TRIZ Paper: Japan TRIZ Symposium 2009 Keynote 
| TRIZ Paper: Japan TRIZ Symposium 2009 Keynote |
|
| TRIZ: Necessary But Not Sufficient: Customers And Theories Of Everything | |
| Darrell Mann (Systematic Innovation Ltd, UK) | |
| The Fifth TRIZ Symposium in Japan, Held by Japan TRIZ Society on Sept. 10-12, 2009 at National Women's Education Center, Ranzan-machi, Hiki-gun, Saitama, Japan | |
| Introduction by Toru Nakagawa (Osaka Gakuin Univ.), Nov. 22, 2009; Japanese translation on Apr. 17, 2010. | |
| [Posted on Apr. 18, 2010] |
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Editor's Note (Toru Nakagawa, Apr. 17, 2010)
This paper was presented as the Keynote Lecture at the Fifth TRIZ Symposium in Japan, 2009
, which was held September last year by 'Japan TRIZ Society, NPO'. This is an excellent Keynote talking on an amazingly big vision and its tools based on the Author's 8-years research. Presentation slides are posted in PDF both in Enlglish and in Japanese translation (by Yoshihisa Konishi), in the Official Site of Japan TRIZ Society and again in this Web site. I wish to thank Mr. Darrell Mann, Dr. Yoshihisa Konishi, and the Japan TRIZ Society for their permisions of my posting.
Last November I posted an introduction to this lecture as a part of my Personal Report of the Symposium
As announced in a separate page
[1] Abstact
TRIZ: Necessary But Not Sufficient:
Customers And Theories Of EverythingDarrell Mann (Systematic Innovation Ltd., UK)
Abstract
As suggested by the TRIZ trend, all systems pass through successive phases of increasing and decreasing complexity. Mankind’s understanding of the world has likewise followed a similar pattern; sometimes, as through the 20th Century, the dominant paradigm was increasing specialisation and fragmentation of knowledge. At other times, during the Renaissance for example, synthesis and integration of knowledge fragments has occurred.
Thanks at least in part to the work of the TRIZ researchers, it looks again as though a period of consolidation has again begun. What TRIZ has done to map and integrate the world of technology, others have been doing in the worlds of biology (Margulis), physics (Einstein), social history (Strauss & Howe), psychology (Graves), literature (Brooker), religion (Wilbur) and economics (Mandelbrot, Gilmore & Pine).
The paper examines the various compatibilities and contradictions between the numerous different domain-specific ‘Theories Of Everything’ and explores the possibility that we may soon be entering a period where a synthesis of these domains into a higher-level Unifying Theory becomes feasible.
Given the apparent lack of successfully commercialised innovations with a clear TRIZ start point, the paper will pay particular attention to, what the author believes to be the biggest single missing-piece in the TRIZ toolkit, that being the anthropological study of populations in general and ‘customers’ in particular. We show that the majority of attempted innovations fail not because the chosen solution was necessarily ‘wrong’, but rather because it was either the ‘right’ solution to the ‘wrong’ problem, or that it was the ‘right’ solution at the wrong time.
In discussing this failure to properly understand the tangible and, particularly, intangible motivations and timing-drivers of ‘customers’, the paper summarises some of the key findings of an eight-year programme of research to uncover the DNA of what motivates people to spend their money on something new. A final section of the paper draws a few tentative conclusions and recommendations aimed at helping companies to increase their innovation success rate.
[2] Presentation Slides of the Keynote Lecture in PDF
Presentation Slides in English in PDF
(56 slides, 2.2 MB)
Presentation Slides in Japanese in PDF
(56 slides, 3.0 MB) (Japanese translation by Yoshihisa Konishi (Sozo Kaihatsu Initiative (SKI)))
[3] Introduction to the Presentation (by Nakagawa)
Excerpt from:
Personal Report of The Fifth TRIZ Symposium in Japan, 2009, Part A
by Toru Nakagawa (Osaka Gakuin University), Nov. 22, 2009
Posted on Nov. 23, 2009 in "TRIZ Home Page in Japan"Darrell Mann (Systematic Innovation Ltd., UK) [EI02 K-2] gave the second Keynote Lecture on the third day morning with the title of "TRIZ: Necessary But Not Sufficient: Customers And Theories Of Everything". This is an amazingly big title. We, the Symposium organizers, invited Darrell Mann knowing his very wide range of work and activities, and asked him to talk about his big vision or big-scope of thinking on Systematic Innovation, rather than specific topics such as TRIZ (or systematic innovation) in IT/Software. Even though not an easy task, I would like to introduce you the main contents of his lecture here using about 20 slides, because a full paper is not requested/prepared for this lecture. [The presentation slides have been posted publicly in the Official Site of Japan TRIZ Society [and in this Web site]. You may access the PDF file directly:
[and Apr. 15, 2001] ]
The main motive of this lecture is to clarify why more than 90 % of projects fail to deliver their products to the market and why more than 90 % of such products fail to succeed in the market, or fail to innovate. The Author notices there are so many tools which should support innovations (see the slide below-left) and even more publications of business books (see the slide below-right). For clarifying these problems and establishing some effective methodology, the Author has been conducting an extensive and yet intensive research for these 8 years with a team of researchers, he says.
