I just laid my hands on an interesting book called Hands-on Systematic Innovation for Business and Management by Darrell Mann. This book is not yet available from Amazon. I came across the previous book written by Darrell Mann – Handson Systematic Innovation, which is a popular book among those who follow the concept of TRIZ for creative/innovation processes.

One of my friends, an gas turbine design engineer with Alston, Anurag introduced me to the concept of TRIZ and I was looking around for some reading on this subject – but more relevant for my area – Management. And he suggested this book and I got hold of a copy now.

Thought I will share my thoughts here as I start reading it.

First Darrell quotes some famous people – one of the quotes he has is from Bertrand Russell: The average man would rather face death or torture than think. Does that sound reasonable to you in today’s world? Do drop in your thoughts!

Then here are some of the main findings from research on systematic innovation. I haven’t got around to think more about them – hope to do that over the weekend – but they are thought provoking. They go like this:

• There are only a small number of fundamentally different types of problems.
• Someone, somewhere, therefore has already solved a problem something like the one you wish to solve.
• There are only a small number of possible strategies for generating inventive solutions.
• System evolution trends are highly predictable.
• The strongest solutions transform the unwanted or harmful elements of a system into useful resources.
• The strongest solutions also seek out and destroy the conflicts and trade-offs most design practices assume to be fundamental.

I have to convince that these are valid as these are the foundation on which Darrell has build his systematic innovation concept.