The founding members are pleased to announce the founding, on 15 October 2000, of the European TRIZ Association, ETRIA.

ETRIA represents an initiative aimed at developing a web-based collaborative TRIZ and systematic innovation development environment. The organization is targeted at the creation of connecting links between any and all institutions concerned with conceptual questions pertaining to the creation, organization, and efficient processing of innovation knowledge and innovation technologies.

ETRIA intends to function as a connecting link between industrial companies, institutions, educational organizations and individuals concerned with conceptual questions pertaining to organization and processing of innovation knowledge.

TRIZ is considered as a cross-disciplinary, generic methodology, but it has not previously been adequately presented in terms of logic or any other formal knowledge representation. Most of the concepts introduced in TRIZ are fuzzy, and most of the techniques are still heuristic and only partially formalised. For further development and conceptual re-organization of the TRIZ knowledge base, ETRIA shall involve and collaborate with TRIZ experts and professionals from the fields of logic, organization science, informatics and linguistics.

ETRIA has been set up to accomplish the following tasks:

• Promotion of research and development on the organization of innovation knowledge in general and in particular fields by integrating conceptual approaches to classification developed by artificial intelligence (AI) and knowledge management communities;

• International observation, analysis, evaluation and reporting of progress in these directions;

• Promotion on an international level of the exchange of information and experiences of scientists and practitioners in TRIZ, of universities and other educational organizations;

• Development of TRIZ through contributions from dedicated experts and specialists in particular areas of expertise.

To achieve these tasks, ETRIA will form an open community which will unite the efforts, suggest opportunities for global standardization, conduct further research and development, and provide mechanisms for the exchange of information and knowledge on TRIZ and TRIZ based innovation technologies.

ETRIA will provide:

1. Web-based access to our content and subscription of individuals and corporate clients to our online services;

2. A distributed collaborative TRIZ environment with a set of interactive electronic services based on state-of-the-art content management and Web portal development technologies;

3. A formal framework for opening new discussion forums and research initiatives;

4. Promotion and education of the best business practices and guidelines for industrial and educational organizations;

5. Accounting for cultural diversity, to ensure access to the content by people, speaking different languages, and having different cultural background.

ETRIA is planned as a non-profit organization.

During the initial period the Association has derived a decentralized organizational structure built around the core group of ETRIA-founders in different European countries.

ETRIA will do most of its work with a mandate from subscribed members. Proposals for opening a new discussion group or research initiative will be reviewed by the Coordination Group and, when consensus between members of the group and invited experts to pursue the work is reached, a new forum, discussion group or research initiative will be launched.

The lead ETRIA project will involve the technical implementation of modern tools for building, organizing and maintaining web-portals targeted at knowledge exchange, dissemination and management.

The first phase of the project will last 12 months and will focus on the following

1. Structuring of existing TRIZ techniques and development of a general framework for analysis of innovative problems, generation of new solutions and intellectual property.

2. Establishing relationships between previously unrelated TRIZ techniques on the basis of introducing sharable ontological concepts and developing general framework for mapping between designer’s requirements and specific procedures defined by TRIZ.

3. Defining criteria for selection of TRIZ procedures for innovative design and metrics for evaluation of solutions.

4. Building a vocabulary of ontologically defined TRIZ terms and concepts that will enable further development of TRIZ-related knowledge bases.

Organization of the ETRIA web-based collaborative environment

Membership of the organization will be open to any corporation, university, individual, partnership, governmental body or international organization, which accepts and supports the objectives and tasks of ETRIA.

For further information about the ETRIA activities and membership please contact a member the ETRIA Coordination Group in your nearest country.

For further information about the TRIZ Innovation Methodology please use the links to the Websites of ETRIA-Founders in your preferred language.

ETRIA will be holding a world TRIZ conference ‘TRIZ Future 2001’ in November 2001. The conference is aimed at an audience who already knows what TRIZ is, and is looking for a forum in which they can expand their knowledge and share research and exploitation ideas. The conference will be convened as a Workshop style event, combining formal paper presentations from TRIZ experts, working group panel discussions and informal networking with the finest TRIZ expertise available.

The overall theme of the conference is twofold – firstly ‘defining future TRIZ strategy’, and secondly

‘industry experience and requirements’.

Abstracts for papers to be presented at the Conference are invited. Relevant topic areas of interest include:

New developments of TRIZ and Knowledge Management tools and methods
Advanced applications and approaches
Integrated systematic innovation tools, methods and strategies
Industry Requirements

Interested parties are invited to submit a title and 200 word abstract of their proposed paper, along with a brief biography. Submissions, including author’s name(s), company, address, phone, fax, and e-mail should be sent to a member of the ETRIA Coordinating Committee at any of the above e-mail addresses.

Further details of the TRIZ Future 2001 conference will appear in future months. For the moment, prospective authors and attendees should make a note of the following dates:

• Abstract deadline – 31 March 2001

• Full papers due – 16 May 2001

Conference – 7-9 November 2001

A full set of proceedings will be made available at and after the conference.