TRIZ Café on November 11, 2009: Full of Energy

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

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.

Creativity World Forum in Antwerpen

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.

OTSM-TRIZ for Kids: Learning Power Thinking

Last Thursday and Friday, we run a workshop "TRIZ for Kids" led by Nikolai Khomenko in The Hague. The workshop was targeted at parents and teachers interested in incorporating OTSM-TRIZ components to improve kids education. It was certainly an inspirational event. Nikolai has been involved to developing educational programs on the basis of OTSM-TRIZ for kids during last 20 years, and certainly two days were just barely enough to cover some parts of the programs. For those who never met the term before, "OTSM" is a Russian abbreviation which stands for the "General Theory of Power Thinking" developed by Nikolai together with Genrich Altshuller, a founder of TRIZ. However unlike TRIZ, OTSM is not restricted to specific areas like technology or business since it targets at studying and uncovering a generic process of creative and innovative thinking regardless any specific area.

First, Nikolai introduced OTSM-TRIZ approach to kids education and developing thinking skills. The remaining and the largest part of the workshop was dedicated to interactive sessions on the basis of "Yes-No" games: teaching how to play the games (finding right answers as quickly as possible) using OTSM-TRIZ to ask right questions. This approach is based on several techniques: "thinking dichotomy" to narrow a possible search space; learning how to make "abstract-specific" thinking transitions to reformulate situations; and recognizing contradictions to construct exact questions. We also explored different types of "Yes-No" games, and a method for creating our own games. All the participants were enthusiastically involved to the process. Needless to say, they found that the method is not only useful for kids, and even if it can be played with kids of age as early as 3-4, we all can benefit from it.

The workshop was followed by a discussion how the material learned can be put to local educational systems and what next steps can be undertaken. We are really looking forward to new workshops in the nearest future.

Nikolai Khomenko explains the basics

During sessions

During creative breaks

Kids were with us, too.

March 2008 TRIZ Newsletter

Our March 2008 TRIZ and Systematic Innovation newsletter is available at
http://www.xtriz.com/newsletter/newsletterICGTCMarch2008.pdf

In the newsletter: forthcoming courses and conferences, interesting links, recommended books, and the "principle of integration", one of 29 principles for creative innovation.

Creative Problem Solving: Four Types of Thinking

Being involved for a long time as a TRIZ trainer and facilitator, I’ve had a great chance to meet many different creative personalities. This certainly enriched my life, and I also noticed that there are two major dimensions along which a creative thought is developed, regardless if people use TRIZ or not: a) from specific to abstract and b) from chaotic to structured. Of course, there are no clear borders between different types of thinking and there can not be, but we can clearly see dominance of one or another type of thinking. What does this mean? Below I try to explain this concept by illustrating it with the following problem: I am a very slow coffee drinker, which means that coffee in my cup gets cold too quick and its taste degrades. What can be done? Now, to four type of thinking dominance in creative problem solving:

1. Chaotic and Specific: we try to solve a problem by simply guessing what a solution can be. This is the trials and errors method in its full extent. Might be good for problems of low-level difficulty but how many trials we should make to solve problems of high levels of difficulty? This is like playing in a casino. We have a chance, but its probability is low. So what are we going to do to have our coffee warm as long as possible? We might quickly jump to solutions without much analytical thinking: for instance, put a lid on a cup, insert a radioactive element to the cup which will warm up coffee, or simply stop drinking coffee to avoid experiencing discomfort…



2. Specific and Abstract: We use guidance by the methods which help us to diverge to break mental inertia or associate our problem with some already known solution but residing in a different area. For instance, we might use lateral thinking, or we might have to search for analogy. I noticed that outstanding inventors read a lot of different literature and have ability which I call “hunger for knowledge”. This “hunger” helps to establish an analogy between seemingly unrelated things. By visiting houses of such inventors I was always impressed by sizes and diversity of their libraries: from history of theater to quantum mechanics. Do you know that Voltaire (1694-1788) had a library of over 6.000 books? He was not just a bibliophile; his handwritten comments can be found in more than 2.000 books. A library of Thomas Edison counted 10.000 books. Now, how do we apply analogy to our coffee problem? To keep meals warm, Chinese use a pad with a flame. Why not to use a flame pad for warming up coffee? Or, similarly to arctic igloos which use ice blocks for thermal insulation, we can put a floating foam-plastic pad with a hole for drinking on the surface of coffee; or to make a cup from porous thick material with a drinking hole. Solving problems by analogy is a very powerful method, but how to find a right analogy? This might be troublesome.



3. Specific and Structured: this is where logical thinking comes to play. We use logic to analyze why a problem is happening, what causes the problem; and assume that the deeper we understand the problem, the higher chance we will have to solve it. This won’t necessarily provide us with solutions (although it many situations it will) but at least give us a better insight to what forms the problem. This way of thinking is often attributed to scientific approach: first, understand the problem and then solve it. But what to do if understanding of the problem’s causes does not give us insight on what a solution can be? Still, understanding the problem is very important. Example: At this level we try to understand why coffee gets cold. Why? Because it has a contact with air which has much lower temperature. Thus there is heat and mass transfer which goes too fast in order to establish a thermodynamic balance. So the question will be how to slow down the heat transfer? Probably, by warming the air, and so forth.



4. Abstract and Structured: This is where we not only use logic to understand the roots of a problem but also use universal abstract patterns which can solve the problem. This is the most effective way to solve creative problems. But what are these abstract patterns? In my opinion, they are aggregation of many different analogies, which we can observe in technology, biology, social life. They are exactly what Altshuller and TRIZ researches have identified by studying vast massive of creative and innovative solutions. Altshuller also noted that outstanding inventors use 5-7 patterns which they discover due their lifetime. Example: Let us use a pattern which is known in TRIZ as “inventive standard 1-2-2: If there is a harmful effect of interaction of two objects, then introduce another object between them, which is a modification of either of the objects”. Modification can be seen in a broad sense: it can be a different phase state, physical state, chemical state… Why not to use foamed coffee, for instance? If we make a nice foam layer of coffee on top of liquid coffee (crema), it will have low thermal conductivity and prevent coffee from getting cold too fast. My espresso coffee machine uses exactly this solution, and I am happy with it. Advantage of TRIZ is that it identified many such abstract patterns: inventive principles, inventive standards, patterns of system evolution. It is impossible to say that TRIZ has a comprehensive set of patterns, but its set of patterns helps to solve many difficult problems.
   

This diagram also shows evolution of human thinking: from chaotic and specific to abstract and structured. I often hear that to come up with creative ideas, we need to unstructure our thinking. I can’t completely agree with that. We need to unstructure our thinking only when we do not have a more powerful method of thinking. But combining analytical logic and knowledge of universal patterns of solutions, we get much stronger instrument for solving creative problems.

xTRIZ May 2007 Newsletter is Available

May 2007 Newsletter is available. It presents new dates for Fall 2007 training in TRIZ, Sysematic Innovation, Creative Imagination Development, as well as information about forthcoming TRIZ conferences, new interesting books, and collection of links.

The newsleeter is available at http://xtriz.com/newsletter/newsletter052007.htm