All people have the same potential, so exchange and diversity are the invisible force of innovation in our societies.
What strategies favor innovation at the regional level?
The four central points of a strategy for innovation in a given region are:
a) Training for innovation, business, technology and product.
The business system as a whole must be re-thought in terms of creation. The implementation of policies to stimulate innovation cannot wait. The incorporation into the job market of talented professionals and new ideas in management, engineering and design are imposed. The R&D world cannot be conceived without designers for most industrial activities.
b) Development of capacities for a rapid and efficient assimilation of industrial technology.
The training system should take a quick turnaround in terms of technical training to prepare suitable personnel; the business system should generate a database of available technology, its use rate and technical efficiency. There are many cases of underemployed infrastructure. It is necessary to be able to analyze what else can be done with the park installed. Surely much more than what is done today.
c) Development of regional associative capacities.
Together with the two previous points, complementation with other provinces and countries in terms of installed capacity or innovation processes should be sought, through the creation of networks of industrial interest in the SME sector.
They have a potential for rapid aggregation, they are flexible, the risk is more distributed and the chances of finding successful projects are increased.
d) Promotion of the regional circulation of capital goods and services, associated with R + D + i.
Generate alliances to promote laws that allow the circulation of technology, capital, knowledge, tools and people linked to innovation processes, in the search to build new paradigms.
We think that we all have the same potential, so exchange and compatible diversity are the force of innovation in our societies.
But while creating is relatively easy, innovating instead depends essentially on a good organizational structure and training in useful tools for systematic innovation.
These hard facts mean that it is virtually impossible to do innovative business, products or services in an organization, without necessarily redesigning and incentivizing the Research and Development departments, with their engineers, technicians and scientists.
Does our education facilitate the development of creativity?
Creativity and Innovation are victims of our mediocre way of teaching.
For example, systematic innovation triz was widely accepted in Russia. Why? In the past, dialectical philosophy was common in Russia, from which contradictions arise. Then and right now, anyone with a secondary or higher education knew that all developments and innovations come from the process of contradictions.
On the other hand, in the West this did not happen and for this reason it is very difficult for us to raise contradictions of a situation or problem.
Now, in the current university education, their priorities should be reviewed and interested in human relations, in the training of entrepreneurs, in the motivation to be innovative people and with a broad domain of finance.
Today's education continues to be based on providing information rather than converting information into knowledge. Then we must ask ourselves:
Why are corporate universities flourishing?
Because current universities do not fulfill their mission well, nor do they care to accompany organizations in their continuous learning processes.
Traditionally, the sense of existence of Corporate Universities has been linked to multinationals and business groups, which due to their size and multi-location usually require a strategic and centralized evolution of their training and professional development functions.
However, the concept has more to do with vision than dimension. In this sense, those companies are interested in having a Corporate University, regardless of their size, that identify with the adequate management of their intellectual capital, and give organizational learning a determining factor of their progress and integral sustainability.
Why are private universities also growing day by day?
Perhaps they offer guarantees of being able to work and study at the same time or have programs more in line with future professional development.
What is our goal, as a society, regarding higher education?
That young people know a lot and that knowledge stagnates in a couple of years or that they learn to handle themselves in life, to manage themselves, to be caring citizens, creative and innovative professionals, entrepreneurs and who know how to relate to others.
What distinguishes what you remember in your mind from what you forgot?
That what you remember you learned from experience, doing it, practicing it repeatedly, learning from mistakes and trying not to repeat them, etc.
This is no discovery, but educational establishments are designed for young people to sit quietly, taking notes while receiving massive amounts of information from their teachers. If we know that we learn from experience then, How do you explain that the university is designed so that young people have hardly any experience, do not practice anything?
The educational system is still based on information (subjects, content, exams) but information is quickly forgotten, personal experiences are much more memorable, especially if you practice them repeatedly until they are recorded in your brain. The experience is not what happens to you but what you do with what happens to you.
Learning consists of accumulating reusable experience in the memory in the future and it is a skill that accompanies you from the moment you are born until you die.
Education makes us experts in solving theoretical problems but not in solving practical problems.
