Systematic Problem-Solving & Innovation

Vantive India R&D · Phase 1 · Module 1

Bala Ramadurai

Intro & Plan

Meet Your Facilitator - Bala Ramadurai

Entrepreneur, Professor, Author and Innovation Coach

Marie Curie Research Fellow at Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
PhD from Arizona State University, USA (Materials)
BTech from IIT Madras, India (Metallurgy)

Prof. Bala Ramadurai - Professor

IIT Madras, Chennai, India
Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City, Mexico
Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, India

Bala Ramadurai - Author

Bala Ramadurai - Innovation Coach

Bala Ramadurai - Entrepreneur

Spirelia

Innovate with Confidence

Srishti OS — The AI-Native Innovation Platform

Spirelia Innovation Pvt. Ltd.

"Innovate with Confidence, Powered by Insight"

S R I S H T I — The AI-Native Innovation Platform

🔭

Utkarsha

Technology Forecasting
& Roadmapping

MVP LIVE

🔬

Uttishta

AI Inventor's
Assistant

IN PIPELINE

💡

Karmaja

Structured Innovation
& Idea Generation

VISION

🛡️

Narasimha

IP Capture &
Protection

VISION

⚙️

Ananta

Rapid
Prototyping

VISION

Courses Taught

Design Thinking

Human Centred Design of products and services

Innovate Like a Boss

Systematic Innovation using methodologies like TRIZ, Brainstorming

Technology Forecasting

Love to keep in touch

https://balaramadurai.net/about/

bala@balaramadurai.net

http://in.linkedin.com/in/balaramadurai

My LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/balaramadurai/

Who's in the room?

Field, Factory or Future?
How many people report to you?
One problem your team keeps bringing back to you

Our 2 days, in one line

Day 1 — find the real problem

Day 2 — break it, and defend the fix

Day 1 — the plan

We work on…
Why innovate? · pick the problem
Function map — see the system
Name the contradiction · price it with TIMES
Brainwrite — flood the contradiction + Day-1 wrap

Scan me — the plan

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/00-Intro.pdf

Two days of tools ahead

But first — what is innovation, really?

What the heck is Innovation?

What is Innovation?

Open your browser
Type "innovation" in a search engine
Click the images tab
What's common across them?

Innovation

10s

→ 432,000s

120 hrs · 30 days

Edison's innovation was not the bulb

He thought about the customer situation

He formulated the problem from the customer's perspective

He thought in systems, not just products

He built systems that made business sense

Innovation requires three things

Customer Desirability — do people want it?
Technical Feasibility — can we build it?
Business Viability — will it make money?

Source — IDEO's model

Your three pillars

🏥 Field — the patient's pain
🏭 Factory — the process
🚀 Future — the next product

All three innovate the same way: see the system → name the real problem → break it

The building you work in

Floors 9–10 — new products — are strong

Floors 2–8 — the fundamentals — are where problems recur

Today we reinforce the middle floors, so the top stops catching fire

Task — Team, Theme and Tone

Team: Move around to sit with your teams
Theme: Discuss or recall the project that your team should work on
Tone: What do you want to improve? What stops you?

Please don't say "cost" — I have you covered 💰

Time Remaining:

Scan me — Innovation

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/01-Innovation.pdf

Edison didn't fix the filament

He saw the whole system — and your first tool draws it

Tool 1 — Who does what to whom (Function Map)

The escalation — as it is written down

The escalation-management process pertaining to installed therapy equipment is predicated upon a nominally ticket-mediated arrangement whereby the customer institution, upon apprehending a deviation in machine behaviour, is expected to raise a formal complaint into the ticketing system — the queue thereby generated constituting the sole aggregated visibility afforded to the responsible team lead, whose attention is, regrettably and as a matter of near-empirical inevitability, concurrently solicited by that selfsame institution by way of a direct telephonic approach circumventing the record in its entirety — following which the said lead effects an assignment upon a field engineer who, having been equipped with a standard spare kit whose constituent inventory bears only an approximate and progressively drifting correspondence to the failure modes actually encountered across the installed base, proceeds to restore the equipment to service and is thereafter obligated, at an hour and in a condition not conducive to reflection, to inscribe the underlying causation within the ticket, such record ostensibly constituting the evidential substrate upon which the design organisation is expected to predicate the succeeding generation of the product, such that the responsible lead is ultimately left to effectuate assignment upon the engineer whilst merely observing, without direct actuation, the queue that only purports to represent the true volume of the problem.

