The Next Big Idea

Business

An inspirational new way of looking at the invention process may lead San Diegans to bigger, better ideas

ISAAC NEWTON is sitting beneath a tree. He’s bopped by a falling apple and discovers gravity. Archimedes lowers himself into a bath and——eureka!——he figures out water displacement. Ben Franklin, out flying his kite, discovers how electricity is conducted.

The conventional wisdom is that invention just zaps the minds of geniuses. But a relatively new school of thought called TRIZ suggests inspiration for invention is open to everyone.

TRIZ, a Russian acronym standing for “theory of inventive problem solving,” is a science of creativity that relies on the study of the reliable patterns of problems and solutions, as opposed to spontaneous, intuitive creativity. Through its extension program, the University of California, San Diego offers a three-day seminar in TRIZ. It’s taught by Ellen Domb, a former physics professor and aerospace executive-turned-consultant who applies in the civilian world what she learned in the military-industrial sector. Domb’s corporate clients include Hewlett-Packard, Dow Chemical and General Electric’s energy division.

“TRIZ is a method of thinking about problems that says somebody somewhere has already solved your problem or one similar to it,” says Domb. “If you can figure out who they are and what they did, you can adapt their solution and make it work for you.” TRIZ research categorizes problems in social systems, technology and business management and looks for analogies to problems in other disciplines.

“A vast majority of the time, to solve difficult problems, you don’t need inspiration,” Domb says. “You need research.”

The research, however, is likely to be from a different field of study. “One of the difficulties with invention is that as people get more educated, they learn more about a narrower area,” Domb says. TRIZ encourages inventors to look outside their area of expertise. “If it’s a mechanical engineering problem, we’ll look at biology to see how nature solved an analogous problem.”

Another element of TRIZ is analyzing problems by 40 principles. One principle, segmentation, suggests “dividing something into parts,” Domb says, “and if it’s already in parts, then smaller parts.” In a publishing context, this could mean a series of short articles instead of one long one, or starting three magazines for specific audiences instead of one aimed at a general audience. A related principle is merging, or “taking lots of little things and putting them together,” she says.

WHY COULDN’T INNOVATORS learn to improve their products the old-fashioned way, by studying previous failures or successes?

“Intuitive problem-solving comes from an area psychologists refer to as psychological bias,” says Michael Slocum, a San Diego–based corporate consultant for Xerox and Bose and co-editor of the TRIZ Journal. “People grow up in a certain environment, they work in a corporate culture——they’ve done things in the past that worked or didn’t work. You put all that stuff together in a box, shake it, and what falls out are those ideas that are acceptable to you. The ideas that are acceptable to you may be quite a bit different than the best solutions available. But because of psychological bias, you don’t find these ideal solutions, nor do you look for them in the right place. In other words, if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

As vice president of engineering for locally based Ontech, Slocum used TRIZ to develop a patented technology that heats beverages in their containers. The beverage is contained in a plastic package with an internal chamber; the consumer pushes a button that activates the heating element.

For San Diego innovators, finding the next big thing can be very rewarding. Venture capital firms poured more than $475 million into 43 San Diego County companies in the second quarter of 2007, nearly double the $244 million invested in 27 companies in the same period a year ago, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

Slocum says “competitive innovation” is now part of the corporate lexicon. “If the only kind of innovative approach you take is ‘I’m a mechanical engineer, so I’m going to come up with a mechanical engineering solution,’ then you get on a curve where your technology is highly mature, so the only improvement is incremental and therefore insignificant. This puts you at risk for the competition to pass you by, because there’s somebody who’s trying to make obsolete what you do, and that’s true whether you’re Xerox or Microsoft. Typically, the new paradigm in a field comes from a nobody.”

EVEN AS TRIZ PROMISES to open new doors to invention, recent court decisions are making patents——legal protection for intellectual property——harder to obtain and easier to attack.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court decided KSR International vs. Teleflex, a case experts expect will have an enduring impact on inventors’ ability to obtain and defend patents——and which may serve to drive down the valuations of emerging technology firms. If patents are seen as easier to attack, manufacturers who are sued by patent-holders may be less motivated to license intellectual property.

Generally speaking, an invention is worthy of patent protection only if it is not an “obvious” extension of some other invention. Under prior law, federal courts had allowed patent applicants to submit documents under the so-called “teaching, suggestion or motivation” (TSM) standard to prove that the applicant’s invention was novel and not obvious.

In Teleflex, the Supreme Court said the TSM standard was “narrow and rigid” and called for a “common sense” approach in determining whether an invention is obvious.

Local attorneys say the decision marks a significant change in patent law. “Teleflex changes how patent examiners and courts evaluate the question of obviousness,” says Steve Reiter, an attorney at Foley & Lardner, and a member of the Biocom Intellectual Property Committee. “The new common-sense approach is a fairly squirrely yardstick that leaves patent applicants with a bigger burden to show that their invention is not obvious, and it seems to make it easier for a patent challenger to say an invention is obvious. We’ll need to see how the courts deal with this decision.”

Whatever the direction of future Supreme Court cases, future Isaac New tons will be able to use TRIZ to view creativity as a science rather than a bolt of inspiration.

“If you look at history, people like Henry Ford made a science of productivity, putting us on a path today where we have robotics, lean manufacturing and automation,” says Slocum. “After productivity, quality was next to change from an art to science with Total Quality Management [TQM] and its successor, Six Sigma. Now I think it’s time for a revolution in innovation to go from art to science.

“Corporations can’t sit around and wait to hire an Edison or an Einstein. It’s not enough to have a bunch of smart people in a room anymore; you need to be able to predictably and reliably innovate, and the only way to do that is through method——to describe innovation as a process that can be taught and practiced with predictable results.”

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