We know very well what to do to lose weight (stop eating and exercising) or to end world hunger, but making it happen is something else.
The theoretical problem has a clear solution, but, when implementing it, variables that you had not foreseen begin to appear: will, mood, motivation, fear, pressure, distrust and lack of empathy with other people.
Is it possible to use the Internet to improve creativity education?
The incorporation of 2.0 technology and its forms of interaction with participation between people and projects, autonomy in the production, opening and reuse of content, extension of school times and spaces, breaks the traditional monopolies of the traditional educational system.
We are in an open and collaborative digital world and this causes a radical redesign in learning methodologies.
What to teach, who, to whom, when, where and how is profoundly transformed by the context of the network society itself, by its technologies and by its specific learning demands.
Both intermediate and higher education must be significant, relevant and competitive with what the information society requires, and this at least in Argentina and Latin America does not occur.
And what about mobile learning?
Mobile Learning projects have been developing for years in Europe and the US and use a mobile device (Samsung Galaxy tablets) to expand the classroom on the web.
There is even the use of open software (Android) or Moodle for the virtual platform and together with online work activities integrated into the training.
There is thus an enrichment of the students' learning process by having a personalized and interactive relationship with their teachers that allows them to learn at any time and in any place.
Almost all postgraduate degrees and career extensions in Europe apply Mobile Learning and the reason is to gather a critical mass of people that optimizes the high cost of this education and that is practical for people who are in distant places.
And using your imagination can you come up with creative and effective ideas?
Look, I tell you what Altshuller, creator of TRIZ, thought about it. He said that: The optimal results to technical and social problems are only obtained with a systematic thought so necessary for scientists, builders and inventors together with the imagination.
But too many people have low imaginative potential, so it is possible that with a systematic methodology like TRIZ, which is based on successful patents, that imaginative deficiency can be enhanced.
If you must climb a window that is five meters high on a wall, why not use a ladder and get there safely and effectively.
TRIZ is the Russian acronym for Teorija Rezbenija Izobretatelskib Zadach, which stands for Innovative Problem Solving Theory.
TRIZ is important because it is effective on the grounds that:
1-You have to innovate in the right product, not just any
2-We must improve the main parameters in value, not in all
3-You have to find the root cause of the problem and not the initial problem badly posed
4-We must focus on the main useful function and not on the components
5-you have to resolve the contradictions and not only establish compromise solutions
6-You have to select evolved products and not others
7-You have to collect and use global knowledge and not only that of the company, but another will do it for you
8-Adapt existing solutions and do not invent randomly
9-There are guidelines for the evolution of products and services, use them
10-All products tend to Ideality, as the ultimate goal, and there are rules to follow to obtain this.
The TRIZ methodology was born in Russia in the 1940s at the end of World War II by Genrich Altshuller. The name is preserved because it began in 1995 to be recognized quite extensively with these acronyms.
In the United States and Europe, people began to talk about Systematic Innovation, terminology that is more attractive from Marketing, but only after 2000.
Let's clarify that the words: Problem, Creativity, Invention and Innovation, are related but have very different meanings.
A problem for TRIZ is when one or more contradictions arise in a process, while creating is thinking about something new, innovating is manufacturing what is thought, and inventing is widely surpassing what is known to what is thought.
But you have to work hard with a systematic algorithm from TRIZ that lives up to the most famous phrase in the history of Avis car rental advertising: “We try harder” which equates to “We work hard”.
Does this way of seeing creativity resemble a Science?
Just as the key to understanding the world is mathematics, the key to creativity is to study it as a Science, with its inventive principles and its algorithm for solving problems, be they technical or social.
And like mathematics, there is the paradox that the more abstract your tools are, the more you understand and get closer to the surrounding reality.
If one delves into the study of integrals, derivatives and mathematical series, one will understand many phenomena of nature that explain their actions in such tools.
A possible policy, derived from the studies done on the success of Finland in the PISA exams (international tests that evaluate the knowledge of schoolchildren), would be to once again give prestige to science education as part of the culture and as an engine of change and improve their initial and ongoing preparation, have more and better textbooks and materials, and bring science to the classroom through specific programs, along with TRIZ, which is the Science of Problem Solving.
