Not all Innovation is good – can you spot the bad kind?

Do you agree that not all innovation is good? Trolling, email exhaustion and bank fraud are all innovations which harm many and if you can think of BAD Innovation examples please let us know…we could turn them into cartoons for you.

I define Good Innovation as responding fast to change with clever, appropriate solutions. I feel proud of how the Oxford TRIZ team so brilliantly improved all our outputs, as we transitioned to online when Covid struck. By April 2020 not just our teaching but all problem solving was online which expanded our international market and worked better in many ways than our face to face work. Recently, we achieved an amazing innovative step with the creation of a new hybrid training experience, running simultaneous, separate, parallel training both in-person and online. This is for teams who are mostly together again in the same room, but with some colleagues unable to join them. So, whether in-person or online the whole team is experiencing live the same learning and participative exercises. but separately in the best focussed medium for their environment.

Responding fast to Exeter Business School’s request for TRIZ for their new MBA cohort, within 10 days we delivered our new hybrid training. Those at the university, and looking to learn together in the same room, experienced our highly interactive, exercise based workshop on TRIZ Time & Scale for sustainable solutions in climate change, in their wonderful new MBA studio with Neil Sherry. At the same time those in quarantine, after international travel, covered the same material and exercises online with Oxford TRIZ expert Dave Knott in a separate but similar 4 hour training session with exercises and tutorials. This is the first time we have offered Innovation TRIZ training simultaneously online and in-person to ensure everyone had the same high quality, fast hands-on, interactive experience

This principal of delivering hybrid solutions for the best training possible has been carried over to our new Fundamental Problem Solving and eLearning bundle. Launched this month we are confident it creates the perfect blended learning experience to ensure a full understanding of the TRIZ problem solving toolkit. Read on for more details, plus six reasons why brainstorming won't solve your problem, the cartoon of the month and more…...

Training & Resources

NEW: Fundamental Problem Solving plus eLearning Bundle

Fundamental Problem Solving was developed to teach Oxford TRIZ online, and over the last year and a half we have been improving this course to make it more effective. This month we added our 7 Module Oxford TRIZ Fundamentals eLearning to our live learning Fundamental Problem Solving course to give you the best of both worlds.

This means after finishing your fast paced timetabled daily 2 hours for 5 days, you have access to standalone bite sized TRIZ eLearning lessons for you to revisit at your own pace and in your own time. It supplements our live learning with logical extensions of different examples and exercises, case studies and much more detail for clear and simple revision of the main Oxford TRIZ tools. Both kinds of online training enable TRIZ problem solving – and help get all team members up to speed fast to tackle new challenges and tough problems.

How it works:

eLearning - seven modules made up of 24 video lessons and 12 practical assignments to complete - with sample answers from the Oxford TRIZ experts
Live online learning - 5 days of one hour fast paced learning every morning finishing with a set task. One hour afternoon live tutorial when you join a small-group workshop for in-depth work on the exercise, discussion and questions

Join us on 22-26 November

Tell Me About TRIZ: Free YouTube Series

In 20 years of spreading the word about TRIZ and Oxford TRIZ we have learnt one way to explain TRIZ is through webinars, courses and videos. So we offer a Tell Me About TRIZ video series on YouTube.

In these videos Karen Gadd explains:

The Origins of TRIZ
How to get everything you want by resolving contradictions
The secrets of systematic innovation
The 40 ways to solve every problem
How TRIZ promotes resourceful thinking

Watch Now

Six Reasons Why Brainstorming Won't Always Solve your Problems (but TRIZ will)

Difficult problems are universally tackled with brainstorming, which works at least half the time. However being random it cannot reliably deliver good results, or come up with the strongest solutions to your problems.

For more consistency and confidence in solving complex problems try systematic problem solving - TRIZ. In this article Lilly Haines-Gadd lists six of the reasons why TRIZ can be relied upon where brainstorming fails.

Read now

Patent & IP Development

This 5-day online training provides you with the power to protect and derive greater value from your Intellectual Property, ring fence your competitors, and create a coherent patent strategy in logical, clever and ethical ways.

What benefits does this course deliver?

Learn to broaden your patents and predict and protect your products' future development
Each morning over 5 days, online, one hour learning lectures finish with set tasks/patent protecting exercises. These are expanded and explained in a small-group workshop tutorials with Oxford TRIZ expert guidance
Identify new invention opportunities and implement Structured Innovation to create novel concepts and make stronger patents
Contact us to book both this course and our eLearning for just £1000 - a £300 saving

Join us on 8-12 November

This course can be completed by anyone who has completed Fundamental Problem Solving Oxford TRIZ Live or Oxford TRIZ Fundamentals eLearning.

Cartoon of the Month - corporate anorexia

When saving costs by slimming down, one trap that some organisations fall into is to go too far, repeatedly reducing valuable resources through simply spending less and less (instead of intelligently maximising profitability). Lean and other toolkits help us all gather the low-hanging fruit of cost savings. Oxford TRIZ helps us with logical and proven ways to both cut costs and increase revenue /profits and reach the HIGH hanging fruit of increased efficiency by improving IDEALITY.