Tuesday, October 29, 2013

 

ETRIA TRIZ Futures Conference, Paris. Day 1 afternoon.

We had a short walk to the Paris City Hall for a beautiful lunch -- 3 courses with 2 wines!   The afternoon speakers will have a challenge rousing the audience.   Good news, there was lots of afternoon excitement.

Val Souchkov was the chairman of the afternoon session on TRIZ with other tools.   First speaker was Ms. Yui Kato with Manabu Sawaguchi, “Design Process Management based on Redesigned Contradiction Matrix in Aesthetic field.”  She gave a detailed explanation of the issues of design workflow and individual designers’ differences that contribute to the need for improvement in design work.   This study is limited to the product design work phase of product development (excluding market research and product planning that come before, and production and distribution that come after.)    They have hybridized the stages of design based on AHP (especially weighting and evaluation) and the stages based on TRIZ (design and problem solving).   Improvements to designs that have a good sales history are different in some details from new products.  A typical esthetic conflict was improving Impact vs. declining  Color Harmony; a sample of 11 elements of an aesthetic issues matrix was shown,  with a 48-element version described that included some of the classical Altshuller matrix elements.   Future work will include extension of the examples of application of the principles to the design problems. 

“Lean-TRIZ instead of TRIZ Lean” was introduced by Prof. Christian Thurnes (the lean guy) and Dr. Frank Zeihsel  (the TRIZ guy.)  They start with the assertion that  lean methods have had a lot of money and management attention over the last 30 years, whereas TRIZ has been an expert method with very  little management attention. They have enriched TRIZ tools with lean elements, and then used them to work on lean problems.   For example, they have made specific separation principles that include separation of non-value added work, separate set-up tasks from operating tasks, etc.   Likewise, ideality was easily combined with lean—what is the ideal production rate, what is the ideal transportation unit, …what are the ideal functions of the product, ….Then they reversed the process and found areas of weakness in Lean that can be improved with TRIZ, such as treating “necessary waste” as a physical contradiction, then applying the usual separation principles to resolving the contradiction.     They conclude that these practices have a high potential for spread in the lean world, with case studies and stories needed to support the dissipation of the methods.

I presented the paper written with Tim Brewer, Joe Miller, and Darrell Mann on the crowdsourcing and crowdfunding business models, and how the TRIZ model of the complete system helps to understand these emerging models.   I’ll post the full paper on this site when I get back from the meetings.

Prof. Paul Filmore presented the work done with Mir Abubakr Shahdad  on the application of TRIZ to graphic design, using genetic algorithms.  They developed software, now in its 7th generation to create a computer-aided innovation tool.   Genetic algorithms are used because of their ability to deal with extremely large search space.   Font design was the specific graphic design task that was chosen.  The designer selects “chromosomes” and the system generates the next generation;   the designer selects  the “parents” of the next generation, and the system does the iterations.    A similar process is applied to logos.  Feedback from the designers is that they find it very fast, works well for initial concept creation, and enables them to benefit from TRIZ without studying it.   New studies will include examining the difference between the use by graphic designers and engineers, and inclusion of additional TRIZ principles. 

“A novel hybridized TRIZ-based Design Approach for Concept Generation” was presented by Aiman Ziout and Ahmed Azab from the University of Windsor, Canada.   They demonstrated the method with the design problem of an active joint, one that can be disassembled by some external trigger.   Active joints are important at the end of product life, for disassembly, as an element of sustainable design.   Function analysis and patterns of evolution were combined with Cladistics (a biological method of classifying solutions) to create lines of ideas.  

Valeri Souchkov presented “Trend of Functionality Evolution” which is based on some of Altshuller’s work, expanded by his personal experience with over 100 products and projects.   During his work, Val realized that something was missing in TRIZ, and he used TRIZ-based function analysis and value analysis to complete the missing element, the evolution of the functionalities.  He saw 18 steps of evolution, 11 of expansion and 7 of convolution.   He called on his experience in the The Netherlands to use the evolution of the bicycle to illustrate the 18 steps.   Business-targeted products (B2B) have a somewhat different emphasis from B2C products, and the order of the patterns is not always the same.   Val’s challenge to the audience is to use these trends of functionality evolution to support innovation road mapping and risk management.

Eric Prevost’s presentation “TRIZ for Business”   emphasized the need for different vocabulary and different psychology than those used for engineering/technical  TRIZ.   His first approach is to create fear—show the statistics on the vanishing of companies (87% of the Fortune 500 changed in 20 years…) and to show new paradigms in technology and manufacturing,  as well as new paradigms of selling and other elements of business – sensors in tires and engines and many products make it possible to sell based on performance and lifetime rather than price.   Innovation models are changing—particularly integration of service into products accelerates innovation, but requires new business models with new partners.   As an example, he showed a conventional business process used at CapGemini, then inserted TRIZ into the process, and did 3 one day workshops (sales, talent management, and project funding.)  Result:  lots of ideas, reusable content, and great TRIZ interest. 

Val Souchkov presented Vladimir Petrov’s paper  On Su-Field Analysis for Information Processing

System” which was originally presented at the TRIZ Developers Summit.   Petrov replaces the Substance-Field interaction  with DFK  (Data coming into the system, Function that changes the data, and  Knowledge that is the aggregation of information about the incoming data and the function, and can be used to adjust the system. ) There are 3 laws:

1.        Multistage processing:  4 trends within this trend progress from simple to simple multistage, to coordinated multistage (knowledge about stages interacts, improving system function) to common multistage  which can have shared structure with shared knowledge. 

2.       Multiple sources of processing:  Independent processing of multiple kinds of data progress to coherent multiple source processing,  (video conference example, which video and audio data are processed separately, but knowledge about positions of people is used to modify the process and the data collection.)

3.       Accommodation:   And information system tends to accommodate past data to improve its performance.   The progress is from static, to learning, to evolving DFK systems.   The function stays the same but the knowledge is used differently at each level. 

Complex systems can be generating by combining systems from each of trends.

The meeting adjourned for the day, and we found congenial small restaurants for continuing the discussions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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