Success Stories

The companies listed here consider TRIZ to be their newest "secret weapon" and have requested that their identities be kept anonymous.

• Company Profile A
  A leading "document" company
• Company Profile B
  A leading international oil exploration company
• Company Profile C
  A leading space exploration, aerospace, and defense firm
• Company Profile D
  A small medical products firm

Company A
One of the leading "document" companies

"We've always been at the edge of technology. We often lead the marketplace with new, innovative products and processes in the "documentation" business sector that we are in. In fact, we're one of the top three companies in this business.

Foreign competition is particularly tough. Inventions, patents, and intellectual property are key elements in our success. We are constantly on the alert for new tools and approaches which will support our efforts and make them more productive.

For example, we began implementing Taguchi Methods when ASI first introduced it to U.S. companies, and it has done well for us. For new product innovation, we've always depended on the brilliance and expertise of our people.

Recently, we found out about an approach which would leverage our innate creativity by orders of magnitude-this approach is called TRIZ. Our first in-house TRIZ training was attended by twenty of our most creative "minds."

Everyone attending brought along a complex engineering or scientific "problem" or new design challenge. After just four days, everyone left with more than one conceptual solution. Several of these will no doubt result in patents.

We left the training with the realization that this was not just another creative approach. This represents a new strategic R&D initiative within our corporation. We're only in the beginning stages of implementing TRIZ now, but already we are realizing major benefits.

What our strategic approach will do to our competitions' market share-we don't even bother to think about. That's their problem!"

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Company B heard about some leading edge tools which could be applied to its operations and products. A top manager attended an overview course, which was followed by three days of on-site training, attended by their world-wide management and professional staff.

TRIZ and Taguchi Methods were two of the new tools which were immediately adopted. This all happened less than two years ago.

Taguchi Methods have been used to significantly increase the reliability of both electronic transducers and well operations.

In the case of TRIZ, some very costly problems were solved right in the workshop, even before candidate projects had formally been identified and selected!

Three corporate patent attorneys attending realized the importance of applying TRIZ to establish a corporate patent umbrella to protect the intellectual property which emerges from this creative approach. What they could not know prior to the training (but realized afterwards) was that patent umbrella protection could be accomplished in two years or less.

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When you think of space exploration and aerospace, you think of Company C, always pushing technology limits-for example in the area of "power sources" and "exotic transducers."

Company C's technical staff came to a TRIZ workshop with extraordinarily complex problems and challenges, and left with patentable solutions.

They found that the "errors" from the tedious approach called Trial & Error were absent-after a few days they had an average of over a dozen conceptual design solutions for each problem or design challenge they had brought with them.

Their inventiveness didn't stop after they left the training. Today, those teams are training other corporate teams in the TRIZ approach.

While they have found it difficult to assess the cost savings value of TRIZ to their R&D operations, they figure it to be on the order of several million dollars each year. They also see a potential spinoff from these designs into products for commercial aviation.

What they were most excited about was not just the rate of inventions they could conceive (which was measured in dozens/person/hour), but also the levels of inventions achieved by the teams.

TRIZ is now a part of their corporate culture, and it took less than half a year for it to catch on.

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Company D
A relatively small medical products firm

Company D had a legal problem. They were first to come up with a design. Licenses to competitors followed that development. One of their competitors then turned around and legally prohibited them from producing what they had initially invented.They stood to lose their international market for the related product line.

TRIZ offered them alternative designs-many from outside the field of medical technology. Today, Company D is developing several of those designs, which are simpler than the original design.

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