Risk Reduction and Opportunity Exploitation through TRIZ-based Technology Forecast

Gaetano Cascini

Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Abstract

The capability of anticipating the main features of future products and related manufacturing processes is more and more a critical asset in industry, due to the innovation-based competition of markets and to the extremely reduced lead time of modern product development cycles.

The rate of innovation has reached a speed so high that despite the diffused efforts to shorten the lead time, companies continuously struggle for renovating their products on a day-by-day perspective. This implies the necessity to make critical decisions with very limited time resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events.

In this context, a relevant research goal in the engineering design domain is the definition of reliable practices and supporting tools for anticipating the main features of future products and related manufacturing processes.

The present speech overviews the potential role of TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, as a reference theoretical framework to anticipate future technological scenarios. With respect to other well-known applications of TRIZ models to the prediction of system evolution, this presentation proposes the TRIZ potential for qualitative anticipation of a system’s future combined with Trend Extrapolation models, such as the Logistic Growth Curve model and the Logistic Substitution model, to determine the timing of evolution and to integrate quantitative estimations.

Some example of industrial applications from different fields will clarify the proposed integrated method. The research activity is partially funded by the European Marie Curie Programme: “FORMAT: FOrecast and Roadmapping for MAnufacturing Technologies” Project FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IAPP/286305.