LPPDE Update

I may have been taking some time off, but the LPPDE Organizing Team has been very busy! This week, we travel to our two finalist cities, Denver and Chicago, to nail down our site and date selections. We have also narrowed the window of time to April of 2008.

We intend to have our registration system available in October. In the meantime, we have set a target of $1500 for our registration fee, for two full days of presentations, with an additional fee for pre-conference workshops.

We have also signed up an outstanding list of thought leaders to help guide the agenda and recruit speakers. Michael Kennedy, Jamie Flinchbaugh of the Lean Learning Center, Bo Oppenheim of the Lean Aerospace Initiative and Jim Luckman join Durward Sobek, Tricia Sutton and myself on the thought leader panel.

We are looking for lean product development practitioners with great stories to tell, and additional sponsors! If you would like to be considered, please use my contact form to send me an email or give me a call.

TRIZ and the Waste of Reinvention

If you are a lean product development practitioner, and you have not met TRIZ, let me be the first to introduce you!

TRIZ is a problem-solving methodology for leveraging knowledge created within your company, your industry and other industries to solve immediate technical problems. TRIZ (pronounced “treez”) was developed in the former USSR between 1946 and 1985 by G.S. Altshuller and his colleagues. Since 1985, a devoted community has continued to develop it.
The name translates in English to the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.” Atshuller obsrved that there were patterns to innovation and universal principles that could be used to identify solutions to problems more rapidly. In short: “Somebody someplace has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it.)” Over the decades, TRIZ researchers analysed over three million patents to identify repeatable patterns of problems and solutions.

TRIZ helps eliminate the waste of reinvention by making reusable knowledge more accessible. Just as the TRIZ researchers did with patents, organizations can analyze their own knowledge base from the perspective of the repeatable patterns of innovation, using TRIZ as a means of generalizing and classifying their knowledge for future re-use. TRIZ encourages people to seek solutions outside of the traditional functional boundaries. In large organizations, a common TRIZ-based classification scheme could help break down functional and organizational barriers to knowledge-sharing. TRIZ turns the U.S. Patent Database into a collection of accessible solutions which may be adapted to a team’s specific problem, creating breakthrough innovations.

According to Ellen Domb, founding editor of the TRIZ Journal, Toyota not only has TRIZ practitioners - they have had TRIZ instructors attend events in Japan. To learn more, check out the references in my new knowledge brief, TRIZ for Lean Innovation.

P.S. I've been on a lighter schedule over the summer, including my first real vacation since I founded this business! With the coming of autumn and the LPPDE Conference heating up, I'll be back to a more normal publication schedule of once per week or so.