Thursday, October 07, 2010
TRIZCON and National Innovation Conference, late morning day 1
Deborah Westphal from Toffler Associates asked us to take a trip to 50,000 feet to see global innovation. She set a high bar: challenge our thinking about the future of innovation, broaden our perspectives, and learn from what we are doing, specifically looking at product innovation.
Her definition of the revolutionary nature of change got us to look back at transitions between the agrarian economy to the industrial economy to our knowledge economy to benefit from differences and from similiarities with previous changes. I predict that her metric of "cost - per - idea - transferred" will be useful in a lot of ways.
So far, a persistent theme of the conference is hybridization, and Deborah's version of this is "it is all about the AND" - - medicine AND robotics, people AND technology, technology AND culture. I'm not sure I agree with her claim that university multidisciplinary programs will advance this trend (maybe it follows the trend?) Likewise I question her emphasis on countries' innovation initiatives, but her questions got a lot of discussion started.
I'll be the first after - lunch speaker in the Innovation & Creativity program, talking about the relationships between TRIZ and many of the other innovation systems/tools/methods. Either send an e-mail or put a note in the "comments" column if you want the presentation.
Her definition of the revolutionary nature of change got us to look back at transitions between the agrarian economy to the industrial economy to our knowledge economy to benefit from differences and from similiarities with previous changes. I predict that her metric of "cost - per - idea - transferred" will be useful in a lot of ways.
So far, a persistent theme of the conference is hybridization, and Deborah's version of this is "it is all about the AND" - - medicine AND robotics, people AND technology, technology AND culture. I'm not sure I agree with her claim that university multidisciplinary programs will advance this trend (maybe it follows the trend?) Likewise I question her emphasis on countries' innovation initiatives, but her questions got a lot of discussion started.
I'll be the first after - lunch speaker in the Innovation & Creativity program, talking about the relationships between TRIZ and many of the other innovation systems/tools/methods. Either send an e-mail or put a note in the "comments" column if you want the presentation.