These are measures that have a markedly political character and involve the entire system, being large-scale in time and space, and do not cost money.
There is also another class of didactic cut measures, to be applied in classrooms, and this is precisely what science didactics investigates as a discipline, and they are: new approaches to face day-to-day teaching.
It is important to unravel how to teach epistemology and history of science to teachers in training and in activity, under the assumption that these disciplines can contribute effectively to a better teaching of science in secondary or other levels
Similarly, if one delves deeper into studying TRIZ, one will understand the ultimate reason, or what we call the root cause, of each problem or situation.
Then one analyzes and detects which is the contradiction of the problem and through the tools arrives at the optimal solution based on the available data.
What are contradictions?
In technical contradictions, a desired state is reached but at the cost of another variable that worsens. For example, a fragile product package is stronger (good) but the weight increases significantly (bad).
The catering service is dedicated to each client (good) but the delivery system is complicated (bad).
Individual training is very comprehensive (good) but keeps employees out of the office for a long time (bad).
In physical or inherent contradictions, contradictory or opposite situations or requirements occur. For example, banking software contains many important variables that make it complex (bad) but at the same time it must be simple and colloquial to users (good).
Coffee in winter should be hot (good) but not so hot that it burns users (bad)
Fruit juice concentrators need to sell optimal concentrates (good) but the cost is very high (bad), so a way was found to face the problem without using heating or electrical energy, based on water-retentive enzymes.
Are there simple examples of contradictions?
Suppose you want a sports car but you can transport your family with a bulky luggage.
So what we want is to improve the sportiness of a car but without worsening the capacity to transport passengers and equipment.
Assuming that sports cars carry only a couple of passengers and that they are smaller than non-sports and family cars, let's try to find some contradiction.
Let's see if we use the contradiction that the length must be improved but at the same time without reducing the transport capacity.
There are other contradictions but let's work with this one.
If you enter the Altshuller matrix with the variables length of the moving object that improves versus volume of the moving object that worsens, you will find that the inventive principles of world patents used have been:
principle 7 Nesting, principle 17 Another dimension, principle 4 Asymmetry and
principle 35 Changing properties
In that order, the solutions between these variables have been given.
An example of Dodge is the Dodge Charger with 4 sliding doors (Nesting) which is a sports car, based on the Dodge Challenger sports model, but with 4 doors and with fully folding seats (Another dimension).
For this, the factory played with the position of the wheels and the width of the filming (Asymmetry) being that it is still a sports car, where the family can be placed in the back seat like in a sedan and they have attached a luggage rack (change of properties).
Another example is if you want to buy a computer and are unsure whether to buy a better processor and spend more money or do the reverse. Then you can pose this:
TC1: If an Intel Core 2 Duo processor is included in my laptop then the processing speed is improved but at the same time I have to pay $ 200 more than with a normal processor.
TC2: If the Intel Core 2 Duo processor is not included then I save $ 200 on my purchase but at the same time the processing speed gets worse.
Here the parameters are "processing speed" and "computer cost" being two different and opposite parameters compared to the fact of installing a specific processor.
What are the TRIZ tools and what are they for?
TRIZ, collects a series of principles that must be learned and serve when analyzing a problem, modeling it, applying standard solutions and identifying inventive ideas.
However, the problem analysis phase and the synthesis of inventive ideas are reinforced if they are carried out in a group and under this methodology.
It does not replace creativity but it is a guide that is based on inventive principles already applied in world-class patents.
The power of TRIZ is demonstrated by the synthetic fiber research that the DUPONT company has mastered since 1940. At its New Hampshire experimental plant, DUPONT verified more than 300 different synthetic polymers and six years of development to arrive at nylon in 1936.
It was marketed shortly after and was a success and the same happened with acrylic fiber in 1944 and dacron in 1946.
More than 40 scientists worked on these developments with an investment in each case of 1,400,000 dollars over a long period of six years by using trial and error methods.
Today, the latest research development in artificial fibers DUPONT uses TRIZ and a team of fifteen researchers with results in six months of work.
The investment was $ 300,000.
How does it apply?
