TRIZ Forum:


TRIZ Activities in Iran (2)
Applying TRIZ for promotion of TRIZ

Mahmoud Karimi (Iranian Inst. of Innovation & Technological Studies (IIITS), Iran)
Mar. 24, 2010

[Posted on Mar. 24, 2010; Updated: Apr. 18, 2010]

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Editor's Note (Toru Nakagawa, Mar. 24; Apr. 18, 2010)

I received this nice article this afternoon for this Web site.  I have translated it into Japanese and post it here both in Japanese and in English.  In English I will show the PDF file only, at moment. (Mar. 24, 2010)

After coming back from a two-week vacation, I am writing this note on Apr. 18, 2010:

This is the second article on the TRIZ Activities in Iran, written by Mahmoud Karimi.  The first article , posted in this Web site on Feb. 22, 2010, has revealed the history of activities of introducing and penetrating TRIZ in Iran.  Their activities are amazing and even shocking to us TRIZ people not only in Japan but also in many other countries, who have had very little information on TRIZ in Iran.

Since I received his first article last December, I have been requesting Mr. Karimi one thing; i.e., another article on his way and thoughts on TRIZ activities written in a less formal way. He wrote the first article in a so official and modest manner that his own name/acivities/thoughts never appear in the article even though the author should have contributed much to the activities.  On my request, Mr. Karimi has written this second article in a frank and vivid manner on his thoughts and activities. 

This article has been prepared as a basis of the Author's Keynote Lecture to be presented at the coming Japan TRIZ Symposium 2010 in September .  I am very happy to be able to post it on this Web site before the Symposium.  This article helps the Author prepare for the Symosium, but even more it helps us understand the Keynote Speaker beforehand.  With this article we can learn about the TRIZ activities in Iran, which we rarely have direct/personal information, and about its young leader Mr. Karimi.  Please go ahead to read the article.  Its interesting and pleasant to read.

 

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TRIZ Activities in Iran (2):
Applying TRIZ for promotion of TRIZ

For “Japan TRIZ Symposium 2010”

Mahmoud Karimi
Iranian Institute of Innovation & Technological Studies (IIITS)
Representative of ETRIA in Iran
Member of Systematic Innovation Network (SIN)

karimi@iiits.org
Tel. +98 (21) 22242656 Fax: +98 (21) 22247474 Mobile: +98 912 1546782

 

I can remember several stories about living with TRIZ since the first time I knew about it. Suppose that you hear one strange word for the first time. You have no background about it and cannot guess where it comes from. Still I meet many people who ask “What is TRIZ?” If they have heard about me and my field of expertise, they guess it should be related to creativity, or sometimes compare it by Value Engineering.

It was around 2000 when late Prof. Dr. M. Hosein Salimi and his Ph.D. candidate Eng. S. Hosein Iranmanesh found TRIZ term on papers. At the same time in Iranian Institute of Industrial Engineering (IIIE.ir) we were working on new subjects for the training committee.

Now I return to the story of TRIZ in Iran and review what has done with TRIZ for TRIZ promotion. Or I have to honestly say how we use TRIZ thinking approach for running the TRIZ approach. Using Media is one of our discovered ideas in this way. In this article I am going to explain some of these stories briefly.

(1) Learning TRIZ

The first step in the initial stage was gathering the proper amount of knowledge about TRIZ. What we found on the web was not enough for understanding the body of knowledge of TRIZ and also A to Z of its application. Different methodologies introduced on the papers by the authors from west to east of world. Result of thinking about similarities and differences of paper contents was having more questions. Several tools, versions of approach and abbreviations added to our question list day by day. How we can find the answers properly?

Participating in a TRIZ course overseas was a standard solution. But among other topics in a new established, none for profit academic organization and without any fund, how we can get the board member permission for this request. Also there was not reasonable amount of academic resources in the oversea universities. No one - even the new comers Ph.D. from best universities - did not know about it. So naturally TRIZ should go down in the ordered subject for training in IIIE. But we like to learn about it.

Solution: Resources

What about a fare solution? Could we find it? In what extend the board accept our proposal for TRIZ course? What will happen if we inform them that all the seats for a TRIZ course in IIIE has reserved by the participants from industry? They will agree and the president (Prof. Salimi) will defense this solution in the meeting as he is interest too.

We think about the Resources in TRIZ approach. What resources do we know and have for this case? Who rely on our offer for a new training subject? Who are looking for innovation? Which companies pay more attention to R&D? Who will invest on related to innovation issues more? The potential clients listed. Some information based on 6 WH questions (why, what, who, when, where, how) gathered for a flyer and we started negotiation to have no seat blank. So the first TRIZ course conducted by Prof. Miloslava Zinovkina and Prof. Rifkat Gareev from Russia.