Quick quiz — answer from the paragraph

How many parts make up this system — can you name them all?
Name one insufficient function, and one harmful function?
What do you act on — and what do you only watch?

⏱ 90 seconds — dig the answers out of the paragraph

The same system — as a picture

Same quiz — now from the picture

How many parts make up this system — can you name them all?
Name one insufficient function, and one harmful function?
What do you act on — and what do you only watch?

Same questions — one a slog, one a glance

The identical system — not one fact added or removed — re-presented as a function map, with the same three questions beside it. Now the part count is a single glance at the boxes; the failing functions are the four red arrows, three solid and one dashed; and what you act on versus merely watch is the difference between the arrow running into the engineer and the one running into you from the ticket. Seconds, not minutes.

Two things usually land in the room at this moment. The first is the gap itself, between the paragraph and the picture — that gap is the entire argument for drawing your system rather than describing it. The second is that the dashed red arrow, the direct phone call, appears nowhere in any official process document, and yet everybody recognises it instantly once it is drawn.

A complaint is never just one part

Draw who does what to whom — and mark what's going wrong

Why draw it? Your eyes beat your reasoning

A list hides complexity. A picture shows it

Your visual cortex untangles relationships far faster than the prefrontal cortex that plods through bullet points — so we draw the system, we don't list it

A ticket, a handover, an engineer — these are parts too

A part is anything that does a job to something else

Step 1 — list the parts (the repeat escalation)

Step 2 — draw the functions

arrows = functions: the engineer records the cause, the kit supplies the part

Step 3 — mark what's going wrong

🔴 insufficient / harmful · 🟢 sufficient — every 🔴 is a problem candidate

🔧 the formal tool is Function Analysis (FAA)

Now we judge each arrow and colour it. Four come up red. The spare kit supplies the part only weakly — the right part is rarely in it, so the engineer improvises. Recording the cause is insufficient: one line, typed from the airport lounge, which is why nobody can learn from it. Feeding the next design is insufficient in turn, because a thin ticket carries nothing worth designing against — this is how the Field pillar's hardest lesson quietly fails to reach the Future pillar. And the direct call to you is a harmful function: it gets that hospital served faster while starving the ticket, hiding the true volume, and training the customer to bypass the system entirely.

Two things are worth saying to a room of managers. First, a harmful arrow is usually somebody being helpful — the direct call exists because you answer it. Second, these red arrows are not embarrassments to hide from your own leadership; they are your richest leads, because each one points at a problem worth solving. The very next tool turns one of them into a sharp contradiction.

The same map — Field · Factory · Future

🏥 Field — customer · engineer · ticket · spare kit — 🔴 the cause is never recorded
🏭 Factory — operator · fixture · inspection · handover — 🔴 rework quietly hides the defect
🚀 Future — marketing · design · supplier · pilot site — 🔴 field learning never reaches design

People and paperwork are parts — they do functions too

The same map in each pillar, with the part list that usually fits. In Field the cast is the customer, the engineer, the ticket and the spare kit, and the arrow that reliably comes up red is the recording of the cause. In Factory it is the operator, the fixture, the inspection step and the shift handover, and the red arrow is rework: a helpful-looking function that quietly repairs the defect out of sight, so the process that created it is never corrected. In Future it is marketing, design, the supplier and the pilot site, and the red arrow is the feedback that never arrives — design builds against an opinion because the field's evidence stopped at a one-line ticket. Note that all three red arrows are information functions, not mechanical ones. That is the pattern in management systems: the thing being done badly is usually a piece of knowledge failing to move from where it was learned to where it is needed.

Task — map your case

List components — include the people: you, your team, the customer, the ticket
Draw the functions between them
Mark each insufficient · excessive · harmful

Every red arrow → a contradiction candidate

on the wall, on your feet

Time remaining:

Scan me — the Function Map

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/02-Function-Map.pdf

Reflection time

what did you enjoy doing?
where did you struggle?
what did you learn and can apply come Monday morning?

