Be Innovative: By Design, Accident Or Both?
An IBM ad suggests that businesses only invest in what customers want – not what they need. This either/or has to stop; both are needed in an effective innovation effort.

Case Study: Integrating TRIZ Into Six Sigma
Six Sigma operates based on the assumption that the solution to a problem is contained within the process under investigation. TRIZ, which can solve the problem outside of the process boundaries, is a necessary to Six Sigma to solve external solutions.

Case Study: Reduce Traffic By Resolving Contradictions
The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) requires the identification of contradicting parameters and then converting the problem into a contradiction between corresponding generic parameters – one parameter improving vs. another parameter worsening.

Case Study: Using TRIZ to Forecast Technology
TRIZ is emerging as a powerful scientific tool that helps decision-makers to make strategic forecasting decisions. Assessment of a company’s current technology should drive the direction of the R&D planning process.

Creativity and Innovation: Try River-Jumping
Innovation is vital to a company’s growth. It is sensible to establish a work environment that encourages people to be creative – a prerequisite to innovation.

Define and Quantify Customer Value – Reveal the Needs
The role of an innovation champion is to connect various needs and their solutions so that synergy is created faster, cheaper and without failure – understanding and empathizing with its customers before defining value.

Empathic Design: Innovation & Observation – Part I
Defining the undefined. Impossible? Maybe not. This article looks at how anthropology can push beyond consumers’ indifference.

Emphatic Design: Innovation & Observation – Part 2
Anthropological studies show a Japanese company how to change their perceptions of their customers and, therefore, their product offerings.

Fantogramma: A Technique for New Fantasy Ideas
Fantogramma is a powerful thinking tool for producing new science fiction and fantasy ideas in a systematic way.

Find the Ideal Final Result
The Ideal Final Result (IFR) tool has a solid base in innovation science. Beginning with a problem’s optimal end expands the creativity stage by removing all obstacles from the situation. The IFR increases benefits while simultaneously decreasing costs and harm.

Leave Dogmas Behind to Meet Unmet Market Needs
Indesit’s introduction of its “Graffiti” line of refrigerators is an excellent example of innovation – representing a freeing the mind to enable the discovery of unmet market needs.

Local Problems Lead to Ideal System Solutions
Problem solving at the sub-system, local level can be inefficient. By defining a problem and attempting to solve it without regard for the entire system, there exists the risk of local optimization, with global non-optimization.

Make Innovation More Reliable, Predictable & Pervasive
The lack of innovation is more a function of complacency than of natural constraint. Unusual business success has always been a function of uncommon sense, not of common sense – if common sense says innovation has to be rare, then common sense wrong.

Map a Problem to Reveal Opportunities for Solution
When a company needs to find a problem’s solution, it is important to consider a comprehensive perspective of the system in question prior to problem solving, which provides a framework upon which to base decisions concerning what problem to solve.

Nine Steps to Create a Great Customer Survey: Part One
While it is important to ensure that surveys are targeted to the right audience, confidence in the development and implementation of a survey is even more vital. To prepare a successful survey, practitioners should follow nine basic steps.

Nine Steps to Create a Great Customer Survey: Part Three
To prepare a successful survey, practitioners should follow nine basic steps. The final three steps, which follow the survey through its execution and analysis of results, are explored here.

Nine Steps to Create a Great Customer Survey: Part Two
To prepare a successful survey, practitioners should follow nine basic steps. The fourth, fifth and sixth steps, which relate to what types of questions to ask and how they will be asked, are explored here in Part Two.

People as a Source of Breakthrough Innovation
Partnerships focused on the customer change product offerings in this case study about Philips Design.

Resolved: The Most Powerful Way to Touch People is Through Screens
In this Fast Company conversation, two business leaders discuss the importance of the “screen” not merely for presenting information, but for capturing information.

Resolving Contradictions with 40 Inventive Principles
Innovation practitioners can all benefit from one of the basic concepts of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) – at the heart of many problems is a contradiction, and much of innovation involves solving the contradiction.

Seeking – and Measuring – Innovative Ideality
Regardless of how extensively you deploy a systematic innovation engine, one of the first steps you take is to define your ideal state. The IFR can also be used to create the perfect solution to strive for in problem solving.

Six Sigma and Business Innovation: Process or Passion?
A discussion of the relationship between Six Sigma and innovation is a discussion of process and passion.

Slashing Product Development Time in Financial Services
A global financial services company knew it took 18 months to get new nationwide variable annuity products to the market. Cutting development time would be smart.

Teamwork and Creativity Help to Identify Root Causes
Creativity and team management tools, more often employed for solution finding than for root cause finding, can generate understanding of the process mechanics and help a team prepare for a distilling of the “essential few” root causes of a problem.

Ten Arguments in Favor of Invention-on-demand
There are ten main findings from successfully delivered invention-on-demand projects. The following ten statements were developed during the research process of non-typical consulting projects.

Tools to Forecast Technology Innovations
Making strategic decisions for product development is one of the most difficult challenges for the research and development (R&D) staff of a business. Assessment of a company’s current technology should drive the direction of the R&D planning process.

Using Analogies to Develop Breakthrough Concepts
Both the classical and software-based TRIZ methods rely heavily on the use of analogy as a teaching method and as a problem solving method. Typically, the TRIZ practioner decides what problem to solve and then redefines the problem.

Using Ideality to Improve Solar Panel Release in Space
A problem solver’s objective is to increase the useful functions (numerator) at a rate greater than any consequential increase in the harmful functions (denominator) – this forces a system’s evolution that also increases a system’s ideality.

Using Innovation to Address Unmet Customer Needs
Too few companies step back, review their products and services and assess how well their offerings meet the customer’s requirements. This lack of self-assessment leads to limitless lost opportunities for innovation.

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