Thursday, October 31, 2013
Day 2 European TRIZ Association Paris Meeting
The Wednesday program began with Denis Cavallucci (Past
President of both ETRIA and TRIZFrance) introducing Dr. Ing. Mihai
SOCOLIUC - Head of Scientific Communities at PSA Peugeot-Citroën, and recalling
the role of the company in starting TRIZ activities in France. Dr. Socoliuc introduced the history of the
company, starting with Peugeot as a metallurgy company in 1810, with many
technological and scientific innovations.
The science activities of the company are now organized to emphasize
energy, mechanics, and fluidics, with major work in human factors and
interactive simulation. “OpenLabs” emphasize open innovation and partnerships
with other organizations—one in Marseilles for motion and in Bordeaux for
energy, and others around France for design, fluidics, etc.
Dr. Socoluic then surprised the audience with his
challenge to us—after 14 years of pioneering work with TRIZ, it is still not
part of the daily life at PSA Peugeot-Citroen.
He asked the audience 10 questions about how to re-birth the excitement
of TRIZ in all the OpenLabs, which resulted in a vigorous dialog and multi-log
with the audience.
The morning program continued
with 3 plenary sessions chaired by Paul Filmore. Paul-Armand
Verhaegen from the University of Leuven, presented “Organism
Aspects for systematic BID” which we
would call biomimetics. They have
developed extensive algorithms and adapted technology from text mining to
filtering biological data to identify the aspects of organisms that are
applicable to other kinds of problem solving.
These algorithms are very tolerant of high-noise situations. Paul gave a live demonstration of using the
databases to find a list of organisms to study for a particular display problem
(swallowtail butterflies, strawberry poison frogs and Steller’s jay were the
top candidates.)
Giacomo
Bersano presented a joint French-Italian project “Supporting
ECO-innovation in SMEs by TRIZ Eco-guidelines.” Impressive results—companies generated
savings of 10-15x the money spent on training and workshops through improved
design incorporating the Eco-guidelines.
A simplified fast method designed to appeal to the SME companies was
tested with diverse companies (electronics, chemicals, machine tools, home
appliances,) and the assessment of the usefulness of the method was based on
life cycle analysis of the designs, not on the opinions of the SMEs or the
researchers. Reduction of weight and
power by 20% each and increase of re-usable parts by 50% are all impressive results!
The TRIZ emphasis was on ideality,
particularly full use of resources, and understanding why resources had not
been fully used in the older designs.
The session concluded with a
Samsung Electronics case study “Enhanced Unlatched Operation of Hard Disk
Drive” presented by Kyoung-Whan Oh.
He emphasized the primary role of ideality in developing and improving
the design. See the proceedings for a
pictorial explanation of the damage mechanism and the flux patterns for the
magnetic fields in the conventional design of hard disk head and disk. 3% of drives showed unlatch failure at low
temperature—with 5 million units a month produced, this kind of failure is
intolerable. Mr. Oh did a very thorough
job of defining the physical and technical contradictions of the latched and
unlatched states, and the practical limits of the time that each change would
take vs. the time available until product launch. Using
resources already in the system (especially using compression of a
rubber part as a source of energy!) made it possible to make the correction
without redesign and without delay to product launch. The insights came from su-field modeling,
“smart little people” modeling, detailed resource listing, and in later
iterations principles 9 and 14. The
audience appreciation was very visible.
I was
the chair of the case study session, so I was unable to take notes – 4 case
studies with different lessons but one theme: TRIZ works! See the proceedings for full reports, and
for reports on the parallel sessions.
Michel Chaux from Michelin
was the afternoon keynote
speaker. He told us about Michelin’s 4
innovation strategies:
1.
Inova Go,
spontaneous, individual idea generation
2.
Innov’Up, open challenges, both inside the
company and outside
3.
Creativity events, which require strong
preparation and experienced facilitator
4.
TRIZ, with supporting training and facilitation.
Europe, Japan, and US Michelin centers have the same basic
facilitator training, but each group is encouraged to modify their methods to
respect and take advantage of local culture.
Goodwin
Ekong, reported on the plans to use TRIZ
for airport management in Nigeria
Petr
Lepsik from the Czech Republic presented “Increasing of car seat safety using TRIZplus –
FOS Method” FOS is function oriented search, and adds depth to
the general TRIZ approach of looking outside the previous science and
technology.
