Japan TRIZ Symposium Continues
Editor | On 01, Jan 2010
Message: 2017Posted by: Ellen Domb
Posted on: Sunday, 1st May 2011
Toru Nakagawa was in a planning meeting for the 2011 Japan TRIZ Symposium when the earthquake hit last month. In his current newsletter http://www.osaka-gu.ac.jp/php/nakagawa/TRIZ/eTRIZ/ he completes his report on the 2010 meeting, and presents the plan for the 2011 meeting, which will be held as scheduled.
Message: 2021
Posted by: Michael Lyubomirskiy
Posted on: Sunday, 1st May 2011
paper abstracts from 2010 are interesting reading. The people quoted seem to divvy up into those interested in software and those interested in management and training. That being said, it is unclear how representative they are of Japanese TRIZ practitioners – it may well be that the majority of them are actually engineers solving the more traditional technical problems and not publishing papers. Then again, maybe not; I have not heard of TRIZ training of engineers in Japan on the same scale as we have seen in Korea.
The business oriented people in this articles selection seems to represent the creativity related strain of TRIZ thinking that borders on and may be in the process of merging with similar contemporary teachings like that of de Bono. The more analytical strain of modern TRIZ is represented by Ikuo Yoshizawa et al which inter alia seems to include some attempt at function analysis.Of the software related papers, Satoshi Hasegawa et al seems to deal with electrical engineering patents whereas Yojiro Fukushima et al appears to be a bona fide effort at making a state of the art contribution to software development per se. What exactly they are proposing is not clarified.As a programmer I don't doubt the utility of TRIZ analytic tools for inventing new and useful things in the domain, at least once the practitioner avoids the very common pitfall of equating software systems' analytical components with their source code files and similar implementation nitty gritty. Nevertheless, I will also point out that people like Yojiro Fukushima could have easily contributed a lot more to their software industry by promoting training and understanding of software engineering patterns by college students, college graduates and software professionals. There is a great deal of collective wisdom about architecture in the software profession, but at present the process of transmission of it and the average level of competence among practitioners so poor (especially when dealing with patterns underlying systems that the practitioner has not already spent years working on) that the biggest bang for the buck lies not in inventing new analytical techniques but rather in developing effective ways of inculcating the old ones into present and future industry practitioners. While this will not lead to invention of revolutionary new software tools (in the same way as spreadsheet or browser were revolutionary) it certainly will lead to high labor productivity of thousands of highly paid software engineers. And regardless, given how amorphous the TRIZ discipline is, even such research could be pulled off easily under the generic TRIZ label by people so inclined.Yet, nevertheless, it is also true that many inventions await in the broad potential solution space for problems that can be solved using software tools, and TRIZ methods will likely contribute to obtaining them.