TRIZ for Social Problems

After the TRIZ Fundamentals course I travelled to Prague to deliver a one-hour keynote talk at the conference on web-based communities within the IADIS 2013 series of conferences. This time my talk concerned application of TRIZ-based approach within social domain. The reaction of audience was very positive, we tried to use some basic TRIZ concepts during the lecture to approach and solve a social problem. We did not expect any breakthrough ideas within such a short time but it seemed like everyone agreed that there is a big potential for further exploring how the key concepts and approach behind TRIZ can be used for social problem solving and social innovation.

TRIZ Fundamentals 2013 finalized

The course "TRIZ Fundamentals 2013" gathered 50 participants this year. It was slightly over the limit but we allowed a greater number of students to register since we expected some last minute cancellations but they did not happen this time.

In addition to 41 B.Sc and M.Sc students we had 9 external guests from industry representing 5 countries.

All the participants were split to 15 groups and each group managed to perform 10 practical assignments. The workload was a bit heavy but at the end of the course everyone looked excited. The following subjects and tools were studied this year:

• TRIZ background and systematic approach to innovation
• Ideality and Ideal Final Results
• Evolution of technology through innovation
• Root Conflict Analysis
• 40 Inventive Principles
• Substance-Field Analysis
• 76 Inventive Standards
• Function Analysis
• Trimming
• Value Conflict Mapping
• Introduction to ARIZ
• Models of Technology Evolution
• Trends and Lines of Technology Evolution

At the end of the course each participant and student obtained a certificate of TRIZ Practitioner Advanced Level.

TRIZ Fundamentals 2013 started

On Monday July 8 started another "full immersion" two-week 80-hour training program TRIZ Fundamentals 2013 at Twente University in Enschede. This time there are 51 participants from 6 countries, including a mix of both university students and working professionals. 15 groups will perform 9 assignments during the course.

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Online Training: TRIZ and Systematic Innovation tools

Since a while I have been running online training in TRIZ and Systematic Innovation. Recently I also added training in specific TRIZ tools for those who would like to study them in more depth than during regular "packaged" training:

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

Updated: TRIZ and Systematic Innovation courses in 2013

PUBLIC COURSES, 2012:
December 12, 2012 Utrecht, Netherlands	One-day public training and certification: Systematic Creative Business Problem Solving
PUBLIC COURSES, 2013:
January 9-11, 2013 Utrecht, Netherlands	3-day public training and certification: Basic TRIZ and Systematic Innovation in Technology and Engineering
February 4-8, 2013 Utrecht, Netherlands	5-day public training and certification: Advanced TRIZ and Systematic Innovation in Technology and Engineering
April 3-5, 2013 Utrecht, Netherlands	3-day public training and certification: Extended RIZ and Systematic Innovation in Business and Management
July 2013 (TBD) Enschede, Netherlands	Two-week (80 hours) Summer Course TRIZ Fundamentals

Chapter about TRIZ and Technology Roadmapping in The Power of Design

My chapter about TRIZ and Technology Roadmapping was published in a new book:

The Power of Design: Product Innovation in Sustainable Energy Technologies

Edited by Angele Reinders, Jan Carel Diehl, Han Brezet

368 pages
November 2012
Wiley
ISBN: 978-1-1183-0867-7

TRIZ Future 2012: Brief Report

Last week I participated at the 12th ETRIA World TRIZ Future Conference in Lisbon, organized jointly by ETRIA, New University of Lisbon, and sponsored by a number of organizations. The conference was chaired by Dr. Cruz Machado and Prof. Helena Navas from the New University of Lisbon, and Dr. Tom Vaneker from ETRIA and the University of Twente.

The event went on October 24-26, 2012. The venue of the conference was at the university campus Caparica, located near the ocean which was really inspiring and provided naturally “fresh” atmosphere.