Prof. Kyeongwon Lee from Korea Polytechnic
University presented both good and bad experiences with the propagation of TRIZ
into industry, and strategies based on lessons learned. In the early stage of deployment, LG
introduced TRIZ in 1996, and in 1996-2004 there were experiences of “overexaggeration” and expensive, un-workable proposed solutions
and overtones of Russian mysticism which were
in conflict with Korean engineering culture. In addition, both companies and universities
experimented with software such as TechOptimizer, Goldfire, and IWB, with
disappointing results (my comment:
because they just had software without real understanding of TRIZ!) TRIZ disappeared in Korea, and started to
re-emerge after 2004. Samsung’s TRIZ
system is well known, starting with cost reduction and using their own success
to move the method into all aspects of creativity. Hyundai incorporated TRIZ into Six Sigma, and
is experiencing growing world-wide recognition for creativity.
Prof. Lee’s conclusions are
1.
The TRIZ users must understand the problem model and
contradictions and work with tools from other methods to develop practical,
fast solutions, rather than to emphasize learning many different tools.
2.
TRIZ proponents should avoid criticizing Six Sigma and other methods
that have had demonstrated success.
3.
Use my flow chart (he had the version from the TRIZ journal ) as a
starting point, to be modified for each company, with the emphasis on getting
early success on pilot projects that are meaningful to the company, and which
can be used by those who become TRIZ trainers as culturally-suitable
examples. Prof. Kim gave particular
attention to the idea that people, even at the very beginning of TRIZ study,
should solve their own problems rather than have the TRIZ experts solve
problems for them.
4.
Pay attention to the company hierarchy—recruit support for projects
using the technical experts, their bosses, and their budgeting process.
5.
Universities need standard textbooks and standard methods in order to
incorporate TRIZ into their curricula.
The disagreements between TRIZ experts cause the professors to avoid
TRIZ.
He concluded by inviting
us to the 5th Global TRIZCON, July 8-10, 2014 in Korea. The audience was most appreciative of the
examination of failures, and Prof. Lee’s extraction of lessons from the
failures.
Ido Lapidot, the TRIZ advocate for Intel in Israel entertained AND educated the
group with “TRIZ is mostly dead, but mostly dead is partly alive.” His talk was inspired by a Google Trend
search on TRIZ, which shows a severe decline (allowing for countries where
Google lacks coverage.) He compared the
TRIZ trend to the Kodak history and the Crocs shoes history, and finally a
search for innovation and problem solving.
Six Sigma is declining, Lean is noisy and rising. Crowdsourcing is on a steeper rise than
open innovation, which is also rising.
Network analysis of the genes and memes
was used to look at the survivability of TRIZ (which is a meme-plex.) Adding complexity makes the system more stable
and thus more survivable but also makes it more complex and intimidating to
newcomers.
BUT because TRIZ is small
it can still grow! TRIZ should be
simplified, use open TRIZ innovation, make it cheap and easy to get started,
ride the wave of crowdsourcing.
Finally, Lapidot proposes that we do new TRIZ research, using modern
search tools, to create solutions databases for software, for biotech, for
communications.
“Application of Substance-Field Analysis for Failure
Analysis” was presented by Ann Belski.
Briefly, an auxiliary field FA is introduced in each of the
relationships in the Su-Field model, and is hypothesized to cause failure in
the system. Then a real scenario is
developed that would create the failure situation. Finally, another Su-Field analysis is done to
find a way to overcome the failure mode.
Case study examples made the model very appealing—Ms. Belski showed a
complex Su-field model for a ship sinking in the ocean and a wiper blade switch
failure in an automotive application.
In the latter case, the engineers went from 4 possible failures to more
than 30, greatly increasing their opportunity of finding the actual cause. The Singapore/Dutch challenge to world-wide
students for minimizing turbidity created during backhoe dredging. Her Su-field model showed deep technical
knowledge of the dredging process, and the auxiliary fields gave a strong set
of solutions (not implemented because of cost, but showing promise for the
future.)
Minsoo Kim from Samsung Display addressed “Group
Creativity plus TRIZ.” He modeled TRIZ
classically as 1) analysis to develop the problem understanding and 2)problem
solving to develop solution ideas. He
reviewed the TRIZ training system, and highlighted the need for group
processes, as well as TRIZ knowledge, for people to solve complex problems. He used the model from “The Medici Effect” to
suggest that multiple experts, each expert in his/her own field, will stimulate
creativity for each other and the
group. A long-life, big, bright, low-weight display
was a good example of group creativity, calling on multiple experts, using the
intersection method—improving the intersection between the subsystems to give
direction to the full project.
Gala dinner in Paris! The group enjoyed a boat tour of the Seine
River, starting from the base of the Eiffel tower, and cruising past many historic and artistic
monuments. Great food, great wine,
great company, great talk! (And why the
day 2 blog is being posted on day 3)