TRIZ provides 5 fundamental tools that I summarize for you
1-Functionality and systemic: our environment is full of systems with interrelated elements or subsystems, which provide a function to some other system.
Applying the principle of mechanical vibration, the medicine dissolves in small pieces, the stones that form in the kidneys due to the high concentration of mineral salts.
Science and technology can be organized for study by disciplines and by functions, but the intersection of this brings facilities that are of great value. So when a biologist needs to solve something related to the transformation of one energy into another, he also has access to other knowledge of mechanics, optics, etc.
2-Ideality: the important thing about a system, especially artificial ones or machinery, is not its parts but the function it provides. It is a pattern of progress that systems tend to reduce their parts and even disappear, the function remaining in an external super-system.
Example of the teacher's pointer, today it has disappeared and even the laser pointer can disappear since the video cannons already have their own image cursor that acts as a pointer.
3-Use of resources: In the search for ideality, inventions and ingenious advances are those that instead of adding, subtract elements; and they take advantage of the resources available within the system itself or the immediate environment to solve the problem.
Example of the gas desulfurization process of a thermal power plant, where we take advantage of the ashes resulting from the combustion that causes such gases and absorb the product in water.
4-Guidelines about the origin and evolution of systems and technology: The analysis of hundreds of thousands of patent documents that gave rise to TRIZ, identified a series of patterns or guidelines that help us to predict how a system can evolve, as well as certain technological configurations for example in cell phones or mobile computers.
5-Contradictions: Some difficult problems solved, had in common the resolution of contradictions. Sometimes, improving one aspect or problem means aggravating another, then we have a conflict or contradiction. The usual solution is the compromise. TRIZ provides a series of suggestions to provide alternative solutions to the contradiction.
A classic example is dairy pasteurization that preserves vitamins and eliminates a high percentage of bacteria. If we increase the temperature (sterilization) we eliminate all the bacteria but we destroy many vitamins. The inventive principle applied is to heat the milk at high temperature for only two seconds.
A high percentage of the bacteria are eliminated but there is no time to degrade the vitamins and the contradiction is resolved
Are there recent innovative applications?
If you search the site triz journal you will find more than a thousand articles on applications of this tool with twelve years of experience in solving different issues.
But I recently read an interesting story of a civil engineering innovation that saved the lives of 3,500 people in a coastal town in Japan affected by the March 2011 tsunami.
It was called the history of the Fundai wall.
The concrete wall of the city of Fundai rises above the mouth of the Fudai River, is 17 meters high and extends for 200 meters.
In the minds of the residents of the Japanese town of Fudai it will remain forever as the wall that saved them from the tsunami of March 11, 2011, which killed around 35,000 people in northeast Japan.
On the day of the tragedy, a few minutes after the magnitude 8 earthquake that violently shook the coastal region, workers in charge of the structure remotely closed the lock gates and a local firefighter rushed to the scene. to close the smallest gates by hand. The great wave of about 20 meters high reached this area of the coast in the afternoon, and only one inhabitant who was fishing on the coast disappeared and ignored the police warning messages.
In the towns that were exposed to the sea, the water washed away the ports, penetrated through the estuaries and killed thousands of people. In Fudai, the 20-meter wave ran into an obstacle that prevented it from penetrating upstream and devastating this town where 3,500 people live.
A few meters from the wall, is the village school. In the photographs distributed by the Associated Press agency, it is seen that the school facilities have been intact, protected by the saving wall.
The existence of this wall is due to the stubbornness of the mayor who governed Fudai, who was aware of the previous tsunamis that had devastated the town, in 1896, 1933 and 1967, Mayor Wamura insisted on building a high wall at the mouth of the river as to resist the onslaught of the sea.
Considering the evolution of the systems, the history of tsunamis and their occurrences were studied, determining that the height should be somewhat greater than 15 meters for very extreme cases.
The construction works lasted ten years, was completed in 1985 and cost around 60 million dollars for the 17 meters high wall. The mayor received harsh criticism because the project was considered disproportionate in view of previous tsunamis with waves no more than eight meters high.
Other towns in the area built tsunami walls, but none as high as Fudai's. Neighboring Taro's wall was 10 meters high and 2,500 meters long, but it did not withstand the test of March 11, 2011 and was broken in several places.
