I spent Wednesday at the Fourth TRIZ Symposium in Japan. This annual event has grown rapidly to become one of the largest events of its kind. Of course, the best part of an event like this is the opportunity to get together with so many top tier innovation practitioners. I always enjoy catching up with old friends and making new ones.
The morning keynote presentation was delivered by Amir Roggel of Intel. The presentation, “TRIZ Development at Intel Corporation”, provided a fascinating look at how Intel applied one repeatable innovation methodology. Amir described TRIZ as the key to systematic innovation to drive Intel’s innovation future, and finished his presentation telling attendees, “Intel uses TRIZ effectively; so can you.”
There a number of interesting presentations during the day. I attended three of them.
Paul Devaraj of Intel talked about the “Test Pogo Pins Reuse Program” that he had worked on. Paul did a great job of explaining how TRIZ tools helped him solve issues with critical test equipment.
Following Paul’s talk, Professor Toru Nakagawa of Osaka Gakuin University delivered a presentation titled “Extension of USIT in Japan – A New Paradigm for Creative Problem Solving.” In this session, Toru described the history of USIT a simplified system based on TRIZ and of USITs deployment in Japan.
The afternoon continued with a session titled “A Comparison of the Problem Solving and Creativity Potential Shown in Engineers using TRIZ or Lean/Six Sigma.” Presented by Paul Filmore from the University of Plymouth, UK, the talked discussed the findings of some comparative studies conducted by Filmore regarding the level of innovation tools offered to practitioners of different methodologies. Of course given the much publicized problems in deploying 6-sigma at 3M, it probably comes as no surprise that 6-Sigma scored the lowest level of support for creativity.
Finally, my turn to present came at the end of the day. My paper, “Advances In The Application of Computational Linguistics for TRIZ Practice,” was well received. Amir Roggel chimed in during the Q&A to confirm the value of applied semantic technology by relating his own use case.
Unfortunately, I could only stay for one day of the Symposium; from what I saw, it is a high quality event.
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