Case Studies Archives - The Triz Journal
Investments – No-Drill Dentistry
22/04/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
The best solutions fix the problem ‘by themselves’. Great for the customer; not so great for the company looking to monetize their great new self- solution. Or the investor… unless they manage to find a novel service innovation … Read More
Case Study: I Want A List, I Don’t Want A List
19/04/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
I admit it, I’m a list-demon. I have a quadruple-hierarchy list structure: a day list, a month list, a year list and an ‘important, but doesn’t fit anywhere yet’ list. The system has evolved over the course of … Read More
Patent of the Month – Self-Replicating Materials
12/04/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
Here’s one we first started tracking back in 2012. Most ‘self-‘ solutions are interesting. This one seemed to offer up more than most. The ultimate factory! Now, as of December 8, the patent has been granted. US9,206,471 was … Read More
Rethinking R&D Strategy
05/04/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.†Wernher von Braun
Look at most R&D strategies and one of the most likely things you will see is how incremental and focused on … Read More
Investments – 3D-Printed Heart
25/03/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
BIOLIFE4D, a Chicago-based company, has created a small 3D-printed human heart. The heart has the same inner-workings as a full-sized heart and was entirely 3D-printed. BIOLIFE4D’s 3D-printed human heart was created using cells from cardiac muscle, which are … Read More
Patent of the Month – Negative Refractive Index Meta-Materials
15/03/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
Patent of the month this month takes into another foray into the realm of so-called ‘negative materials’. Or, as seems to be becoming more popular, ‘left-handed materials’. Which has a certain ring to it, if you happen to … Read More
Innovation Capability Maturity & Complexity
08/03/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, ‘all happy enterprises are alike; each unhappy one is unhappy in its own way’. About six months ago now (time flies!) we assembled our first version of the Complexity Landscape Model (CLM) (Reference 1). … Read More
The Operationally Excellent Sinking Of The Titanic
01/03/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
One of the most enduring workshop features in the TRIZ community is the ‘save the Titanic’ exercise first conceived by Ellen Domb. Nominally it is about resources, and as such often gets used alongside the 9-Windows tool. In … Read More
Investments – Electrocatalysis Reactor
26/02/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
CO2 could be repurposed in an efficient and environmentally friendly way with an electrolyzer that uses renewable electricity to produce pure liquid fuels. The catalytic reactor developed by the Rice University lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Haotian … Read More
Who Do They Think You Are? (Measuring Mental Gears)
16/02/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
Take a look at the following list of words:
Now imagine someone who knows you really well looking at the same words. Which is the word or phrase they would choose to best describe how they see … Read More
Patent of the Month – Bioelectrochemical Bioremediation
09/02/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
Some months are better than others. Some weeks are better than others. The first week of September saw a swarm of below-average patents. The second week, on the other hand gave us several candidates for this Patent of … Read More
The ABC(-M) Of Workshop Design
02/02/2020 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
Most times people tell us they ‘get’ something, it means they don’t. I hear the word all the time with S-Curves. Everyone, it seems, these days ‘gets’ the theory, but the moment they’re put in a situation … Read More
Investments – Sound Projector
22/01/2020 | EditorDarrell Mann
A University of Sussex research team have demonstrated the first sound projector that can track a moving individual and deliver an acoustic message as they move, to a high-profile tech and media conference in LA.
Dr Gianluca Memoli … Read More
Deming’s Fourteen Points & Innovation
19/01/2020 | EditorDarrell Mann
When there was such a thing, I was a regular attender at British Deming Association meetings and conferences. This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Deming’s thinking – in the UK at least – was at … Read More
Patent of the Month – Joining Dissimilar Materials
12/01/2020 | EditorDarrell Mann
Our patent of the month this month takes us to a quartet of inventors at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Washington State. US10,369,748 was awarded to the team on August 6. The invention takes us on a rare … Read More
Measuring Innovation ROI – #1 Big Picture
05/01/2020 | EditorDarrell Mann
“When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.” John Muir
“To demand … Read More
Investments – Negative CTE Materials
25/12/2019 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
Scientists have created materials that shrink uniformly in all directions when heated under normal everyday conditions, using a cheap and industrially scalable process. This potentially opens up a new paradigm of thermal-expansion control that will make electronic devices … Read More
Constructed Crisis?
15/12/2019 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
The main thesis of last month’s Book of the Month, Crisis & Renewal, is that real change only happens when there is a crisis. This creates a potential problem for innovation teams, because, turning the book’s finding the … Read More
Patent of the Month – Plasmonic Structures
08/12/2019 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
We head to the University of Manchester for our patent of the month this month. US10,345,490 was granted on July 9 to a trio of inventors, two of whom are Nobel-Prize winners. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novos won … Read More
EpiPens & Natasha’s Law
01/12/2019 | Kobus CilliersDarrell Mann
This is a photo of Natasha Ednan-Leparouse, recently boarded on a plane from Heathrow to Nice in the South of France. Approximately two hours after this photo was taken, Natasha was tragically pronounced dead. She suffered from extreme … Read More