Wednesday, October 11, 2006
TRIZ in Belgium Wednesday Morning
The practioner session at ETRIA had several changes of program. This conference continues to suffer from speakers who withdraw after their papers are planned into the program. I was particularly disappointed by the disappearance of Darrell Mann whose papers are always provocative, and Sergei Ikovenko, whose papers are always challenging to the audience.
Ian Mitchell—familiar to many readers from his pioneering work at Ilford, is now working for Invention Machine Co. No surprise that his paper was on the benefits of semantic search to TRIZ, but quite a bit too much emphasis on the brand name product, rather than the general concepts.
Karel Bolckmans presented the paper written by Boris Zlotin and Alla Zusman, who were prevented from travel by a minor health problem. They took the general concept of Directed Evolution (their “brand” for technology evolution) and applied it to the future of personal electronic communication devices.
Jan Waitzenböck from DTV in Norway presented a refreshingly comprehensive and real case study on the development of new corrosion protection concepts for ship building. He followed Darrell Mann’s method from Hands On Systematic Innovation quite closely, so other users of that book will find this a very useful illustration. The polymer film method that they developed has excellent performance and also has the potential for adding more functionality.
The “scientific” session featured papers by Denis Cavallucci on his extensive project to structure knowledge for use in complex problems and by Maarten Bonnema and Daniel Klunder on TRIZ for systems and software architecture. I look forward to future conferences to see the applications of these formal systems in applications.