This time the conference gathered about 90 participants from 27 countries. About 60% of the conference participants represented Europe, 30% Asia Pacific, and 10% other parts of the world, including USA and Australia. The conference featured 4 keynote talks, 2 tutorials, and 60 presentations from 135 authors and co-authors: 28 scientific contributions, 23 practitioner contributions, and 9 short talks. Thanks to the introduction of “short paper” format several years ago, the conference allows short papers to be presented in 10 minutes that extends a number of live presentations at the event. Other papers were presented in a usual, 30 minutes format.

About 50% of the participants represented scientific and research institutions, and about 50% private and industrial organizations.

A full conference program is available. 698-page conference proceedings are available from the organizers. So far it has been the largest volume of the TRIZ Future conference proceedings.

I provided the introductory TRIZ tutorial for the conference participants at the first conference day and later presented a paper on "Functional Value Map" written by my colleagues Ives de Saeger and Kim Rutten.

Social events included the conference dinner, and a dinner with fados, traditional Portuguese style of music and singing. And there was really a lot of informal communication among the conference participants to exchange comments, opinions, ideas, and discussing future collaborations.

The official conference closing was followed by the ETRIA Members meeting where a new President of ETRIA was elected: Prof. Dr. Ir. Joost Duflou, from the K.U. Leuven, Belgium. Many thanks were expressed to Dr. Tom Vaneker, who served as ETRIA President in 2009-2012.

As usual, Ellen Domb, a former editor of the online TRIZ Journal, provided a live coverage of the event with many details, including comments on a number of presentations and keynote talks. See her blog posts about the conference.

The next edition of the conference will be held in Paris, France at the end of October – beginning of November 2013. See the forthcoming news at the ETRIA website.

 

 

 

 

  

 

"TRIZ Future 2012" Preliminary Accepted Presentations

ETRIA Global Conference "TRIZ Future 2012" will be held on October 24-26, 2012 in Lisbon, Portugal.

The list of preliminary accepted presentations:
http://triz.h4u.eu/TFC2012PresentationsPreliminary.pdf
The list of tutorials and keynotes:
http://www.trizportugal.com/keynote-speakers/
I will be running a basic tutorial in the morning during the first conference day.
More information on the conference is available at: http://www.trizportugal.com/

Tools Used Most Frequently With 10 Types of Innovative Tasks

In my previous post I introduced 10 types of Innovative Tasks.

According to numerous requests, I made an overview of tools which are used most frequently within xTRIZ framework to support 10 types of innovative tasks. The overview can be found at:

http://www.xtriz.com/cs/10_InnovativeTasks_ToolsTable.pdf

Note that tasks 5,6 and 9 are not currently fully supported by neither xTRIZ nor TRIZ tools. In addition, several tools mentioned were developed within xTRIZ and have no direct link to classical TRIZ tools. Some tools (Problem Perception Map, Multi-Criteria Decision Matrix) are taken from areas other than TRIZ or xTRIZ. In addition, extra tools from different areas can be used in different projects and they are not mentioned in the table.

Ten Types of Innovative Tasks

I am often asked to help with innovation: in products, technologies, or business services. When I talk to people asking me, I find that rather often they do not realize exactly what kind of innovation they want. But innovative solutions and new ideas can vary significantly and solve different types of tasks. On top of that, to use systematic innovation tools (like TRIZ), we need to know what we want to achieve to select a right process.

Therefore I use my own classification of ten categories of tasks which can be identified:

1. Improve quality of a product, process, or service: e.g. eliminate negative, unwanted and undesired effects, increase robustness.
2. Improve performance of a product, process, or service: e.g. raise performance of positive effects, functions, or other features.
3. Increase “compactness” of a product, process or service: e.g. decrease physical dimensions, process or service time, reduce energy consumption, or eliminate human involvement.
4. Improve ergonomics, usability and use comfort.
5. Improve design, aesthetics, psychological attractiveness.
6. Add new functions or features to existing products, process, services.
7. Create a radically new design (form, shape) of a product.
8. Radically cut either production or total ownership costs of a product, process, or service.
9. Find new application areas for an existing product (technology), process or service.
10. Create a radically new product, technology, process or service.

Some more general tasks like a general innovative improvement of a system, or patent circumvention were not included to this classification since they usually can be decomposed to one of these tasks.

