Our Card deck
Card Deck Purpose and Description
Innovation Planner™ is a card set of innovation strategies and solutions used for rapid, effective, and efficient problem solving and idea generation. It is based on the Ideation TRIZ innovation methodology that was derived from the analysis of over 3 million patents and 500 standard patterns of technical evolution. Just as you can combine the 26 letters in the alphabet to produce all ranges of literature, these cards describe the universal principles of invention that innovators combine to create the millions of inventions known to mankind.
Rigorous Testing
The creator of this deck, Robert Cantrell, used these cards as the foundation for a two-year inventive run for the Silicon Valley arm of Walmart where he is an inventor on 112 patent applications in two years developed while he also performed business planning and project management roles. He is the lead inventor on more than half of those. These patent applications have been valued at several million dollars. Users include engineers from HP, Intel, Microsoft, Kimberly Clark, and many others.
Applications
You can use Innovation Planner™ for systematic innovation planning, brainstorming, or to play one of several innovation games. Use of this product as directed leads to the creation of new and patentable inventions. Inventors from using organizations have filed for dozens of patents inspired by the ideas on these cards, making these cards worth exponentially more than their weight in gold for the owning organizations.
Meet the Card Deck Creators
Robert Cantrell
Author, Cinematographer, and Inventor with patents filed at Walmart, Hewlett-Packard, and IP.com. Robert has a biology degree from Duke University and an MBA from Edinburgh Business School. He is the author of Outpacing the Competition: Patent-Based Business Strategies, published by Wiley.
Boris Zlotin
Ms. Zlotin is a certified TRIZ Master with over 40 years of experience, including participating as a fellow instructor in numerous seminars conducted by the TRIZ founder Genrich Altshuller during 1981-1986. He is widely recognized as the leader of the TRIZ community and considered one of the foremost theorists and TRIZ scientists in the world today. He is responsible for the majority of the advances made to the methodology to date, trained over 10,000 people around the world and solved over 12,000 problems. He is a multiple patent-holder and author of books, papers, and special publications on TRIZ.
Alla Zusman
Ms. Zusman is a certified TRIZ Master, one of the main developers of the TRIZSoft® family of software, Ideation Office of Innovation and is an instructor in its all applications. She received her TRIZ education from the TRIZ founder Genrich Altshuller and has over 35 years of TRIZ experience, including participating as a fellow instructor in seminars conducted by Mr. Altshuller during 1983-1986. She co-authored multiple books (including several with Mr. Altshuller), patents and numerous papers, taught TRIZ to thousands of students around the world.
About Us
Ideation International
Ideation International is a private, U.S.-based company founded in 1992 and headquartered in, Michigan. The company, led by Zion Bar-El, focuses on the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, also referred to by its Russian acronym TRIZ. Ideation’s business is to help enterprises with the essential function of innovation by accelerated education, innovation software tools, and analytical services. At Ideation, we believe that by taking a proactive approach to the innovation cycle and by partnering with our clients, the complex challenges that block the pathway to innovative achievement will become breakthrough opportunities.
Card Deck Origin
The Innovation Planner Card Deck was an idea conceived in 2005 to resolve a contradiction: how to make a tool that is useful for the TRIZ expert and also useful for people who have not (yet) had TRIZ training. Over the last ten plus years, the cards have been rigorously tested at top innovative enterprises such as HP, Intel, and Microsoft. Inventors like the card deck approach because it allows them to arrange ideas as they wish and because they can, in a sense, hold inventive ideas in their hands, an aid to thinking through problems.
Walmart's Silicon Valley Arm
In January 2016, Robert Cantrell was invited to the Silicon Valley arm of Walmart to participate in an accelerated innovation push to move Walmart from a retailer that has technology to a technology company that does retail extremely well. Within two years, he had 112 patent applications filed where he was the lead inventor on 2/3rds of these. Publications of these inventions have appeared in the media ranging from the New York Times to Saturday Night Live, generating positive scientific discussion as well as excellent PR for the Walmart company. The Innovation Planner Card Deck was used for each invention.