• Announcement: nearest events

• Report on The TRIZ Day, April 12, 2006

• New books

• TRIZ, Creativity and Innovation on the web

• Examples of innovative thinking: using resources

• TRIZ for Creative Photography?

With many factors which produce immense impact on rapid evolution of all aspects of business and technology, such as emergence of new digital products, disruptive innovations, shortening of product lifecycles, "flattening" of the world by removing barriers to the spread of information and open communication, innovation becomes not only important but crucial for success. Last year BusinessWeek called our times "innovation economy": "From energy to biotech, we may be on the cusp of a new age of innovation".
It becomes clear that modern innovation is not a single event but a continuous non-stop activity. It also becomes clear that creativity and invention are needed along the entire process of creating and bringing new products to market. Innovation is not limited to producing great technological ideas, it is needed for successful invention of new business models, processes and services as well as for removing obstacles, conflicts and bottlenecks, and finding new innovative ways to increase business performance.
Innovation becomes more than technology, research, technique or a method; it becomes a culture. Many organizations simply do not have it yet. While TRIZ and Systematic Innovation can greatly support creative parts of a process of innovation, in order to create and sustain a long-term innovative organization we also need other ingredients: innovative and creative people, knowledge, everyday learning, collaboration and open communication. This is why in this issue we provide you with information not just limited to TRIZ but to other aspects of innovation as well.

Successful innovations,
Valeri Souchkov  

Another TRIZ Day in the Netherlands took place on April 12, 2006.
Click to see the report

The Ten Faces of Innovation : IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization
by Thomas Kelley, Jonathan Littman

"Outlining ten major roles often played on successful and innovative teams, this book catalogs personas used at IDEO to create new products and services. The book is easy to read and contains powerful, persuasive arguments about some of the activites teams need to participate in to unblock the rut they're in or to combat negative environments. I'd recommend this as a light-hearted read for people who see themselves as an energetic personality and are interested in coming in to work on a Monday and giving their team a kick-start" (from Amazon user reviews).
 

As usual, we continue to update you with a selection of recommended recent papers and other web resources in the areas of TRIZ, Creativity, and Innovation.

• Do you have problems?
  By: Howard Smith and Mark Burnett
  A very good introductory overview of using TRIZ for business process improvement.
   
• The Art of Innovation
  One-hour streaming online video and PDF presentation of Guy Kawasaki, presented on January 24th, 2006 at the Tech Coast Angels “Fast Pitch Competition” at UCLA, and author of eight books including Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. His talk is about "the art of start": what to do and what not to do to successfully start innovative businesses and introduce innovations. Interesting, that some key ideas of Kawasaki completely coincide with TRIZ ideas: such as "jump to the next curve or create new curve", "increase not by 10 per cent but 10 times", and so on. Very useful and entertaining.
   
• Top-down Innovation
  An article from Optimize magazine: "CEOs say they want to lead the innovation charge, but they can't go it alone. Collaboration and help from IT are critical to putting intentions into action."
   
• 3M's Seven Pillars of Innovation
  By Michael Arndt
  It may be 104 years old, but the company churns out cutting-edge products like a brash new startup. Here are the secrets of its success.
   
• Top Ten Myths about Business Innovation
  By Geoffrey Moore.
  "If you are worrying about innovation, take heart. Only successful companies do. By contrast, unsuccessful companies either aren’t around to do any worrying or have more pressing concerns, like meeting payroll or paying their bills."
   
• Innovation, the Google way
  by Garett Rogers
  "With each product or service they launch, it becomes more difficult to imagine a world without them. One of my readers asks: What can other businesses (of any size) learn from what Google has done to achieve this level of success?"
   
• A missing link in Innovation
  by Mike Klein
  Whar are the missing links between innovation vs. invention?
  According to Peter Denning, Director of the Cebrowski Institute for information innovation and superiority at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, it is the individual's skill at innovating. He has identified a seven-part framework called the "Personal Foundational Practices," which can be taught to individuals and endorsed by organizations wishing to stimulate a culture of innovation.
   
• Nuggets from IBM Business Leadership Forum in Rome
  A summary on insights reported by IBM about modern innovation
   
• BMW Innovation Day 2006
  A good summary of the Innovation Day 2006, where BMW presented the latest developments in drivetrain technology, energy management, and materials technology which help to "convincingly fulfill current and future-oriented customer wishes for even more efficient energy concepts and to master the challenges of tomorrow". One of the TRIZ trends of system evolution is the trend of increasing the degree of system dynamics, and it is not surprising that under the term “EfficientDynamics” BMW sums up all development activities serving to achieve this supreme standard.
   
• The World's Most Innovative Companies
  Their creativity goes beyond products to rewiring themselves. BusinessWeek and the Boston Consulting Group rank the best.
   
• From Edison's Desk is the blog of GE Global Research
  GE Global Research offers a unique forum for technology enthusiasts around the globe to discuss the future of technology with top researchers from one of the world's largest and most diverse industrial research labs.
   
• Innovation Leaders
  Innovaro conducts an annual assessment of the innovation performance of 1000 companies across 20 key sectors. This is based on detailed research into 8 key areas that is summarized in an innovation scorecard. Based on extensive analysis of the performance, Innovation Leaders profiles the organizations that are making the most impact today.
   
• Creativity in reverse: a new way to use TRIZ
  By Jack Hipple
  "Sometimes, though, the problem is not one of trying to improve something, but to find the cause of a failure in a system, product, or organization. Something has gone wrong, maybe on a once in a while basis, and we can’t figure out why. We develop hypothesis derived from checklists we had previously developed, or from conventional brainstorming ideation techniques. But we don’t always get to the root cause and have to deal with the problem again at a future date".
   
• Applying TRIZ in Process Improvement
  by Haiyan Ru and Haibo Ru
  Two authors from China present a case study of applying TRIZ to improve the effectiveness of internal training process.

This time we again talk about using resources to innovate. Resource-based thinking is extremely powerful instrument to create new ideas and solve existing problems. The term "resource" has many different meanings, but in general, resource is something that is readily available (or easily obtainable) and might provide us with the needed function or value within different contexts to reach the desired purpose.
In xTRIZ, we define the following categories of resources: Space, Time, System (everything that belongs to a certain system), Supersystem resources (everything that interacts with a system or can interact), Functional resources. In turn, system and supersystem resources include material, energy, human and information components. We often neglect available resources whereas they can be excellent sources for creating new value, solving existing problems, delivering required functions and resolving contradictions. Many new ideas can arise on the basis of using available energy sources which we usually ignore, or already existing components in a system; or simply by combining existing components to obtain new functions thus saving space, time, material and energy. Often there is no need to create a new system or subsystem to deliver a new function: it is enough to use what is already available as a whole or as a part.
When we use TRIZ to solve a specific problem we always first look at the already existing internal resources and very often they help to find a needed solution.
A good introductory overview with examples explaining the concept of using resources in technology is available at http://www.ideationtriz.com/TRIZ_tutorial_4.htm (By Ideation International, Inc).
Among some other recent examples (again, note that they were not necessarily obtained with TRIZ, but illustrate the concept):

• Instead of an unavailable, expensive, fragile object, use simpler and inexpensive copies.
• Replace an object, or process with optical copies.
• If visible optical copies are already used, move to infrared or ultraviolet copies.

So why not to capture copies of objects (in this case, shadows) instead of the objects? This is the result (click to enlarge):
 

It is interesting that almost every inventive principle can help with generating interesting ideas. In addition, combinations of different principles can propose even much more space for creativity.