Editor | On 07, Sep 2009

By Amir Roggel

Industry News

At TRIZ-Fest 2009 Martha Gardner was the keynote speaker. Gardner is a GE Global Research Quality Leader. She champions TRIZ as part of the company’s world-wide quality program, which is propagated to all of its research centers, including the addition of the introduction to business units.

Young-Ju Kang introduced Hyundai Motors. He spoke about how Hyundai has developed a cadre of Level-3 resources with many successes in its car designs. There were seven participants from Samsung – three Koreans, including a Samsung TRIZ Association leader, a TRIZ leader for Samsung Electronics and four Russians (including two TRIZ Masters).

Academia

Three of the newly elected MA-TRIZ board members are professors/academics and the board is now truly international with:

• Professor Song from Korea
  
• Kurosawa San from Japan
  
• And Professor Leonid Chechurin

Chechurin established and heads the innovation theory department at St. Petersburg Polytechnical University and he developed the full curricula to be propagated next year to 50 universities in Russia. Chechurin spent several years in Korea (LG, Samsung, university) working on the algorithm part-time.

Board Diversity

The first woman was elected to the MA-TRIZ board: Irina Sigalovsky, PhD in Biology and Medicine (U.S. universities: brain research, neurobiology). Sigalovsky lives in Boston, works for GEN3 and her mission as a board member is to educate and teach TRIZ to companies and standardize MA-TRIZ for English/Russian international organizations.

Overall stats: Japan, Korea, Israel (one participant each), U.S. (four participants: Mark Barkan as president for a second term, Simon Litvin, Sergei Ikovenko and Sigalovsky) and two from Russia (Chechurin and Alex Kudryavtsev). There is discussion to go by Gaetano Cascini’s board retirement “will” key items and making MA-TRIZ bilingual (English first, then Russian) as well as establishing academic standards.

TRIZ Theory

A full day of TRIZ theory summit was conducted prior to the broad conference. In addition,four candidates for Master’s theses presented theoretical works. Three of them passed and received the appointment of Master.

Audience Diversity

Approximately 90 participants from 12 countries: South Korea (9), Netherlands (2), Israel (2), Japan (1), Taiwan (1), Finland (1), Germany (1), and the rest from the U.S., Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Belarus.

The oldest attendee was 86 years old with multiple honorary tags from his service as a soldier in World War II. The youngest was Max, a 9 month old baby who came with his mom- the TRIZ educator for disabled children.