Editor | On 22, Aug 2007

Ellen Domb

Wednesday morning started with Harry Flotemersch conducting a “Management Think Tank” workshop—he used the conference participants’ questions to pair them up and structure sessions for mutual help. Real Innovation Commentators Praveen Gupta and I had the most international table—people from Korea, South Africa, Wales,  California and Chicago exchanged experiences with the interface between Six Sigma and innovation.

Regina Clark from Left Brain Leverage offered to “Enhance your Creative Thinking and Output with 10 Strategies to Support Innovation.”   She distinguished between your personal creativity and the innovative culture that is needed to encourage and support creativity.   Much of the presentation was an overview of all the tools, methods, processes, and systems for stimulating creative thinking that abound in the corporate training environment.

Karen Brandenburg from Nokia has an unusual background combination – Six Sigma Black Belt and Dale Carnegie instructor.  Her paper on “Integrating the Voice of the Customer into your Innovation Process to Ensure You Provide Exactly What your Customer Wants” comes directly out of the company’s Finnish cultural background as well as its standing with 30% world market share in mobile telephony.  She engaged the audience in the challenges of satisfying the end user, when the purchasing customer is NOT the end user.

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Praveen Gupta and Harry Flotemersch

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The conference organizers announced an informal dinner during the day yesterday—I didn’t go, because some of us had semi-organized a Chicago-area TRIZ discussion group for that evening.  

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Alan Miller, Jeff Middlesworth, Ellen Domb, Praveen Gupta, Jay Bronek, Joe Miller