The Fudai wall, as the marks left on the towers show, faced a 20-meter wave, which slightly surpassed the structure but not enough to cause damage. After that day, Fudai residents have returned to visit Mayor Wamura's grave to pay their respects and honor the man who saved their lives.
And are there applications of inventive thinking in art as well?
There are artists who have surely applied inventive thinking without realizing or knowing it.
For example, the Portuguese artist Farto, looks for old walls of desolate streets and with a minimum of color he chisels those walls in search of faces.
Another German sculptor Grez, elaborates what he calls the anti monuments because they are invisible. Jochen Gerz is a German artist born during the Second War and the peculiarity that his works have, for which they unleash controversy, respect and admiration, is that they are built to be later removed from view. His argument is that while images wear out, the words they tell keep memory alive.
Both are examples of the tool called Subtraction, which can be applied to a situation, product, service or process, just by breaking it down into its components and applying the corresponding methodology.
For example, in the case of a painting, it would have these components: Canvas, Paint, Frame, Brush, Theme (still life, face, landscape, etc.), and suppose model (in the case of a nude)
Now we remove a component where possible essential and removing the paint, we create a virtual product.
So we imagine the benefits, potential customers and requirements provided by this virtual product. Subtraction takes us out of mental fixation and a painting without painting is quite a challenge that fits into being a virtual product. This is what Grez does in her anti monuments.
On the other hand, the Portuguese artist Farto in his installations uses Subtraction and then Unification in combination, as does the North American photographer and visual artist ViHil, a classic that, according to the character, uses the street environment appropriate to the client's personality.
Unification means assigning an additional task to an existing resource always within the closed world, which is the space and time close to the situation.
For example, in our case of the painting, we can use a part of a building and take it as part of a face and ask people to add details to a street painting.
Another tool is the Attribute Dependency, which uses the correlation between an internal attribute of the table and an external and close attribute of the environment.
So when an attribute changes, so does another attribute. This happens when the artist ViHil paints a picture and it rains, the picture changes colors in the eyes of his characters.
This creates a surprise in his paintings that sometimes causes amazement due to the change of subjects and shapes of the faces.
A plastic artist who successfully applied Subtraction was Rothko. His installations and paintings, which many analysts call abstract, were created by influences from primitive art and children's drawings in the 1940s.
For this reason, he is distinguished by using only one color without any shapes or drawing in his watercolors of city scenes. Many of its installations after they were created were self-destroyed, such as those in the Rothko Chapel in Manhattan, New York.
We have already seen that Unification is applied to a situation, process, product or service, and consists of assigning a new use or function to an existing component. A common example is a printer that is transformed into a multipurpose computer with a printer, scanner, telephone and fax.
The German artist Beuys, who makes social sculpture and was a Nazi in his youth and later an opponent of the disaster caused by Hitler.
Parodying Hitler who said that "every German must be a Nazi", then Beuys in the 1950s said that "every human being must be an artist", and for this in all his sculptural works he marked the polarity between life and art, or between human being and nature.
Beuys is the most recognized German post-war artist and his posthumous work is in the city of Kassel, a city devastated by the war in 1945, where 7000 oak trees (symbol of nature) and 7000 basalt stones (symbol of nature) have been planted. human race) next to every tree, meaning that humanity must always be next to nature.
This unification between each tree and its attached basalt stone promotes a new function that surpasses that of each individual element.
So you always have to experiment with art and products?
Look in Art it is possible to experiment given the individual and the scarce monetary investment but in Industry and Services you have to be very careful in calculating both the implementation and the non-implementation of the innovative idea.
How is that about non-implementation?
Imagine that a great idea is discovered in your company and then a group of consultants calculates the cost of implementing it.
That cost is balanced against the potential value, which is usually additional money either for increased sales or reduced operating costs.
But the more creative an idea is and if we assume that it will be highly innovative, it becomes more difficult to determine its potential value and this is the reason why managers do not implement it due to its high cost.
But the problem is compounded by the fact that managers generally know quite a bit about how to implement ideas in their industry but fail to calculate the cost of not implementing it.