TRIZ Workshop-Tehran-2001
Middle: Prof. Dr. Miloslava Zinovkina and top of her: Dr. Rifkat Gareev
Top row, seated, 2nd one from left: Mahmoud Karimi
Ladies row, from right, 2nd one: Nona Mirkhani (my wife), 3rd one: Sara Salimi

Quality and quantity of this workshop and problems like training material, presentation in Russia and executive problems have their own separate stories.

We supposed that we need to have some people as resources to hold a TRIZ course to be able to participate by ourselves too. The next year by a group of these people we hold level II of TRIZ workshop again with the 2nd level I.

This story is somehow similar to “One Student University” of G. Altshuller while he was in prison. Here in our story, we tried to find the majority of registered students for TRIZ course while we were the minority. Nested Doll principle applied and we found solution to learn more about TRIZ.

And then this learning process followed by invitation of Darrell Lee Mann and other well known TRIZ specialists.

(2) Promotion of TRIZ in newspaper

Looking to the monthly agenda shows me that most of the time we attended in the similar meetings to say managers and experts of companies what TRIZ is. As they have just searched over the web and have not clear and processed information we had to answer their basic questions.

Usually they need more information to trust TRIZ. We are faced by requests for examples and case studies in their business area. They need explanation about differences between TRIZ and other problem solving methodologies, its efficiencies, success stories of application TRIZ in Iran and so on.

We supposed this meeting and level of people information about TRIZ as a problem: Could we have any solution to increase the level of information of all managers, experts, staffs and those people who we think they should know TRIZ, without spending time in meetings? Could we arrange one meeting for all people even those we do not know them? There should be lots of people who looks for a methodology like TRIZ, but they do not know it, how we find each other?

Thinking to such questions we ask this one from ourselves: If TRIZ can solve problems, we should solve our new problems too and people needs to see how we apply it for ourselves too.

First we generate some standard solutions. If we want to inform people about a new thing we can inform them by publishing some hard copies like flyers and brochures. Or we can order some advertisements in the most popular newspapers. I think about ideality and formulate most desirable results. Cost, number of copies of newspaper like Hamshahri and Jam-e-Jam per day, amount of information on each advertise, trust of people to an advertisement and other issues discusses.

I want to publish as much as possible information about TRIZ to inform them about what, why, when, who, where and how it works. They need to know the benefits and advantages of TRIZ. But I want to have it free. Let’s look at the newspaper page to see how they accept a free regular things even it may be not an advertisement. So we discover the solution as a “column”. If we have a weekly column for TRIZ we can go closer to ideality.

Again Resources

Who should be attracted about TRIZ to issue the permission for a column? As Pareto law learned me I can do 20% efforts to gain 80% of results. Instead of spending lots of time in meetings, I have to talk to the editor of one of the most popular newspaper to publish this column. So I looked for resources in newspapers and find the editor of science page in Jam-e-Jam as one my former colleagues in IIIE. She trusted me and found the subject interesting. We arranged a meeting and among many generated ideas, “Innovation Elixir” was chosen as the name of this new born column in 2004. I did not stay just on TRIZ and write about problem solving techniques, tools, examples, cases and also creativity.

In Innovation Elixir weekly column usually one of the concepts briefly introduced (for example Function, Ideality, Contradiction, and also some of the 40 principles), then an example explained and analyzed (like Sapparo Dome; football and baseball stadium in Japan). Like telling some secrets behind the creative solutions readers’ feedback were interesting and column had fans. At the end of column, I had some motivation questions to involve readers with the concept of the day and their life problems (personal and work life).

Issue 1341 - Volume 5 - 20 January 2005- Jam-e-Jam newspaper - Page 10
Innovation Elixir Column (Left)
Title: Unique Stadium - by Mahmoud Karimi

 

This column was followed by 2 years and then we switched to the most popular IT weekly “Click”. In this one I used to write about special issue of the week in “Click” and analyze it by 9 Screen and Trends. Here they assigned bigger column in the middle pages of weekly. Usually I finished the article by a science fiction in the content of defined issue; what will happen in the future if we change the system, super system and sub system, or what we will have if we follow this trend of evolution.

Issue 147 - 14 July 2007 -“Click” IT Weekly appendix of Jam-e-Jam newspaper - Page 08 and 09
Looking from the 9 Windows (Left)
Case: Mobile Phone - by Mahmoud Karimi & S. Nona Mirkhani

The publication department of newspaper institute planned to publish the revised version of Innovation Elixir column as a book. It is in progress now.


PDF Filie  (6 pages, 976 KB)

 

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Last updated on Apr. 18, 2010.     Access point:  Editor: nakagawa@ogu.ac.jp