Panel on Computer-aided Innovation...software and hardware that helps you
think and invent
Design Exchange, 234 Bay St. Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Sept. 24th, 1997 7:00-9:30pm
Moderator: Walter Derzko, Idea Lab, Design Exchange
Panelists: Patricia O'Charchin, Rand Corp., Toronto; Guy Haas, Invention
Machine Corp, Boston, MA, Russell Smith, Visual Dynamics,Toronto
Cost: $20 members, $30 guests, $15 full time students. Creativity
Consortium annual membership is $50 Cdn.
Computer-aided Innovation
Can software programs help inventors, designers and engineers create new
concepts for inventions? Invention Machine Corporation, a Boston-based
software firm is one of several companies who have released software on
a creative technique called TRIZ, a process originally invented by
G.S.Altshuller in the 1960's. While studying over 2 million patents over a
20 year period, Altshuller's team discovered that there were only about
200 inventive principles behind the most difficult-to-solve problems,
discoveries or patents. They reasoned that the new inventor can apply the
invention solutions or formulas in a systematic way, if one can state the
problem in terms of a valid contradiction or paradox statement. Match
your contradiction to a previously successful innovation principle and
you should be able to come up with a new approach which could lead to a new
discovery, patent or design.
Originally reviewed in Wall St. Journal and Business Week last year, the
TRIZ process and Invention Machine's software is now being used by such
well-know companies as:Kodak, Ford, Nortel, AMP, IBM, 3M, Eli Lilly,
Kimberly-Clark, Rand, Motorola, NASA, Rockwell, Saab, Xerox and others.
Come out and hear our specialists. Does it deserve all the hype? What are
some of the results, designs and patents produced? See a demo in action.
Take the software for a creative test drive and invent a new product in
the second half of our meeting.
Call Walter Derzko, Director Idea Lab, Design Exchange at (416) 216-2139.