How combinations of TRIZ tools are used in companies – results of a cluster analysis

Many engineers and natural scientists in companies are using tools directly or indirectly related to the theory of inventive problem solving (abbreviation derived from the Russian title: TRIZ) by Altshuller (1984, 1996) . Some of the TRIZ tools are based on the application of condensed technical knowledge, others are special techniques for directed creativity. The usage of TRIZ and its tools should lead to improvement of efficiency within the innovation process as well as to more and smarter problem solutions.
More than 40 reported applications of TRIZ in companies show that usually not the whole set of TRIZ tools is used. This is surprising, because in the original TRIZ literature all the tools are recommended for usage in a classified order named ARIS (Russian acronym for 'algorithm for inventive problem solving'). A cluster analysis of the applications reveals that there are three subsets: (i) basic TRIZ, (ii) resource and ideality-based TRIZ, and (iii) substance-field based TRIZ. This leads to important consequences: TRIZ training and TRIZ implementation should be structured according to the three subsets.     

The Relationship of Individual Capabilities and Environmental Support with Different Facets of Designers' Innovative Behavior

Theoretical perspectives on employee creativity have tended to focus on an individual's capability to generate original and potentially useful ideas, whereas definitions of innovation also include the process of putting those new ideas into practice. This field study therefore set out to test how theoretically distinct types of individual knowledge and skills are related to different aspects of employees' innovative behavior in terms of both their new idea generation and idea implementation. Using a sample of design engineers (n = 169) in a multinational engineering company, measures were taken of different aspects of innovative work behavior (patent submission, real‐time idea submission, idea implementation) and a range of individual capabilities (creativity‐relevant skills, job expertise, operational skills, contextual knowledge, and motivation) and environmental features (job control, departmental support for innovation). Analyses showed that creativity‐relevant skills were positively related to indices of idea generation but not to idea implementation. Instead, employees' job expertise, operational skills, and motivation to innovate demonstrated a stronger role in idea implementation. In terms of environmental factors, job control showed no positive relationship with innovative work behavior while departmental support for innovation was related to employees' idea generation but not idea implementation. The theoretical perspective that correlates of idea generation differ in certain aspects to those for idea implementation are confirmed by the study. Practical implications for organizations wishing to improve their innovativeness are discussed in terms of tailored training, development, motivational, and environmental interventions designed to improve the capabilities of individuals to engage in all parts of the innovation process.     

TRIZ创新方法在化学工艺研发中的应用

本文介绍了用TRIZ创新方法解决生产过程中流程问题,以化工研发项目“碳纤维增强聚醚醚酮复合材料的制备与性能研究”为例,通过利用TRIZ理论中的功能分析、因果分析、冲突理论、物场模型、知识库、创新原理等方法,得到了若干个解决问题的方案,完善了制备复合材料过程中的制备工艺,并提高了复合材料强度。     

Learning creativity and design for innovation

This paper puts the case for using a pedagogical framework based on the principles of grammatical design in conjunction with conventional creative problem solving strategies in higher education to foster learning for innovation and creativity. It explores the design and delivery of an inaugural creativity and innovation course that used a combination of individual and group projects to explore the combinatorial use of creative problem solving strategies and grammatical design schemas. Using established creative thinking evaluation techniques and reflective practice journals offers a powerful path for the creative development of innovative ideas. Testing (Torrance, Creativity in the classroom, 1977) found that the figurative based creative thinking scores of an experimental group of non-designer undergraduate students significantly improved according to pre and post course tests. Two dimensional and three dimensional design assessment tasks were completed in conjunction with a series of creative problem solving teamwork sessions. Standard SELTS course evaluation also strongly suggests there is value in the active teaching of creativity strategies for the recognition of valuable problems and the development of innovative solutions.     

Do Train‐or‐Pay Schemes Really Increase Training Levels?

Reacting to perceived market failures leading to under‐optimal levels of firm‐sponsored training, governments all over the world have stepped in with various policy instruments to alleviate this problem, using incentives such as regulation or co‐financed schemes directed at firms or at individuals. Despite the widespread use of these schemes, rigorous empirical evaluation of such policies is uncommon. In this paper, we provide a careful evaluation of a reform in a train‐or‐pay scheme used in Canada that exempted medium‐sized workplace from the training requirement. Our identification strategy involves comparing changes in training levels in medium‐sized workplaces, before and after the reform, to changes for both smaller and larger workplaces. We also compare relative changes in training intensities to those observed in a neighboring province in which no such changes took place. We find the policy had no impact on training levels but caused firms to change their human capital investments portfolio, substituting informal and formal training.     

