I'm continuing to immerse myself in innovation topics in general, and various uses, such as software, consulting methodologies, games, etc. around a Russian innovation practice/theory known as TRIZ - or the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. For something that has been around for around 60 years, I can still hardly believe that I hadn't stumbled on TRIZ earlier in my working life!
I'll shortly be doing a podcast with Andre de Zanger, who is the inventor of a game and deck of cards called INVENTIUM ("The Inventing Game"), which is based on the either Primary 8 or All 40 (depending on which deck you use) of the TRIZ principles.
TRIZ is all about providing systematic means to take any problem (primarily oriented at this time to product design) and blow it apart into a much larger collection of re-wordings and analyses of the problem. More on TRIZ as I move along in future posts, but before I wrap up this quick blog post - let me point you at DIVA, or the DIrected VAriation solution from CREAX out of Belgium. This is a new offering based on their existing methodologies, which are, you guessed it, oriented very much around TRIZ.
You can see a tour of the solution at diva.creax.com and sign up for a free trial (no idea what the criteria is - I have signed up as of today, and we'll see what pops out of the web workflow).
They have some beautiful examples of TRIZ-inspired (and generated apparently) design variations as well, in their growing database of product designs. Take a look at "Fun way to get your children to wash their hands" for one example, and then link from any of the tags they've put on this article to find other items in the database. Some very interesting examples of energy saving and/or efficiency creating solutions in there, such as "AA Batteries charge via USB" (which I should look into - as those bulky rechargers are almost always somewhere inconvenient).
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