TRIZ for the Real World

The Altshuller Institute www.aitriz.org is the US TRIZ association. The annual meeting TRIZCON2007 is being held this week in Louisville, KY. Joe Miller and I did the beginner tutorial yesterday, while our colleagues Isaac Bukhman, Sergei Ikovenko, and Zinovy Royzen did segments of "advanced" tutorials on psychological inertia, intellectual property, and ARIZ, respectively.

Last year I tried live blogging from the European TRIZ Association meeting and the Mexican TRIZ meetings. A few of the readers of this column appreciated it. Good news is there is a live blog from TRIZCON -- and better news is that I don't have to do the work! Katie Barry, editor of the TRIZ Journal, is posting her impressions at
http://www.triz-journal.com/commentary/

There are a small number of excellent papers (which we will be getting permission to reprint.)
The entertainment feature tomorrow will be my paper on the 10th anniversary of the TRIZ Journal, showing how we used TRIZ concepts to solve the problems that resulted in the creation and development of the TRIZ Journal. My overall reaction to the meeting is that we need many more REAL TRIZ users and many fewer consultants giving papers. We continue to have abysmal participation by the academic community, too.

Readers: any ideas why the European, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwan meetings have much stronger industry participation? And the China, Mexico, Europe and Korea meetings have much stronger academic participation?