Ideation Asia Pacific Pty Ltd

 

Tim Cousins was one of three directors of Ideation Asia Pacific Pty. Ltd. from April 1996 until October 2002. The company's principal focus was introducing TRIZ, The Russian Theory of the Solution of Inventive Problems, to the Australian Engineering mindscape.

TRIZ is the Russian acronym for "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving". It was developed by Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues in the former USSR starting in 1946, and is now being developed and practiced throughout the world.

TRIZ research began with the hypothesis that there are universal principles of invention that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology. If these principles could be identified and codified, they could be taught to people to make the process of invention more predictable. The TRIZ research has proceeded in several stages over the last 50 years and over 2 million patents have been examined, classified by level of inventiveness, and analysed to look for principles of innovation. The three primary findings of this research are as follows: 

  • Problems and solutions were repeated across industries and sciences
  • Patterns of technical evolution were repeated across industries and sciences 
  • Innovations used scientific effects outside the field where they were developed

Ideation Asia Pacific Pty Ltd was affiliated with Ideation International; headed by Dr. Stan Kaplan, risk analyst, decision theorist, engineer, applied mathematician, and ex-nuclear reactor physicist, specializing now in what he calls the Science of Uncertainty. He is presently Visiting Professor of Systems Engineering at The University of Virginia. 

In my role as Technical Director I was required to develop a good working knowledge of the principles and to build evidence based examples in my consulting work. However, my secondary interest was linked to Risk Management and the Human interface with engineering systems. As a consequence I attended The University of Virginia in 2001 to complete a short course on Risk Assessment and Management of Engineering Systems taken by Dr Stan Kaplan and Dr Yacov Haimes (founder of the Centre for Risk Management of Engineering Systems at the University of Virginia).

This course covered:

  • The Process of Risk Assessment and Management
  • Hardware, Software, Organizational, and Human Failures
  • Holistic Philosophy and Guiding Principles Common to Risk Analysis, Systems Analysis, Multi-objective Nature of Risk Management
  • An Introduction to Bayesian Theory
  • Multi-objective Decision Trees
  • How to Make Tradeoffs among All Relevant Costs, Risks, and Benefits

While I was in the Virginia I entered preliminary discussions with the Society for Risk Analysis to set-up a chapter in Australia. The idea was to integrate, or piggyback Risk Analysis with TRIZ as complimentary disciplines. 

The venture was deregistered in 2003 after achieving only limited success allowing me to focus on the development of Tim Cousins and Associates Pty Ltd.

For more information: http://www.triz-journal.com/