRIZ Future 2006 is over

The 5th ETRIA Conference TRIZ Future 2006 in Kortrijk, Belgium is over. In total, 120 participants from 27 countries (including Australia, Brasil, Japan, Korea, USA, Taiwan) visited the conference. If to express my impressions about the conference in one sentence: both many of the papers presented and Belgian culinary delights were definitely matching each other! I also enjoyed numerous discussions with many of the conference participants. But as a result I lost my voice and must recover it by Monday.

I wanted to comment on the conference but there is no need for that: Ellen Domb (The TRIZ Journal Editor) provided live coverage from the conference in her blog; so anyone interested can find rather detailed information about the conference stream there.

And some photos from the conference are available at: http://www.xtriz.com/img/TFC2006/

It was six years ago in 2000 when me, Pavel Livotov, Denis Cavalucci and Darrell Mann founded ETRIA. And now it is great to see that the Association is growing to a large global professional network of TRIZ users, developers, and researchers.

Can TRIZ solve any problem?

Can TRIZ solve any problem? This is the question that I hear very often. Sometimes it is asked by people who were not experienced in TRIZ but ordered TRIZ services and were unhappy with the results; and complained that a TRIZ service supplier who worked with them had mentioned that TRIZ could solve any problem. And I believe these unhappy customers are right with their complaints. In fact, my answer to this question is pretty straightforward: TRIZ can not solve any problem since TRIZ does not solve problems. Problems are solved by people while TRIZ is a method which supports problem solving process by introducing rules and guidelines indicating how to transform a problem to a solution. Can a computer solve a difficult math problem? Not at all, unless it is equipped with a proper software package that can process input data and generate output data. In both cases - TRIZ and the computer are tools, or platforms which organize and support the process. Being "equipped" with TRIZ, a person solves a problem. But software itself cannot solve the math problem without hardware. Similarly, TRIZ is an ingredient of a more extended problem solving framework, which usually involves different knowledge sources - from an owner of the problem to external experts who possess knowledge necessary to interpret an abstract solution idea produced with the help of TRIZ.
The bottom line: with TRIZ, any problem which can be solved, can be solved. But not by TRIZ.

Google trends: search for TRIZ

When trying to explore at www.google.com/trends who most actively searches for the word "TRIZ" at Google, the following results appeared:

No signs of Europe or US except Austria. Seems like Austrian TRIZ Zentrum does a good job to promote TRIZ. And one more chart - results for "innovation":

Singapore and Malaysia - most innovative places in the world?

TRIZ Case Studies Book: Call for Papers

During recent discussions with numerous people, it became obviuos that we need a book presenting a collection of real TRIZ case studies. An independent editors team was formed (thanks Ellen Domb, Marco Aurelio de Carvalho, Hongyul Yoon for joining). The book will be available as a e-book for free. Therefore we invite all interested authors to submit their papers or express their intention to write a paper. The call for papers is available at http://www.xtriz.com/TRIZCaseStudiesCallForPapers.pdf