TRIZ for the Real World

http://www.facebook.com/pages/TFC2011/252803378101325?sk=wall for photos, thanks to Jeongho Shin, who established the page and invited all participants to post pictures and rememberances of the conference.

Eddie Commins (ooops, Dr. Eddie Commins, manager of the applied innovation department of Enterprise Ireland) did a great keynote talk—really establishing key points about innovation as a systematic process, for organizations, putting the TRIZ elements of innovation into the context of culture, strategy, and leadership.

Ayano Sato started the practioners’ session with her research on “Considering user’s Kando for Conceptual Design on CDSS” (Kando describes several aspects of customer satisfaction/ experience/ emotional reaction. The techniques looked like some that I had seen in Kansei engineering. Sato explained that Kansei deals with a large spectrum of emotions, and Kando is one particular emotional response, particularly related to the customer's willingness to share his experience.

Jens Hammer discussed “Systematic Innovation and Identification of ideas in Siemens.” He showed the training and workshop system, and an example of a workshop that created more than 50 alternate solutions to a specific design problem. The expert participants in the workshop select the ones that they want to develop further, and they frequently become interested in TRIZ as a result of participating in the workshop.

Jeongho Shin did a delightful presentation about the 16 year history of TRIZ at LG, the first company to adopt TRIZ in Korea. He offered us 3 gifts

1. SCM Simple contradiction model diagram, based on ARIZ, that quickly identifies both physical and technical contradiction. His examples were from real teams dealing with everything from sound/vibration to refrigerator design to team behavior improvement.

2. SCM case studies

3. Contradiction Song – for learning 8 of the 40 principles in Korean, Japanese and English—we all sang along and then applauded the video of his children! http://e-triz.com/blog/?page_id=2



My talk (co-authored by Ralph Czerepinski and Joe Miller—many thanks!) about teaching from the learners’ point of view, using the TRIZ concepts of resources as an example, got lots of audience interest, particularly the story about the use of both physical and knowledge resources to create the new growth plan for the city of Payson AZ (see the full story at http://trizrealworld.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html ) I was very grateful for Robert Adunka’s comment that he had taken some of the learner-focused teaching elements from earlier papers and applied them to his teaching TRIZ at Siemens, to very good effect.

Barbara Gronauer gave us her perspective on how to avoid resistance to TRIZ projects, incorporating current research on organizational psychology and on success factors for innovation. Her application of 9 windows to reveal the reasons for employee fears of the changes that a new technology would cause was very useful, and her example of use of function modeling to describe the relationships between people was equally revealing. She catalogued the 8 System Laws of human interactions and showed how ignoring these laws will cause resistance.

Pavel Jirman and Bohuslav Busov concluded the session with “how to improve the evaluation of exhibits with TRIZ” He started with realistically complex function analysis of turbocharger systems and subsystems, then challenged us to think about a much less technically complex system, such as the exhibits at an international engineering fair (which has a gold medal for best exhibit, which should be a high prestige award in Brno, but had fallen into low regard.) This required creating a new concept for the criteria for evaluation. Cause-effect analysis of the low prestige revealed both real and false contradictions, which were addressed by treatment as both physical and technical contradictions. This was an excellent case study for application of TRIZ to a business/management system, and it will be very helpful to other people, since it was so easy to understand.

Wei Yan from INSA-Strasbourg presented “ A Method Of Facilitating Inventive Design based on Semantic Similarity and Case-Based Reasoning. “ She described the problem of semantic inconsistency between parameters that are specific to elements of a problem and the generic parameters of the contradiction matrix. Semantic analysis methods that cannot be summarized in this format (highly mathematical models) were applied to a set of electronics industry cases. 200 users per year are providing data on the usability of the method.

Tiziano Montecchi from the University of Bergamo presented a set of digrams used to analyze a system to support patent search for exploring future development opportunities. The complexity of system description becomes apparent from some well-defined case studies, such as the sterilization of contact lenses (but very few of the patents actually use the word “sterilize.”) For example “parameter” can have any of 3 meanings (description of a relationship between 2 things, description of the state of one thing, or description of the behavior of that thing. Searching for technology transfer opportunities is even more stressing, because of the need to do the semantic process outside the area of the researcher’s familiarity. “Abstraction of the object” is easy to say but very hard to do.

The difficult position of last paper of the conference went to Victor Berdonosov, discussing the TRIZ evolution map of programming systems, then generalizing from that. He finds that the TRIZ logical system is a basis for systemization of knowledge.

Pat Coman and Tom Vaneker brought the conference to a conclusion, and received the thanks of all the delegates.