The following papers are available for download in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have an Adobe PDF Reader installed on your computer, you can download it for free at:
Building a Culture of Innovation by Peter Hanik
This paper is a practical guide to building a culture of innovation in your company. Innovation is an intensely human activity and as such it is essential for Human Resources to be at the forefront of building a culture of innovation in an organization. What innovation is, how innovation and invention differ, how to develop inventive solutions to problems, how to build a language of innovation and how to configure and operate an innovation system.
Structured Innovation for Product Development by Sergey Malkin and Peter Hanik
Customers don’t care about a product in and of itself. They care about the functionality that the product delivers. This paper shows how to model the functionality delivered by a product and then identify innovative ways to significantly improve the delivery of functionality.
Structured Patent Development by Peter Hanik
This paper is provides a systematic method to create broad, strong patent claims. Communication between inventor and patent attorney is critical but most people muddle through this process. Structured patent Development provides a way to both improve the quality of patent claims and reduce the cost to produce the patent application.
Customer Complaint Process by Peter Hanik
Most business process improvement projects are focused on finding and adopting best practices. This paper describes how to find the underlying contradictions which limit business process performance and then develop innovative ways to resolve them. This leads to breakthrough business process performance.
Lessons Learned and Observations from a New Method for Teaching and Using TRIZ by Sergey Malkin and Dr. Donald Coates
TRIZ has been in use for many decades with some very successful results. However, it is extremely difficult to teach TRIZ to everyone in the organization because it requires considerable time to learn and effectively use. This paper discusses how to teach TRIZ such that it is both powerful and easy to learn. The research into this “New Method” was done jointly by Pretium and Kent State University.
Define, Measure, Analyze, INNOVATE, Control by Sergey Malkin and Peter Hanik
After a company has been using Six Sigma for several years, high impact projects are completed and only incremental benefits remain. This paper combines Structured Innovation and Six Sigma to produce more and better Six Sigma projects and sustain the benefits of your Six Sigma process.
VE-TRIZ A Technology Partnership by Peter Hanik and J. Jerry Kaufman
The Society of American Value Engineers Annual Meeting, San Diego, California, June 27, 2005. Value Engineering and TRIZ have been perceived as two powerful, independent, but often, competitive problem solving tools each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This paper addresses how Pretium has linked the two in its methodology to produce a disciplined approach that maximizes the strengths and minimizes the weaknesses of each. Case studies are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. This paper illustrates how Pretium adds value to traditional approaches.
The Power of When by Peter Hanik
This paper shows how Value Engineers can use FAST diagrams to identify high impact opportunities for improvement and then use inventive principles from TRIZ to make significant value improvements.