Introduction to Systematic Innovation

Introduction to Systematic Innovation

Fall 2013

Instructor Information

David Troness, MS

Office:

Phone: 480-280-7659

Email:

Office Hours

By appointment

Course Location and Meeting Times

Hybrid: online and Thursday 4:40 – 5:30

Course Materials

• Ball, Larry, and Collaborative Authors “TRIZ Power Tools,” March 2012 Edition, Entire series is free and available online at:

• Additional required and recommended readings will be provided from:
• Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2003.
• Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 1997.
• Kim, W. Chan., and Renée Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2005.
• May, Matthew E. The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation. New York: Free, 2007. Print.
• Silverstein, D., DeCarlo, N., & Slocum, M. (2008). Insourcing innovation: How to achieve competitive excellence using TRIZ. New York: Auerbach Publications.
• Ulwick, A. W. (2005). What customers want: Using outcome-driven innovation to create breakthrough products and services. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Course Description

The Introduction to Systematic Innovation course introduces the latest thinking on perhaps the most overused, misunderstood concept of the 21st century, i.e. “innovation”. After exposing many of the current myths around innovation, the student will learn and practice a proven step-by-step algorithm for creating high-probability innovations that can succeed in the marketplace. The course will arm the student with a new level of skill that can be applied to technical problems as well as non-technical ones, e.g. business, social, logistics, organizational, etc. Therefore, these skills can be a foundation for increasing a student’s likelihood of success in engineering, business, sustainability or any kind of scientific research activity.

Course Learning Outcomes

As a result of taking this course, students will be able to:

1. Identify high-probability market segments that are awaiting innovative solutions
2. Define an engineering system in terms of “functions”.
3. Simplify systems by identifying and eliminating components or functions that have low value.
4. Identify the technical and physical “contradictions” that inhibit the best or most innovation solution.
5. Predict the natural evolution of a system or design and move it closer to an “ideal” state.
6. Move outside of an industry, to get solution and design concepts from other industries and disciplines.
7. Identify opportunities for using these methodologies in future academic work.
8. Develop elegant solutions to difficult problems, which are simple and inexpensive, yet still completely effective.

Course Requirements

Assignments

All assignments must be turned in at the end of class on the date they are due. Please contact the instructor if you miss an assignment due to sickness or injury or other valid reason.

Academic Integrity

Developing a strong sense of the value and meaning of Academic Integrity is essential in this course. ASU expects and requires all its students to act with honesty and integrity, and respect the rights of others in carrying out all academic assignments, in accordance with the ASU Academic Integrity Policy (AIP). Any form of plagiarism and cheating will not be tolerated. Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to the following: copying another student’s work; copying or using words or ideas from a book, article, website, etc. without giving credit; not citing a source correctly.

You are welcome to work with others on projects, but it is not required. Any group of students that choose to work together on projects must submit a proposal to the instructor, including how the team will divide up responsibility and credit. There will be higher expectations of the output from a team than from an individual. The instructor reserves the right to not give credit or give partial credit to individuals within the team who do not participate or contribute.

Course Grading

Demonstrating specific skills is critical to your success in this course. The table below provides details on how your performance will be assessed for this course.

Your final course grade will be based on the percentage of total points you earn during the semester as follows:

A: 100%-90%

B: 89%-80%

C: 79%-70%

D: 69%-60%

E: below 59%

Course Schedule (Tentative*)

*This schedule is tentative and may be changed during the semester as needed.

**TPT refers to the “TRIZ Power Tools” series of free e-books.

Assignments:

The assignments will typically be in the form of reading assignments and/or completing practice problems that will demonstrate their understanding of lectures, discussions and/or past reading assignments.

Reading assignments could be chapters from the various books within the TRIZ Power Tools series, articles from the Harvard Business Review, book summaries and assorted articles from other journals/websites.

This would be an example of a typical assignment for developing and practicing specific skills:

• Develop at least 3 “elegant” solutions for each of the exercises on pages 538-539 of the “Resolving Problems” e-book within the TRIZ Power Tools series. Remember that elegance refers to solutions with are simple, inexpensive yet completely effective, i.e. without compromising on any requirements. A handy context to use is to pretend you are working in Soviet Union in the 1950’s, i.e. you have very little money and very little technology to utilize; yet the solutions must still be effective.

Projects:

There will be several intermediate steps in completing their final project, which is meant to bring together most of the discussed skills/concepts and result in a coherent and complete story of student’s journey from identifying market opportunities, to understanding causes and contradictions that have kept anyone else from innovating in that area, and finally, to developing several “elegant” solutions, i.e. ones that are simple, low-cost and still completely effective.