Master Class: Using TRIZ for Business and Management to Increase Business Competitiveness

On May 26 in Minsk, Belarus, I run an open master class on applying TRIZ for Business and Management to innovatively increase business competitiveness. The audience (about 40 participants) was very enthusiastic and seemed to accept the material rather well!

During the class I explained the basic concepts of TRIZ, how they have been adapted to business and management, and how the TRIZ approach to solving non-standard problems can be used within the business and management context to drastically shorten problem solving time and increase quality of new ideas and solutions.

During the last hour we took a challenge from the class to run a case. One of the participants explained a problem his company faced in the past. The group started to apply TRIZ and a number of solution directions were proposed by the participants. The problem owner was fascinated to see how the group managed to find a successful solution within 15 minutes while he spent half a year to come up with the same solution.

Thanks Alexander Sorokoumoff, Julia Sushkova, and Startup Technologies Ltd. for organizing and hosting the event.

A more extended 3-day hands-on course on TRIZ for Business and Management is scheduled for July 29-31 in Minsk: http://www.xtriz.com/Training/TRIZBM_3Days_ru.htm (all in Russian)

Workshop on ZIRT: Reverse TRIZ for Innovation-Based Marketing

On May 14 I delivered the workshop "Innovation-Based Marketing" under the roof of TIAS Business School at Brainport Development in Eindhoven  for a group of CEOs and owners of high-tech companies targeted at growth as next OEM. If TRIZ focuses on finding a solution to a problem, ZIRT (guess what is in the name?) focuses on finding problems to a solution. Once a company developed and commercialized an innovative technology, the question emerges: where else the technology can be used?

A subject of special interest are application areas which reside far away from the original application area the technology was designed for. I have been involved to the development of ZIRT due to numerous requests of my customer. At the workshop in Eindhoven ZIRT approach helped two companies to discover a number of new and unexpected application domains for their technologies which can lead to developing new products for the mass market.

More workshop for other companies participating in the program are scheduled.

Authors of TRIZFest 2014 in Prague

The full list of authors whose paper abstracts were accepted for preparing full papers for TRIZFest 2014 Conference to be held  in Prague, Czech Republic on September 4-6, 2014 is available at http://matriz.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/TRIZfest-2014-Accepted-Authors-Eng.pdf