Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Day 1 morning, ETRIA in Paris
The European TRIZ Association meeting, TRIZ FUTURES
CONFERENCE 2013, started Oct 28 with 2 tutorial sessions. As usual, this is a personal report, so
you’ll only read about sessions I was actually in—for the rest, see the
proceedings. http://www.etria.net I
missed the tutorials because of flight arrangements, but got to Paris in time
for the opening reception. It was great
to see old friends and meet new people.
The TRIZ community is expanding! Many photos will be posted on the conference site and the Facebook page, so I'll concentrate on the discussions and presentations.
The morning of Oct. 29 we were welcomed to the conference,
to university, and to Paris. Paris Tech – Arts et Metiers is over 200 years
old, and combines the historical view of engineering as art and engineering as
“genius” in their approach to education.
ETRIA President Joost
Dufluor welcomed all participants, with
particular note of the delegations from
Japan and Korea, and other
distant visitors, and he extended thanks to all the organizers and their
employers for all the time and energy of
organizing and managing TFC 2013.
The local committee from TRIZ France announced new
relationships including Switzerland and other French speaking countries and a
new relationship between TRIZ France and KATA (Korea).
Denis Cavallucci and Marc Trela (the chairs of the
committees) reviewed the preparations—119 abstracts eventually resulted in a
70% acceptance rate, and the schedule has expanded to accommodate all the
papers, in “professional” and “scientific” sessions.
The opening keynote speaker is Se-Hyun Kim - President of the Korea Academic
TRIZ Association and Senior VP of POSCO (and veteran of 24 years at
Samsung.) He started with a brief intro
to POSCO, 5th largest steel company in the world, but “most
competitive” and “most admired” in recent surveys by metal industries
organizations. POSCO’s concept of “smart
innovation” includes Toyota’s biomimetics approach, Steve Jobs’s creativity
based on convergence of art and technology.
POSCO challenges the blue ocean and nurtures creativity by using
TRIZ. “Creativity comes from
insight. Insight comes from
observation” is the motto on the Poreka
(Posco +eureka) room. Korean folk
stories are full of stories of innovation based on observation and insight,
charmingly explained by Mr. Kim.
He then
gave us impressive statistics about the TRIZ efforts, including increasing
numbers of patents, projects, and development of the internal databases that
help subsequent projects. TRIZ is
being hybridized with Six Sigma and FMEA, and with the 36 principles of the Art
of War strategy. PTA is the POSCO TRIZ
Association which involves 10 companies from the POSCO family, and sponsors
workshops and mutual growth. POSCO is
also promoting TRIZ to SME’s and educational institutions (TRIZ summer camp
sounds great!) They have an internal
conference annually as well as participating in MATRIZ, KATA, and ETRIA and
other associations.
Mr. Kim
reviewed the history of TRIZ in Korea, starting with Samsung’s work with
Russian experts starting in 2001, expanding through education and software
(I-SPARK in 2006) and propagation through projects and involvement of their
supplier community. The future is the
expansion of TRIZ to all activities, and specific challenges to application of
TRIZ in Software development.
Korean
universities, Postech, Hanyang, Korea Polytechnic, and KIT, have TRIZ classes
and outreach to local companies and programs for professors. KATA sponsors industry-academic knowledge sharing with 30 companies and 29
academic members, and is the host of the Global TRIZCON every summer and the
Korea TRIZ Festival each winter. Their
new activities this year focus on social applications of TRIZ (combating violence, increasing creativity.)
For the
rest of the day I was back and forth between the 2 sessions. Alexis Bultey
presented “ A proposal of a systematic
and consistent Substance-Field Analysis” with the goal of resolving conflicts between
different methods of use of the 76
standard solutions and different Su-Field terminology, which result in limited
use of TRIZ in industry. The development team started with a TRIZ expert
team and TRIZ historical references both by Altshuller and from TRIZ Journal
articles, then developed the modeling method using knowledge management
methodologies to remove conflicts in definitions and logic, resulting in a
“formal ontology” which was then processed to create and “operational ontology”
which became the basis for a computer-based system. Both measurement and product-type Su-field
models were included. Eight sets of rules
were developed, which were familiar as groups of the 76 standards, but were
described with a standard vocabulary.
Claudia
Hentschel used Horst Nadler as a simulated elderly person to demonstrate the
need to understand the interactions between the user and the system as part of
“Design thinking as a door-opener for TRIZ – paving the way for systematic
innovation.” She then had the audience
make paper models of their solutions and the customer reply with “I like” and
“I wish” about the candidate solutions.
This was a demonstration of the Self-Immersion method of design
thinking. Dr. Hentshcel proposed that
the usability issues and visionary
issues of the design can create TRIZ
challenges when merged with the technological challenges. This approach has created new appeal for
TRIZ in business and academic communities that had originally rejected TRIZ as
too complex, too hard to learn, etc.
Q&A featured the interaction of TRIZ with design, especially with
design going beyond ideality while TRIZ returns the designer to practical
ideality that can be implemented.
Bohuslav
Busov presented the case study “TRIZ used for improvement of active hinge of
the car bonnet.” The project was developed to meet the requirements for
pedestrian survival resulting from recent auto industry requirement
development. The active hinge must lift
up to prevent the head of the pedestrian from hitting the rigid parts of the
engine. Current solutions are both
complex and expensive. Initial analysis
produced a list of principles to apply, but the limitation of people’s design
experience and abstract thinking capability suggested that they should
re-evaluate the problem from the point of view of the physical contradiction,
between the simple, passive hinge and the complex, active hinge. The solution was found in the “scientific
effects” index – redesigning the dynamic element as part of the short arm of
the hinge, using a much simpler actuator.
This explanation relies on pictures of the old and new hinges—I
encourage readers to see the full case study to appreciate the multiple levels
of TRIZ that were used to create this
new and much more elegant solution to saving pedestrian lives. The audience was very interested and the
speaker noted that his English would improve after one or two beers…
Bernard
Monnier introduced R2B (Research to
business) as one phase of B2C (business to customer) . He proposes that open innovation is the
solution to increasing complexity in a world of decreasing financial support
for development of new systems.
Complementary functions have been provided by suppliers, mixing external
R&D with corporate systems for much of the recent past, but the corporate
partners have frequently benefited more than the SME contributors. A “creativity space” between research and
development makes it possible for the benefits to be equalized and the process
accelerated since both partners benefit from better management of the
development process.
I ran back
to the other room for Pascal Sire’s “How to leverage the knowledge spiral and
creative meta-rules to train on TRIZ thinking while rescuing the sinking
Titanic?” A wide variety of games and simulations were developed for students
and teachers with a great variety of backgrounds. One challenge is to create a method of
measuring the effectiveness of these game-type training methods, and he
recognized the difficulty of developing
the method while using it. A short-term
measure is that the students and teachers are both embracing the system.
To be continued after lunch...
