Editor | On 28, Dec 2004

By: Ellen Domb and Michael Slocum
editor@the-trizjournal.com

The Italian weather and the TRIZ community were in harmony this week—it was a glorious 3 days in Florence! Early notice: next year TRIZ Futures Conference will be in Graz, Austria—plan now to attend.

The European TRIZ Association has a very generous definition of “Europe”—there were participants from Korea, China, Japan, US, Mexico, and all of Europe. We all owe thanks to the organizer, Gaetano Cascini of the Universita degli Studi di Firenze, co-founder of Apeiron (The Italian TRIZ Association) and member for the Global Coordination Group of ETRIA. He had excellent support from students and staff at the university, for all the work needed to bring so many people together for a successful event.

The proceedings of the conference are available from www.etria.net
Day 1: Valeri Souchkov presented a multilingual (Italian/English) tutorial, followed by a wide variety of case studies of applications of TRIZ to technical and business problems–everything from vegetable packaging to medical textiles to a mosquito trap to inventory management. Applications of many TRIZ tools were demonstrated, with contradiction resolution, the system operator, ideality improvement, and use of alternate science/technology featured most often.
Day 2: Victor Fey delivered the keynote address “ Why does TRIZ fly but not soar?” as an introduction to the day’s sessions.

Methods integration and interactions: TRIZ with lean, with other creativity tools, with axiomatic design, and as a cornerstone for integrated business/management excellence systems Knowledge and Intellectual Property Management: New databases and new analytical methods and new software from universities in Florence and Toulouse and from software entrepreneurs in China

Innovation strategies: from SMEs to world wide corporates: Research and case studies of patterns of change in companies as they investigate or adopt TRIZ.
Visit to Leonardo Museum and dinner of Tuscan specialties. See the picture collection!
Day 3: Hansjurgen Linde and Gunther Herr delivered the second keynote address, “Professional strategic innovation contra innovation management.” This provided a structure for the rest of the day’s sessions and discussions.

Development and implementations of TRIZ Theory: University reports on teaching methods, research findings and on new conceptual models.
TRIZ education: University reports on student case studies and on development of integrated tools for innovation, sustainability, and for digitial electronics. New Opportunities & fields of application: This session had the widest variety—new consulting methodologies, new training systems, the tetrahedral model for integrating the patterns of evolution, TRIZ analysis for history of technology, and more cases and methods of propagation of TRIZ in organizations.

The afternoon concluded with the ETRIA business meeting.
Those of you who read the papers in The TRIZ Journal should be encouraged to attend future mettings. The discussions between the audience and the speakers greatly enhance the papers.

ETRIA Photo Album:

Cavalluci and Cascini

Domb and Fey

Edgardo Cordova Lopez

Audience

Hipple, Lin, and Duan

Lee and Sawaguchi

Slocum