Sometimes the calculation of not implementing the idea is easy, especially if the idea saves costs. For example, if the breakthrough idea promises to improve the efficiency of your production line by $ 500,000 and will reduce the cost of production by $ 500,000, then the cost of implementing the idea the first year will be zero, because the cost of implementing equals saving cost.
But then we will have in the second year a savings of $ 500,000. And if we think about increasing sales by ten percent per year and five years of production life, then the cost of not implementing the idea is $ 2.5 million.
We see that this cost of not implementing the idea (2.5 million) is much higher than the 500,000 dollars of implementing it. So not implementing the innovative idea is a huge, costly mistake.
But many other times you have to work hard to know the cost of not implementing the innovative idea.
Suppose for a moment that your company is a global leader in high-tech pens that record voice when you are writing, but one of your technicians provides you with technology that reads and records the user's mind, whatever they are thinking.
In such a case, this new technology is expensive to implement and its sales potential cannot be predicted. And you don't want to do market research to warn your customers what you plan.
Suppose the cost of implementing the idea is $ 50 million and the potential for return is unpredictable, which can be minimal or great, because this technology was not tested outside of the laboratory and requires a special cap that reads the mind and this makes users afraid to use it.
So you decide in view of the risks not to implement the innovative idea and save 50 million but what is the cost of not implementing the idea?
That cost is hardly predictable but you should also consider that competitors may have also thought of the same idea.
And what if your competitor makes the pen that reads the user's mind?
Two things can happen.
That the product fails and ruins your competitor.
But it can also happen that the product is a success and then you will lose sales and reputation and if you want to enter the new market it will be a bit late.
In other words, you will have a permanent future loss of sales and reputation. This which seems fantasy is not.
It has already happened in several companies, for example Polaroid, General Motor in several models of high-end cars and in Microsoft with Encarta, the dictionary encyclopedia.
Since its launch in 1978, the Polaroid has been a success, and was an icon of the instant photo in seconds for two decades.
But today any digital camera provides a photo and it is easily printed on any common printer, because Polaroid failed to exploit digital technology between 1990 and 1995, and in 2001 Polaroid went bankrupt, assisted by the US government.
History is full of companies that did not implement new technologies and that other competitors, even with much less capital, took a large part of the market.
So it is just as important to calculate the cost of implementing an innovative idea as it is of not implementing it. It is understood?
Even seriously consider that the cost of not implementing an innovative idea and your competitor doing so can cause your business to fail in the short term.
What kind of training are companies asking for today?
Every day more companies orient training towards a technical side.
By means of a questionnaire it is possible to clarify the objectives pursued and it is normal that after an introduction to TRIZ content that make improvements in processes, products or services are re-considered.
In this sense, I comment that TRIZ uses a series of tools that guide it towards effective and sustainable solutions through a systematic process but do not prevent it from obtaining reliable data and using its experience.
My opinion is that if you require technical training you should use triz since otherwise using intuition or imagination it will be very difficult for you to quickly access efficient alternatives.
I teach seminars at a Corporate University and at the Interamerican Virtual University, and in all cases triz is essential for the sustainability and progress of said Organization or of the participants, seeing that the results are highly effective when dealing with real and existing problems and not ramble on subjective content or a philosophy of creativity.
It is not news since Arcor, Intel, EDS, Motorola, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Ford, Boing, Kellogs, GM, Ford, Toyota, Rockwell, Honeywell, Xerox, Kodak, Mercedes-Benz, BMW are working in the same direction., Siemens, Volkswagen, Johnson & Johnson, Mitsubishi, Emerson Electric, Proctor Gamble, McDonnell-Douglas, Allied-Signal, NASA, Lockwell, Hewlet-Packard, Kimberley-Clark, 3M, RollsRoyce, Samsung and Metrogas.
I firmly believe in Corporate Universities, which I think will be future universities, because the added value they provide is the possibility of connecting learning with the organizational or corporate strategy, in a coherent way and also by adapting to changes in both the company and the from the people.
In other words, the contents that are appropriate to each time and place should be treated, giving the possibility to technicians, engineers, scientists, technologists, etc. to modify their professional profile based on individual career plans.
