Thursday, October 31, 2013

 

Day 3 ETRIA TFC in Paris: Wow!

The plenary speaker for day 3 at ETRIA TFC Paris is Professor Serge Tichkiewitch, President of EMIRAcle (European Manufacturing and Innovation Research Association), who was introduced by Denis Cavallucci as one of the primary champions for the recognition of TRIZ in Europe.   Prof. Tichkiewitch spoke on 3 topics

1.       ResEUr, an online course for development of entrepreneurs

2.      The “valley of death” – barriers to acceptance of innovation

3.      Cross cutting issues for industrial innovation

He concluded with challenges to take advantage of the publicly supported programs, and to overcome the weaknesses of lack of focus, emphasis on current technology, and psychological and historical resistance to risk.   The partnerships between research, government and industry of EMIRAcle are aimed at developing the strengths of these systems and overcoming the weaknesses. 

“TRIZ education using Pictographs and Music” by Jeongho Shin demonstrated his approach to finding an engaging starting point for TRIZ for children and adults, as well as his own entrepreneurial journey from conventional TRIZ in LG to the music and art world.  The clarity of the simple examples (with design help from his young children to keep the pictographs meaningful, clear and simple) were impressive.   Segmentation—pictograph cards for adults have words, the ones for kids have charming cartoons.   They were tested at the National (Korean) Science Museum recently with 200 children in 30 minutes sessions—each card stimulated many inventions!   The audience loved singing Shin’s song of 8 principles!
Pascal Sire announced a joint venture between KATA and TRIZ France to create new programs for children.    The audience donated 1 euro per pack of cards to support this effort.

We returned to conventional presentation mode for Manabu Sawaguchi’s approach to TRIZ for risk prevention with new technologies that have new kinds of risk.  KYK and KYT combine direct observation of the system in work at the workplace with knowledge from past history of  problems.  CRMART is a complementary method that reverses thinking, asking “how can we create risks?” in order to reveal vulnerability.   This is an application of principle 13, turning thinking upside down, to challenge people to find potential risks.   The harmful function diagram from value engineering is then used for generating mitigation plans.   (There appear to be some subtle difference between CRMART and the AFD or Subversion method that has been used in TRIZ in the past.)

The Value of TRIZ and Its Derivatives for Interdisciplinary Problem Solving” is a fascinating project—a large, diverse group of people were given a half day of TRIZ and USIT training, and another group got classical creativity training,  then placed in small groups and asked to solve a biological problem (adenovirus attack on children with compromised immune systems) for which none of them had any technical background, although research materials on the details of the problem were provided.    The multidisciplinary teams with TRIZ training produced the greatest number of ideas, but the monodisciplinary teams with conventional training produced the highest rated (by technical experts) idea.  No surprise since practical applicability was one of the criteria for evaluation.    Read this paper—lots of good analysis and good experimental design in a field where we have only had people’s opinions in the past.
The team from the host university presented “TRIZ methodology adapted to hybrid powertrain evaluation.”   Analysis of the designs based on mathematical models of fuel use were compared to evaluation based in the ideal final result, for traction, vehicle stop and coasting, and regenerative braking, and the conclusions were used to suggest changes to powertrain architecture.      The method was then applied to 2 different situations for the urban customer and the highway customer. Next steps will be to use the TRIZ problem solving methods to design the powertrain defined in these architecture studies.

“Systematic search and ranking of physical contradictions using graph theory principles: Toward a systematic analysis of design strategies and their impacts” by a multi-disciplinary team from Aalto University and Tampere University and 4 companies (Metso, Solving, Kone Cranes, and the Finnish Defense Forces.)    Research problems: 

1.       How to improve paper roll cleanness and minimize energy use

2.      How to diminish energy consumption of air bearing technology

3.      How to develop computer supported tools for use in early stage modeling and simulation (effects of early decisions are usually not seen until late in the design phase)

Hypothesis:   They can integrate computer systems for requirement analysis and search for contradictions.   It became obvious that they needed language tools to extract contradictions from the natural language descriptions of the specific problems.   The results of this study are being incorporated into software being developed by a start-up company being created by former students in the program.
Koichi Makino  presented “A quantifiable evaluation method for generated ideas with many varieties.”   The method is based on the number and variety of ideas (which is challenged as relevant criteria by those who want a small number of highly innovative and applicable ideas.)

“Measuring the efficiency of inventive activities along inventive projects in R&D” Ali Taheria, Denis Cavallucci, David Ogeta included extensive data from over 100 companies on their experiences with multiple methods in R&D.   The project is to create a metric for design efficiency to compare methods, then to evaluate that metric vs. the opinions of the designers.  Efficiency in time and cost are much easier to measure than the human aspect of the use of brain-power.   Refinements are expected in the next phase of the work.

 

 

I will not be able to report on the afternoon papers or the membership meeting, since I’m traveling to the UK for tomorrow’s UK TRIZ Forum—I’ll post a report on Saturday for that one-day session.

 

This kind of sequential blog may not capture the spirit of either the ETRIA or the UK meeting.   Hearing the papers in the words of the authors is useful, but the “gossip” and the conversations and the fellowship of the meetings cannot be captured in the papers.     Hearing that TRIZ for children has “escaped” from the TRIZ experts because 100 college teachers have now taught many schoolteachers who are now teaching systematic methods to 17,000 students in France—WOW!   Meetings in Bavaria of dozens of companies to share innovation concepts (and not just once, 4 or more a year for multiple years…) Wow!  Formation of TRIZCampus, a community of practice—TRIZ teachers sharing all their methods and materials.   Internal TRIZ societies at GE and Phillips and Siemens…Wow and wow and wow….

 

Blogger’s advice:  Start now to plan for the time and budget to attend at least one meeting in the next year to be part of the Wow!   Lots of choices:

            Iberoamerican Innovation Congress:  November in Mexico

            Altshuller Institute:   December on-line

            Malaysia in February

            China in Spring

            Korea and Society of Systematic Innovation (in the US this year)  in July

            Japan in September,

            And many regional meetings ranging from TRIZ France and Apeiron (Italy)  and Iran and Israel and India to “Pizza, Beer, and TRIZ” in several cities. 

 

I’ll be glad to host any reports of any of these meetings on this blog.

 

Comments invited!

Ellen

 

 

 

 

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