Global TRIZ: New Developments around the World

By Ellen Domb
editor@triz-journal.com

The first conference of the European TRIZ Association was held in Bath, in the UK, November 7-9, 2001. I participated in the conference, and regard it as a great success. The TRIZ Journal’s most prolific author, Darrell Mann, was the chairman of the event, and Professor Julian Vincent at the University of Bath was the sponsor. The TRIZ community owes a great vote of thanks to them for making it possible for more than 50 people from Europe, Korea, Japan and the US to get together to share their TRIZ stories and to develop more knowledge of how to use TRIZ


ETRIA Conference Chairman Darrel Mann (left) from the UK, with author Avraam Seredinski, from France.


Bruno Ruchti

For those of you who were not there, you will have several ways to learn about what happened in the beautiful city of Bath.

  1. The TRIZ Journal will publish many of the papers. ETRIA was generous in arranging for each author to own his/her copyright, so that arranging for re-publication is easy. We start in this issue with the paper by Bruno Ruchti (see photo) and Pavel Livotov, and plan to have 2-3 papers in each issue for the next several months.
  2. Professor Toru Nakagawa (see photo, below) has published a summary of the meeting, and summaries of many of the papers in English on his TRIZ Home Page in Japan, http://www.osaka-gu.ac.jp/php/nakagawa/TRIZ/eTRIZ/eforum/eETRIACon2001/eETRIACon2001.html


Professor Toru Nakagawa at ETRIA 2001.

  1. The proceedings of the conference will be available from ETRIA at: http://www.ETRIA.net

Start planning now to attend the Altshuller Institute Conference, TRIZCON2002, in St. Louis, MO, USA, in April, 2002, and the second meeting of ETRIA in Strasbourg, France, in November, 2002 (See the Calendar Page of The TRIZ Journal for information, and the Welcome Letter for frequent nagging from your editors.) Reading the papers does not give you the same experience as attending the conference. The mix of TRIZ experts, TRIZ beginners, and TRIZ practitioners from industry, consulting, and academia gave rise to many discussions of the way people use (and misuse!) TRIZ, the future of TRIZ, and the relationships between TRIZ and other disciplines, which will be the start of ongoing dialogue and learning.


Denis Cavallucci (left),organizer of the 2002 ETRIA Conference at the University of Strasbourg, France.
Roland DeGuio (right), director of the research laboratory at the University of Strasbourg.


Su-Dong Park has started a Korean TRIZ portal, http://www.triznik.com. This site is in the Korean language only, and is intended to help people learn TRIZ. Mr. Park is a graduate student in the Technology Innovation Laboratory of the Department of Industrial Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University. Anyone with questions about the site can contact Mr. Park at triznik@nature.skku.ac.kr


Darrell Mann announced at the ETRIA meeting that the Journal of Creativity and Innovation Management will feature one TRIZ paper in each issue, and will have a special issue on TRIZ later this year. For more information, or to submit a paper, write to him at ensdlm@bath.ac.uk. The first issue will have a paper from TRIZ Journal co-editor Michael Slocum and his collaborator Catherine Lundberg of the Ontro Corporation (www.ontro.com). They have expanded the article on Technology Forecasting that appeared in our special issue on Food Technology, October 2001, to include a review of eight other methods of technology forecasting.

 


More pictures from ETRIA 2001


Left, Mr. Lee (Korea) with Nikolay Shpakovsky and Peter Chuksin (Russia).
Right, Dmitry Kucharavy from the TRIZ research group in Minsk.


Left, Simon Dewulf, President of CreaTRIZ software and consulting company in Belgium. 
Middle Left, Ludmila Semenova and Vissarion Sibiriakov from Siberia, who reported on using TRIZ to organize charitable work. 
Middle Right, Elies Jones from Brunei University  in the UK, who is doing very interesting research using TRIZ workshops to improve environmental impact of appliances.
Right, David Knott from Rolls Royce in the UK, Wednesday’s keynote speaker on industrial adoption of TRIZ.


Left, Anja-Karina Pahl, recently moved from Australia to Bath. 
Right, Igor Vertkin from the UK, Friday’s keynote speaker on the future of TRIZ.