An International Investigation of Problem‐Solving Performance in the Semiconductor Industry*

Using a unique survey of engineers in major semiconductor companies located in Japan, South Korea, and the United States, this article analyzes how a firm's human resource (HR) system (i.e., practices that structure work, develop skills, and reward performance) and knowledge system (i.e., information access, sharing and control) are related to the problem‐solving performance of engineers. Because of the short product market life cycles in the semiconductor industry, expeditious problem solving is an important performance goal. Therefore, this article examines the performance of engineers in terms of the time it takes them to solve problems in the context of their firms' HR and knowledge systems. It was anticipated during this study that externally oriented organizational systems, which support individual career performance and mobility (an externally oriented HR system) and the use of private knowledge sources (an externally oriented knowledge system), would be associated with superior performance in terms of problem‐solving speed. The findings support this hypothesis and demonstrate the importance of externally oriented HR systems and at the same time suggest the surprising insignificance of the orientation of the knowledge systems. These findings are applicable to engineers in the sample from the United States, whereas the findings for the Korean and Japanese engineers are inconclusive. International variation is found where the U.S. engineers work under the most externally oriented and the Japanese engineers under the least externally oriented systems, and the Korean engineers fall in between. The findings of this article suggest that when constructing a work environment for new product development, managers should take into account how the underlying components of their organizational systems contribute to an internal or external focus, and how this orientation may influence performance.     

The Vital Role of Problem‐Solving Competence in New Product Success*

Problem solving, a process of seeking, defining, evaluating, and implementing the solutions, is considered a converter that can translate organizational inputs into valuable product and service outputs. A key challenge for the product innovation community is to answer questions about how knowledge competence and problem‐solving competence develop and sustain competitive advantage. The objective of this study is to theoretically examine and empirically test an existing assumption that problem‐solving competence is an important variable connecting market knowledge competence with new product performance. New product projects from 396 firms in the high‐technology zones in China were used to test the study's theoretical model. The results first indicate that problem‐solving speed and creativity matter in new product innovation performance by playing mediator roles between market knowledge competence and positional advantage, which in turn sustains superior performance. This new insight suggest that mere generation of market knowledge and having a marketing–research and development (R&D) interface will not affect new product performance unless project members have the ability to use the information and to interact to identify and solve complex problems speedily and creatively. Second, these results suggest that different market knowledge competences (customers, competitors, and interactions between marketing and R&D) have distinct impacts on problem‐solving speed and creativity (positive, negative, or none), which underscore the need to embrace a more fine‐grained notion of market knowledge competence. The results also reveal that the relative importance of some of these relationships depends on the perceived level of turbulence in the environment. First, competitor knowledge competence decreases problem‐solving speed when perceived environmental turbulence is low but enhances problem‐solving speed when perceived turbulence is high. Second, competitor knowledge competence has a positive relationship with new product performance when the environmental turbulence is high but no relationship when the environmental turbulence is low. Third, the positive relationship between problem‐solving speed and product advantage is stronger when the perceived environmental turbulence is high than when it is low, which implies that problem solving is more important for creating product advantage when environmental turbulence is high and change is fast and unpredictable. Fourth, the negative relationship between problem‐solving speed and new product performance is stronger when the perceived environmental turbulence is high than when it is low, which means that problem‐solving speed is more harmful for new product performance when change is fast and unpredictable. And fifth, the positive relationship between product quality and new product performance is stronger when perceived environmental turbulence is low than when it is high, which implies that product quality may more likely lead to new product performance when the environment is stable and changes are easy to predict, analyze, and comprehend.     

ASIT—a problem solving strategy for education and eco-friendly sustainable design

There is growing recognition of the role teaching and learning experiences in technology education can contribute to Education for Sustainable Development. It appears, however, that in the Technology Education classroom little or no change has been achieved to the practice of designing and problem solving strategies oriented towards sustainable design. Brainstorming, Brainwriting, SCAMPER, Metaphoric Thinking, Outrageous Thinking, Mind Mapping and other problem-solving strategies used in the classroom could be suitable for eco-design, however, there appears to be little research data on their use. This paper examines and presents the ‘Advanced Systematic Inventive Thinking’ (ASIT) system as an eco-design strategy. ASIT is derived from a more complex engineering-based problem solving strategy known as TRIZ (the Russian acronym for The Theory of the Solution of Inventive Problems). Drawing on Stable’s (in press) call for new approaches to address sustainable design and achieve solutions through Technology Education, this article traces the history of TRIZ and the development of ASIT. It then argues that the ASIT strategy can be an effective methodology to be taught and used in the Technology Education classroom to solve problems in the ‘eco’ or sustainable design context. Several design scenarios have been included to illustrate how ASIT can deliver eco-design solutions to problems. These examples demonstrate the flexibility of the methodology and the diverse range of applications in which ASIT can be applied.     

