TRIZCON2007 in Review

For me, Monday through Wednesday of this week were devoted to TRIZCON2007.  This is the annual international TRIZ conference organized by the Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies—the main body of the U.S. TRIZ community.  The conference features presentation from members of the global TRIZ community.

I usually enjoy sitting in on as many of the sessions as I can.  The content of the sessions is generally very rich and interesting.  This year, I was only able to attend the open keynote speech and two of the presentations.

For the opening keynote session Tom Johnson gave a very interesting talk titled, "The Means are Ends in the Making: Finding the Natural Pathway to Robust, Stable Business Performance."  The basis of the presentation was a comparative analysis of the structure and performance results of two automotive production operations based in the U.S. – one a Ford operation, and one a Toyota operation.  Tom’s thesis was that U.S. management thinking is uniformly driven by the Management By Results (MBR) paradigm, whereas the Japanese way of thinking is Management By Means (MBM).  Tom asserts that MBR leads to problems because it is an inherently unnatural model of looking at a business which should be treated as a natural system.  He feels MBM on the other hand leads to better overall results because it forces a more holistic approach to a business process by elevating the interactions in the process to a high level of visibility.  While the example reviewed in the session seemed a bit simplistic (probably intentionally so for presentation), there is no arguing with the notion that an approach that takes each function and seeks to optimize it in isolation will usually fail to achieve optimal balance.  On the other hand, an approach that consistently considers the whole system and the dynamics of people, communications, and process will tend to produce superior results.

I also saw a very nice case study presented by ShinHoo Choi of the Korean company LS-Cable.  The presentation considered an interesting technical problem in the manufacture of thin films which contained both technical and physical contractions to be resolved.

The last of the sessions I attended was focused on the application of technology S-curves and was presented by Xiaoling Shi of China’s Innovation Technology Institute.  For the most part, this session was a bit elementary, but I did like the way Xiaoling tied S-curves and technology maturity back to the notion of market maturity.

My own session on Knowledge Enabled Function Modeling was very well attended.  The audience was very engaged in the topic, and the post-session discussion with attendees was very gratifying.

The rest of my time was spent in various discussions with practitioners from industry and consultants concerning the state of innovation practice and where TRIZ fits into the innovation landscape.  All in all, it was a very good event.

Comments

[Navneet Bhushan]

Hi,
I was the person who asked the questions on functional modeling for software systems. it was indeed a nice presentation on Goldfire Innovator and the use of semantic analyzer for function modeling. would love to know more.

with warm regards
Navneet

[James Todhunter]

Hello Navneet!

Thank's for your comment. I am glad you enjoyed the presentation at TRIZCON2007. It is always a pleasure to get out among my TRIZ friends. Many companies use Goldfire Innovator to support their software projects. (Honeywell, Samsung, and Anritsu are a few examples.) Feel free to contact me privately if you would like to discuss this further.

Best regards,

Jim