Editor | On 11, Jan 2018

Ellen Domb

I experienced great joy today when I read that the TRIZ Journal is being re-launched, under Darrell Mann’s ownership.  I hope that the TRIZ Community will join me in thanking Darrell for taking on this responsibility.  I look forward to seeing how Darrell’s technical and business creativity will improve the TRIZ Journal and its interaction with the TRIZ community of researchers, authors, readers, practioners, teachers, and students.

Why get excited about the re-launch of a website?    It happens every day, right?  Maybe a brief history of The TRIZ Journal will help new readers understand.

Jim Kowalick and I organized the first English language conference on TRIZ in California in 1995, and realized that there was nowhere to publish the conference papers unless we started a technical journal ourselves.   But having done “paper” publishing as members of academic societies, we also didn’t want the work of traditional publishing.   We resolved the contradiction by using a new resource—we started a web-based journal, with no paper version.   The first “issue” was released in November, 1996.   To calibrate your thinking, this was 2 years before Google was founded.   We invented the concept of sending e-mail to a list every time the website was updated.   We had to tell several libraries that we could not send them a paper version, but they were welcome to print it themselves, but they didn’t believe us and wanted copyright releases.   Yes, the concept of web publishing was new—there were no blog tools, etc.

BUT the TRIZ Journal was what the nascent TRIZ community needed.   Jim and I wrote all the articles only for the first issue.  We had articles from Canada and the Netherlands and Israel and Finland before the next few months went by, with a good mix of case studies, tutorials, and proposals for integration of TRIZ with other methods.   Our first UK article came from Darrell in August, 1998,  “Digging your way out of the psychological inertia hole.”    He became our most frequent contributor over the next decade, and we became co-authors and conference presenters as well.

The founding of the Altshuller Institute in 1998 and the European TRIZ Association in 2000 followed by AMETRIZ, and the TRIZ societies in India and Taiwan and China and the German-speaking countries and Japan and Korea and Italy and Malaysia (and many others) gave the TRIZ Journal access to many papers, since each organization started local conferences, and we persuaded them to allow the authors to publish in the TJ as well as in the conference proceedings.   TRIZ Journal became the way that people who could not travel to the conferences could read the best of each event and then write their own contributions.

Michael Slocum joined me as co-editor in 1998, when the job editing and producing a monthly TJ was getting overwhelming, and he continued for more than 10 years.   I appreciate this opportunity to thank Jim and Michael for making the early success of TJ possible.

In 2006 we sold TJ to CTQ Media, owned by Michael Cyger, who published the well-known ISixSigma magazine and ISixSigma.com.   He launched a portal called Real Innovation, edited by Katie Barry, with the TRIZ Journal as the first element and many other innovation methods as well.   The professional management was quickly visible in improved graphics, on-line Q&A, etc.   Regular publication of TJ stopped in late 2010, with several ownership changes, but we owe thanks to Michael Cyger for keeping the archive alive through this difficult period.

In 2015 BMGI bought the TJ, and started publishing again, with Phil Samuel as editor-in-chief.   Phil is a TRIZ instructor and researcher. He brought to TJ an extensive experience with Six Sigma and other improvement methods and did a great job integrating historically important articles with new work.   And of course using the web tools of THIS decade helped a lot!   BMGI’s long history of making libraries of research available to the public as well as to their own clients showed in their elegant production.

And now it is 2018, and Darrell Mann is re-launching TRIZ Journal.  I’m sure he’ll tell us the why and how of his decision.   I started this note with my joy at the news, and I’ll end by wishing all readers a joyful experience learning TRIZ and sharing TRIZ learning with others.   The best way to thank the publisher/editor of a journal is to send articles for them to publish, so please express your gratitude and joy by sending Darrell your reports.

Best wishes to all for a happy, healthy, prosperous, and peace-filled 2018.