I’ve always found it interesting to read of the unsung heroes of engineering. Some were extremely low key. Consider, for instance, the modest inventor of Six Sigma, who remained a member of the technical staff at Motorola, eating in the company cafeteria for the rest of his life, instead of keeping his idea secret, jumping ship and then cashing in on the motivational speaking circuit.

By far the most colorful and interesting such heroes hail from the former Soviet Union. Evgeny Zamyatin, for instance, wrote excellent science fiction, including We, a book that is even better, in many ways, than Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World. And that wasn’t his day job. (For a rather weird but interesting YouTube tribute, click here.)

Genrich Altschuller
Another Soviet polymath who also wrote science fiction is engineer Genrich Altschuller, who invented TRIZ, a method that is being used with great success in more pharma R&D projects. Altschuller was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan but grew up in Azarbaidjan and his fascinating life is described in this article. (To give you some idea of whom we’re dealing with, a very young Genrich had the gumption to write to Stalin, and tell him why Soviet science wasn’t advancing…as you might expect, he wound up imprisoned more than once. But read how he coped with Soviet sleep deprivation torture).

If any of you aren’t familiar with TRIZ, it seems a very worthwhile tool (and it’s a four-letter, rather than three-letter acronym, for a change). The Altschuller Institute is carrying on his work, and even YouTube has some videos like this one showing Altschuller explaining his methods, with English subtitles. (Look to the right, and you’ll see quite a few other TRIZ resources, lectures by Altschuller and new disciples, on YouTube).

For those of you who prefer the printed word, and a breezy read, Quality Digest published this article a few years ago, on how to apply TRIZ when Six Sigma efforts seem to lead to a dead end. But here and here are some other articles on TRIZ in drug research and development (and, here, his thoughts on Science Fiction)….

TRIZ  is clearly an area to mine.

AMS

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