Creativity in technology education: providing children with glimpses of their inventive potential

This article examines the claims of the school subject technology education (called Design and Technology in some countries) as a vehicle for inculcating creativity in the curriculum, by introducing children to the world of problem solving and invention. Core foundational underpinnings of the subject are explored, including its hands-on nature, its open-endedness, and its encouragement of generative cognitive processes. Issues relating to the teaching of problem solving are discussed. Examples of curricular approaches to the subject are set forth and their merits as bases for encouraging creative thinking are examined. Research on creativity in the subject is reflected upon briefly. The paper concludes by offering problem solving; and analogical, metaphorical, combination, and divergent thinking, as possible bases for pedagogy in technology education, and calls attention to the subject as a possible fruitful area of research based on creativity in the school curriculum.     

Why do off‐shored Indian call centre workers want to leave their jobs?

Employee turnover is a major problem in off‐shored Indian call centres. Agents who service Western customers often face hostility and racial abuse because of who they are and where they are located. A substantial part of job‐related training focuses on teaching employees to manage their identity and modify their accent. Based on a sample (n = 211) of Indian call centre workers servicing international customers, we explore these issues and investigate how they affect employee turnover intentions. The study utilises Taylor and Bain's (2005) distinction between factors particular to the Indian context and those more generic to the call centre labour process to better understand the drivers of turnover. We found that a number of distinctive factors including accent modification difficulty, stigma consciousness, racial abuse and perceived favouritism were associated with turnover intentions. The study also revealed that certain job‐related factors related to intentions to leave, including routinisation and poor promotional opportunities.     

Consequential creativity

Creativity is an original cognitive ability and problem solving process which enables individuals to use their intelligence in a way that is unique and directed toward coming up with a product. Architectural education is one of the fields in which human creativity has been exhibited; because, it can be defined as a design study that correlates with other disciplines: social sciences, management, history, operational research, philosophy, graphic design, math and etc. These features which distinguish architecture from other disciplines ascribe different kind of responsibilities for architectural education; since beside technical and professional skills, an architect must have imagination and to be creative at many levels. Thus, this research aims at proving that students can be trained in creative thinking via acquiring specific skills and systematic techniques, which directly acts on design product. The study methodology depends on the concept of experimental research that targets at exposing students to creative problem solving experience via carrying out a creative training course that concerns “Consequential Creativity”. That experiment examined the potentiality of enhancing the students’ ability of viewing problems in non-traditional perspectives that counts on the systematic procedures of problem solving. Tools for assessment before and after training have been implemented. The Experiment findings proved that the students’ creative thinking skill has been clearly improved after attending the course. Therefore, training in creative thinking can be considered as independent courses or within specific architectural curricula.     

The Impact of a Creativity‐supporting Work Environment on a Firm's Product Innovation Performance

Many scholars and practitioners have suggested that a creativity‐supporting work environment contributes to a firm's product innovation performance. Although there is evidence that such an environment enhances innovative behavior at individual level, very few studies address the effect of a creativity‐supporting work environment on product innovation performance at firm level, and the results are inconsistent. This paper examines the relationship between a firm's creativity‐supporting work environment and a firm's product innovation performance in a sample of 103 firms. For measuring a firm's creativity‐supporting work environment, a comprehensive and creativity‐focused framework is used. The framework consists of 9 social‐organizational and 12 physical work environment characteristics that are likely to enhance employee creativity. These characteristics contribute to the firm's overall work environment that supports creativity. The firm's product innovation performance is defined by two distinct concepts: new product productivity (NP productivity), which is the extent to which the firm introduces new products to the market, and new product success (NP success), which is the percentage of the firm's sales from new products. In most firms, different knowledgeable informants provided the data for the variables. The results show that firms with creativity‐supporting work environments introduce more new products to the market (NP productivity), and have more NP success in terms of new product sales (NP success). NP productivity partly mediates the relationship between creativity‐supporting work environment and NP success. The mediation model shows that the two paths from a creativity‐supporting work environment to NP success are about equally important: the direct path between creativity‐supporting work environment and NP success has a coefficient of .22, and the coefficient of the indirect path via NP productivity is .23. The creativity‐supporting work environment framework can be used in managerial practice to enhance employee creativity for product innovation. It allows applying a flexible and broad approach by influencing both social‐organizational and physical characteristics of the work environment.     

