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ME59700 INNOVATION AND PROBLEM-SOLVING WITH AN EMPHASIS ON TRIZ TOOLS School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University Target Audience You have hard problems that have eluded solution for months or even years. You want to be a problem solver but haven’t found a framework that takes you beyond mere concepts without quantification (many popular design theories or idea generation methods). You want to perform work that cannot be commoditized or automated or replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Your problem may be any of product/service/organization/policy design or analysis. Course Material Understanding the objective function, developing problem representation and system modeling based on…

My wife and I like to travel and we travel a lot. Recently we spent three weeks in China, but when the vacation was over, we had to return to work. I came to my workplace, entered my cubicle, and, as on any other day, opened the laptop and connected to the company’s systems. Pretty quickly I realized that those three weeks are too short for vacation but very long to be disconnected from work. Many things happened, and I needed to make up the leeway to get up to speed with everything that had happened and related to my…

We often hear about our brain’s very different left and right halves or hemispheres and benefit from that knowledge. In contrast, we are less conscious of our conscious and subconscious thinking and the powerful interaction between them. Let’s rectify that imbalance. We are very aware of the capabilities of our conscious mind. It explicitly drives our work and lives. With our conscious mind, we are thinking and we know it. In contrast, cognitive processing in the subconscious mind occurs without our awareness. The biggest thinking player is our subconscious mind. Conscious cognitive processing is the tip of the iceberg; subconscious…

Ranking options or items is not a trivial process. The main problem that usually people try to make a decision and select one out of all the items or options. This is the wrong way. The ranking is a kind of problem that should be solved using the relevant problem-solving tool. Many people asked me when should they use Round-Robin Ranking (RRR) provided here, in the PRIZ Platform? Why can’t I make the choice on my own? How difficult that can be? After experiencing the power of RRR myself several times, I decided to write this short post and give…

Are you looking for a Task Priority Management tool? We have a fabulous tool to recommend to you. We are excited to announce a recent release of an additional Creative Thinking Tool in PRIZ online innovation platform, Urgency – Importance Matrix (UIM). This tool is built to help you to avoid mistakes, save time in managing tasks priority and make decisions. The new tool is a practical instrument for task priority management. Urgency – Important Matrix is most effective in conjunction with Roun – Robin Ranking (RRR). Why’s Getting Your Priorities Right So Crucial? When you nail your priorities, you’re…

En mis más de 15 años de experiencia en la industria, he escuchado el principio básico de la Calidad “Lo que no se mide no se mejora”, pero por otro lado leyendo a Deming diciendo: “una gestión numérica sustituye el Liderazgo ya que todos los empleados buscarán el número por cualquier medio…”, bajo esta filosofía hasta dónde y porqué es necesario medir… Durante mis años de inspector de Calidad, medíamos y con la llegada de ISO tuvimos que validar nuestras mediciones a través de la calibración y medición de la incertidumbre, así como revisar los indicadores de manera semanal. Ya…

We all need to make a lot of decisions by choosing and ranking items/options on a daily bases. Sometimes it looks easy but often takes a long time to make the decision. It is not easy to choose one option out of several. It seems paradoxical, but our decision is typically driven by trying to avoid a mistake rather than searching for a bigger benefit. We are more afraid of making a mistake than to not get what we need. Our fear of losing is stronger than the desire to acquire. The difficulty of decision-making depends on the chance of…

Let’s analyze the problem solving process. From our perspective, Functional Modelling (one of the well-known TRIZ tools) is the best way to analyze a system. An additional article describing Functional Modeling (FM) in greater details will be prepared and published later on. For the purpose of this discussion, we are going to provide a very brief explanation of how the Functional Model tool helped me to investigate the problem solving process. At a high level, the principles of FM tool are as follows: All relevant components of a system are mapped and connected with arrows according to an existing functional…

We are all problem solvers. We solve problems every day and everywhere. Whether we innovate or invent is inconsequential if we actually solve the problem. A patent is a documented act of solving a certain problem. Any article, paper or even advertisement on any type of achievement is actually a type of documentation announcing that the problem was solved.  Where do problems come from? Did you try to understand their origin when you were met with them? Let’s start from the beginning, from ideality. The ideality equation formulated by Genrich Altshuller in the form of the law states: “The development…