In every area of innovation, a number of solutions in each category grows towards the top of this list. Statistically there are many more innovative solutions improving quality than radically cutting costs, for instance.

The question might arise: are the solutions to the tasks at the bottom of the list address disruptive innovations while solutions to the tasks at the top of the list are incremental? In most cases yes, but not always. Everything depends on a scale of change that should be made to achive a speicifc goal. Sometimes to solve a quality-related problem, for instance, decreasing a number of accidents, a radical change of a basic principle behind a product or a service is needed which results in disruptive innovation.

In addition, according to numerous requests, I made an overview of tools which are used most frequently within xTRIZ framework to support 10 types of innovative tasks. The overview can be found at:

http://www.xtriz.com/cs/10_InnovativeTasks_ToolsTable.pdf

TRIZ Fundamentals 2012: Summary

Another annual course "TRIZ Fundamentals" is over. It was 2-week course which lasted 80 hours in Enschede, the Netherlands organized jointly by the University of Twente and ICG Training & Consulting.

The total class of 34 persons included B.Sc and M.Sc students from the universities of Enschede and Eindhoven, as well as several experienced guests from the US and Indonesian academy and industry. During each course we allow a limited number of external participants to join the course.

These two weeks provided a really "full immersion" TRIZ experience. Although we started each day at 09:00 and were supposed to finish about 18:00, sometimes students were working till 24:00. And our team of instructors was also busy every night with evaluating student works.

In addition to lectures, each day the participants were split to 11 groups, and each group worked on the following assignments with their own selected problems:

• Formulation of Contradictions and Ideal Final Result
• Root-Conflict Analysis (RCA+)
• Contradiction Matrix and Inventive Principles
• Function Analysis and Trimming
• 76 Inventive Standards
• Value-Conflict Mapping
• Functional Evolution
• Evolutionary Potential Analysis and Trends of Technology Evolution.
• Ideas Evaluation and Landscaping

We also spent a day on solving a problem with ARIZ. The problem was proposed by a student, so it was a bit of a challenge.

Last two days the groups were performing a final assignment which included going through a full xTRIZ process: from problem definition to ideas evaluation and landscaping. This assignment included working on real problems, including problems brought by several participants. Some groups still have to finish their final assignments next week - no problem with that.

Each assignment project was evaluated by me, Tom Vaneker, and Wessel Wits every evening, thus in total we had to check over 100 submitted projects. Most of the time the techniques were used correctly, and many novel and exciting ideas were generated. The marks students got were quite high. As a result everyone obtained a certificate of a TRIZ Practitioner; and B.Sc and M.Sc students obtained 3 European Credits.

But for some students it is not over yet. Those who are interested can continue their formal TRIZ education by doing a TRIZ project at an industrial company or by doing a TRIZ-based research project later this year. These activities will be supported by the University of Twente.

I believe that the course went very well, and I am quite sure knowledge learned and skills gained will remain with most of the participants.

"This course changed the view I see the world", said one of the students during a closing discussion. This is the best evaluation of the course I love to hear.

Some video highlights from the course: http://youtu.be/DQum7BG6DTY (you can also watch it in HD quality).

TRIZ & Systematic Innovation Public Courses: Fall 2012

The following public courses and certification will be conducted in the Netherlands in Fall 2012:

• September 5-7, 2012: 3-day TRIZ and Systematic Innovation in Business and Management 
• September 25, 2012: One-day Creative Imagination Development  
• October 3-5, 2012: 3-day Basic TRIZ and Systematic Innovation in Technology and Engineering 
• November 5-9, 2012: 5-day Advanced TRIZ and Systematic Innovation in Technology and Engineering

More details: http://www.xtriz.com/Training/

2012 Summer TRIZ Course at Twente University

Last Monday, on July 9, 2012 started another annual full-immersion TRIZ marathon for two weeks at Twente University in Enschede, The Netherlands. This time students are from the Netherlands, Indonesia, USA. They all say "TRiiiiiiZ" :)

Intermediair on TRIZ

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

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

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.

Video: TRIZ Today

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

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

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