Does a long‐term orientation create value? Evidence from a regression discontinuity

Research summary : In this paper, we theorize and empirically investigate how a long‐term orientation impacts firm value. To study this relationship, we exploit exogenous changes in executives' long‐term incentives. Specifically, we examine shareholder proposals on long‐term executive compensation that pass or fail by a small margin of votes. The passage of such “close call” proposals is akin to a random assignment of long‐term incentives and hence provides a clean causal estimate. We find that the adoption of such proposals leads to (1) an increase in firm value and operating performance—suggesting that a long‐term orientation is beneficial to companies—and (2) an increase in firms' investments in long‐term strategies such as innovation and stakeholder relationships. Overall, our results are consistent with a “time‐based” agency conflict between shareholders and managers. Managerial summary : This paper shows that corporate short‐termism is hampering business success. We show clear, causal evidence that imposing long‐term incentives on executives—in the form of long‐term executive compensation—improves business performance. Long‐term executive compensation includes restricted stocks, restricted stock options, and long‐term incentive plans. Firms that adopted shareholder resolutions on long‐term compensation experienced a significant increase in their stock price. This stock price increase foreshadowed an increase in operating profits that materialized after two years. We unpack the reasons for these improvements in performance, and find that firms that adopted these shareholder resolutions made more investments in R&D and stakeholder engagement, especially pertaining to employees and the natural environment. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collaborative Prototyping: Cross‐Fertilization of Knowledge in Prototype‐Driven Problem Solving

This paper presents an inductive study that shows how collaborative prototyping across functional, hierarchical, and organizational boundaries can improve the overall prototyping process. Our combined action research and case study approach provides new insights into how collaborative prototyping can provide a platform for prototype‐driven problem solving in early new product development (NPD). Our findings have important implications for how to facilitate multistakeholder collaboration in prototyping and problem solving, and more generally for how to organize collaborative and open innovation processes. Our analysis reveals two levels of prototyping. Besides the more formal managerial level, we identify the informal designer level, where the actual practice of prototyping takes place. On this level, collaborative prototyping transforms the act of prototyping from an activity belonging exclusively to the domain of design engineers to an activity integral to NPD, with participants from within the organization (different functions and managers) and from outside (consultants and users). In effect, this collapses the discrete steps in the prototyping process (at the managerial level) to an essentially continuous process of iterative problem solving (at the designer level) that is centered around the collaborative prototype, which allows participants to see their suggestions implemented and exposing them to the design constraints. The study, moreover, shows how, at various stages of the prototyping process, the actual prototype was used as a tool for communication or development, thus serving as a platform for the cross‐fertilization of knowledge. In this way, collaborative prototyping leads to a better balance between functionality and usability; it translates usability problems into design changes, and it detects emerging usability problems through active engagement and experimentation. As such, the collaborative prototype acts as a boundary object to represent, understand, and transform knowledge across functional, hierarchical, and organizational boundaries. Our study also identifies some constraints in involving the appropriate stakeholders at the right time. The paper specifically elaborates on the role of users in collaborative prototyping, which is important in order to cover all phases of the problem‐solving cycle but triggers an interesting challenge due to the “reverse empathy” that a user may develop for the design constraints—parallel to the designer empathy for the user context. Finally, our study shows that despite the continuous nature of the (designer) practice of prototyping, there are certain windows of opportunities (at the managerial level) during which the collaborative prototyping approach actually leads to changes in the product design.     

Industrial sales emphasis across the life cycle

Life-cycle stages require changes in both operations and management styles. Different personnel sales skills, qualities, and motivation are optimum for the various phases of industrial product life cycles. Early phases require creativity and informality. Growth phases require emphasis on operational planning, staging, training, optimism, problem solving, and stamina. Mature phases demand emphasis on efficiency, administration, judgement, and conservatism. Cutback phases place a premium on “hard-nosed” decisiveness, objectivity, judgement, and courage.     

Interorganizational Collaboration and Innovation: Toward a Portfolio Approach*

In the literature on innovation, interorganizational collaboration has been advanced as beneficial for the innovative performance of firms. At the same time, large‐scale empirical evidence for such a relationship is scarce. This article examines whether evidence can be found for the idea that interorganizational collaboration supports the effectiveness of innovation strategies. This article empirically addresses this research question by analyzing data on Belgian manufacturing firms (n=221) collected in the Community Innovation Survey, a biannual survey organized by Eurostat and the European Commission aimed at obtaining insights into the innovation practices and performance of companies within the various European Union (EU) member states. Tobit analyses reveal a positive relationship between interorganizational collaboration and innovative performance. At the same time, the impact on innovative performance differs depending on the nature of the partner(s) involved. These findings strongly suggest the relevance of adopting a portfolio approach to interorganizational collaboration within the context of innovation strategies.     