For clarifying the situations, the Author believes the necessity of having suitable 'Maps of the World', or 'Maps of Everything'. One of such Maps is shown below. The slide (upper-left) is the basic scheme having 4 boxes divided by the Internal/External worlds and by singular/plural persons. The Author interprets the four boxes as the basic functions of a business system and added the 'Control' function (for making the system 'Complete' in the sense of TRIZ); thus the boxes represent the tools and means of product development and market delivery (See the slide upper right). With this framework the Author has classified various tools and methods, as shown in the slide (bottom-left). Selecting the most useful tools in each box, the Author shows the 'Five Innovation DNA strands' (bottom-right). Here you see the picture of Mr. Altshuller in the upper-right box.
The Author's classification of numerous ideas in these methods and business books is amazing, as shown in the slide (below). As you see, the table here intends to be 'All the insights in one place' and its format is adopted from the Periodic Table of Atoms in chemistry. The first insight (i.e. in the Hydrogen position) is Tr (Trends), and the second (in the Helium position) is Id (Ideality). The insights at the second row are Sd (Spiral Dynamics), Fa (Function analysis), Nl (NLP), Ip (Inventive Principles), Fd (Function Database), Sf (Software Factories), Sl (SLP), and Fu (Functionality). The Author says this is a result of his research for these 8 years and still under the way.
On these bases of thoughts, the Author now discusses the requirement for successful innovations. His main statement is shown in the following slide. "Innovation happens when the Voice of the customer matches with the Voice of the system." And he believes the main task for us to make an innovation is to find the real Voice of the customer, and hence the main research task for us is to establish effective ways for finding the real Voice of the customer.
The Approach proposed here by the Author is schematically summarized in the following slide (below). [This slide is also named as 'Maps of the World' because the Author wants to map all the ideas (or insights) shown in the previous slides in this framework, I suppose.] In this approach, we should first follow the steps shown in the downward triangle for clarifying the Voice of the customer and for identifying contradictions where various trends may have to face with in the near future. Then we should try to solve such contradictions and to realize new products, by going up the steps (though not shown in any detail) in the upward triangle for achieving the Voice of the system.
| The first step, i.e. the META level of clarifying the Voice of customer, is relatively clear (see the slide (right)). It is to clarify the Functionality which the customers want to perform in their jobs. |  |
For the second (MEGA) step, the Author proposes to use a few methods together. (a) First method is to think of the customer's (or consumers') lifecycle and the population change in your country (or in the world of your interest).
(b) The second method at this step is to think of the characteristics of generations of customers. The Author has adopted the idea of 'Generation Cycles' by W. Strauss and N. Howe (1997). The basic idea is that the manner in which you were raised by your parents in turn influences how you raise your children. For the case of US/UK after the World War II, a model of four generation cycle was proposed (slide below-left). Assuming such characterization of generations of people and their behavior changes with their age, the characteristic cultural changes in people are schematically shown in relation to calendar year and age of people (slide below-right). This implies cultural shifts in young/adult people at the borders of the characterized generations. [The characterization of generations may differ, of course, depending on countries, but the ideas of generation cycle and generation shift may be applicable widely.] |
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(c) The third method is the consideration of people's characteristic behavior, on the basis of Spiral Dynamics (see below). The Author, Darrell Mann, evaluates the work by Clare Graves highly, saying about it "the social and psychological equivalent of TRIZ: study and distillation of the way the world works". Spiral Dynamics characterizes 8 levels of human thinking/behavior (given by the color codes) as shown in the slide (upper-right). Human behavior is typically motivated in two directions, i.e., pleasure seeking and pain avoiding (see the slide lower-left). Any person or human organization grows upward in a spiral manner following these levels and containing them as its inner layers. People at a certain level have their typical value thinking, thus they can be regarded as a group of customers. In the slide lower-right, people are categorized with the levels in Spiral Dynamics and the patterns in the Generation cycle. Several examples of people's behavior are shown in this framework; for example, 'Ms. Independent' is understood as females of NOMAD type at the 'scientific' level. This way of characterizing people is important and stable because it is based on the people's sense of values.
Then we now come to the third, MICRO step of revealing the Voice of customers. Here we want to capture various trends of customers, society, or markets. But once we found some logical trend relevant, the future deviates quickly, the Author writes (upper-left slide). As an example, the trend of 'I-want-It-Now/Life-on-the-Credit' is shown in the slide (upper-right), and the Author recognizes many trends enforcing it and also many others contradicting against it. The Author did a research first to list up about 1000 such trends, and to think of the enforcing and contradicting relationships among them. The slide (at the bottom-left) demonstrates (just a part of) the interrelationships among them, with the heading 'Everything is connected to Everything else'. The Author is suggesting that the contradictions among relevant trends takes us to the 'critical point' [just as discussed in Boris Zlotin's presentation] and needs to be solved for achieving an innovation. Darrell Mann's framework for finding/achieving the matching between the Voice of customers and the Voice of the system is shown again at the end (bottom-right).
*** This lecture is based on an very extensive and intensive research. We can learn a lot in this lecture and also from the Author's publications.
--- As is announced separately, the "TRIZ Home Page in Japan" Foundation has presented Mr. Darrell Mann an Award for his contributions and services over many years in the field of TRIZ and Systematic Innovation
Last updated on Apr. 18, 2010. Access point: Editor: nakagawa@ogu.ac.jp