Crossing Disciplines: A Constraint‐Based Model of the Creative/Innovative Process

This paper argues that artistic creativity and organizational innovation share a common problem‐solving process. The process per se is presented as a complement to the jazz metaphor for understanding organizational innovation. As modeled, it involves paired constraints that limit and direct search for a solution path. One of each pair identifies something to be precluded; the other specifies its substitute. The process can be initiated by necessity or by design. Once begun, the process is iterative: one substitution pair necessitates another. The creation/innovation is the novel solution path created by the substitution series. In‐depth analyses of two artistic creators are accompanied by allusions to parallel examples in organizational innovation.     

Problem‐formulation and problem‐solving in self‐organized communities: How modes of communication shape project behaviors in the free open‐source software community

Research summary: Building on the problem‐solving perspective, we study behaviors related to projects and the communication‐based antecedents of such behaviors in the free open‐source software (FOSS) community. We examine two kinds of problem/project‐behaviors: Individuals can set up projects around the formulation of new problems or join existing projects and define and/or work on subproblems within an existing problem. The choice between these two behaviors is influenced by the mode of communication. A communication mode with little a priori structure is the best mode for communicating about new problems (i.e., formulating a problem); empirically, it is associated with project launching behaviors. In contrast, more structured communication fits subproblems better and is related to project joining behaviors. Our hypotheses derive support from data from the FOSS community. Managerial summary: We study how the way in which individuals communicate influence the project‐behaviors they engage in. We find that relatively unstructured communication is associated with the setting up new projects, while communication that is structured around an artifact is associated with joining projects. Our findings hold implications for understanding how management may influence project behaviors and problem‐solving: Firms that need to concentrate on more incremental problem‐solving efforts (e.g., because a sufficient number of attractive problems have already been defined) should create environments in which interaction is undertaken mainly via artifacts. On the other hand, if firms seek to generate new problems (e.g., new strategic opportunities), they should create environments in which open‐ended, verbal conversation is relatively more important than artifact‐based communication. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Firm heterogeneity in complex problem solving: A knowledge‐based look at invention

Research summary : The knowledge‐based view suggests that complex problems are best solved under hierarchical (within‐firm) governance. We examined why firms assumed to be in general alignment with this theory might nonetheless produce solutions of varying usefulness. We theorize that a firm's internal knowledge variety (IKV) is associated with its capacity to support cross‐domain knowledge flows during search, and its ability to identify and explore promising areas on the solution landscape. We further theorize that partner knowledge in familiar (unfamiliar) domains can offset specific weaknesses in searching rugged landscapes, inherent with low or high (moderate) IKV. We find support for these ideas in the context of drug discovery, extending KBV's focus on governance alignment to explain variation in problem‐solving effectiveness within hierarchy. Managerial summary : Firms that concentrate their inventive efforts in a few technological domains, but also dabble in several others, have problem‐solving advantages: they can better support knowledge transfer and recombination across domains. Firms that focus too narrowly or spread their inventive efforts thinly across many domains lose these advantages, but might compensate through alliance partnerships. Our study of drug discovery shows that while firms with very low or high knowledge variety tend to produce weaker solutions than firms in the moderate range, their inventive performance improves when alliance partners afford them access to additional knowledge in familiar domains. We explain how the combination of firm and partner knowledge enables firms to better identify, evaluate, and implement alternative solutions to complex problems. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

'Technoscience' Education: Empowering Citizens Against the Tyranny of School Science

The status quo for school science and technology is unacceptable. While the former often is required for admission to university engineering, as well as to science programmes, the latter is deemed most appropriate for less able, concrete thinkers. This situation persists, despite the fact school science tends to generate large groups of citizens who are relatively scientifically and technologically illiterate, largely as a result of its preoccupation with identifying and training potential scientists and engineers. This practice is tyrannical. It must be abandoned forthwith. A realistic alternative is a combined technology and science programme – perhaps called 'technoscience' education – that would treat science and technology as equals. Such courses may, as well, be more democratic in the sense that technological problem solving often is more natural to everyday situations that everyone may find useful, not just future scientists or engineers. A framework for combined technology and science courses is described and defended here. Originally developed through collaborative action research amongst practising teachers of science, the approach appears to be feasible, under certain – perhaps ideal – conditions. A number of changes to science and technology education may be necessary for broader implementation, not the least of which is a general retrenchment in expectations for pre-determined learning, along with adjustments to teacher education. Nevertheless, the approach is recommended because of its emphasis on: personalization, inclusion, problematization, explicitness, apprenticeship, authenticity, contextualization and freedom. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.