Time left for reflection:

Your map is full of red arrows

Pick one — why is it that the red arrows have not yet been solved?

Tool 2 — Name the real conflict (Contradiction)

This is the heart of Day 1

Most recurring problems hide an un-named contradiction or a conflict

What is a conflict?

Source - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl3e-OUnavQ

Where can we learn how to identify contradictions or conflicts?

The Matrix

Source — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPRbIlMJI4Y

The conflicts

If: Morpheus reveals the code,
Then: the agents hack into Zion's mainframe,
But: Zion is more important than Morpheus

If: Neo enters the building to save Morpheus,
Then: he might save him,
But: three agents are holding him

Bhool Bhulaiyaa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbUsBTlB3fA

The conflict

If: Manjulika completes her revenge,
Then: the curse is broken and Avni is cured,
But: Avni loses her husband

Source — https://trizindia.org/2009/09/triz-in-films-ideas-for-fooling-filmi-ghost/

The model — If… Then… But…

If: a thing happens
Then: something good
But: something bad

Put on your movie critic's hat (individually)

Think of a movie or novel you really liked
Pick a scene you liked
Find the conflict the character faced
Represent it in the model (If… Then… But…)

Time left:

Worked example — the repeat escalation

If: we close the ticket the moment the machine runs again,
Then: the customer is up today and the queue looks healthy,
But: the cause is never recorded — so the same call returns next month

🔧 the formal tool is Engineering Contradiction

Back to the escalation map — take its red "records the cause" arrow and push on it. If we close the ticket the moment the machine runs again, the customer is back up today and the queue on your dashboard looks healthy, but the cause is never written down, so the same call returns next month and your best engineer spends another day on the road. Speed of restoration versus depth of learning: better one way, worse the other. That is a contradiction, and it is the trade-off you have been quietly paying for years.

Notice how a contradiction differs from a complaint. "Our root-cause discipline is poor" is a complaint, and it invites a lecture. This sentence names the two goods in tension — the ones your own metrics reward you for — and that is what makes it attackable tomorrow rather than moralised about today.

Three conflicts — Field · Factory · Future

🏥 Field: If I send my best engineer to every escalation, then it is fixed today, but they stay the only one who ever can
🏭 Factory: If we add one more inspection, then fewer defects escape, but the line slows and the queue grows
🚀 Future: If we build what this key account asked for, then we win the account, but the release slips for everyone else

The same shape in each pillar, and each one written from a manager's chair rather than an engineer's bench. In Field, sending your strongest person to every escalation is the fastest way to close today's problem and the surest way to guarantee tomorrow's, because nobody else ever gets to learn. In Factory, one more inspection genuinely does catch more defects, and it genuinely does slow the line — both halves are true, which is exactly why the argument between quality and output never ends. In Future, saying yes to the account that shouts loudest wins that account and quietly taxes every other customer's release date.

What all three have in common is that both sides are legitimate. Nobody in the argument is wrong, which is why these conflicts survive years of meetings and reorganisations. Tomorrow we stop choosing between the two sides and start breaking the trade-off itself.

Task — name yours

Take all red arrows from your function map
Write them as If… Then… But…

Then pick the ONE to attack — recurring · high-pain · within your reach

writing + picking THE ones

Time Remaining:

Scan me — the Contradiction

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/03-Contradiction.pdf

Reflection time

what did you enjoy doing?
where did you struggle?
what did you learn and can apply come Monday morning?

Time left for reflection:

You've named the enemy

Every "But…" is a bill — so what exactly are you paying?

Tool 3 — What is it costing you? (TIMES)

I said I had cost covered

Cost is TIMES

TIMES — the five resources you spend

⏱

Time

cycle time, waiting,
the repeat visit, your calendar

ℹ️

Information

data, know-how,
who knows what, the ticket

🧱

Material

parts, spares, consumables,
scrap, paperwork

⚡

Energy

power — and human effort,
attention, goodwill

📐

Space

footprint, beds, bench,
warehouse, the ward

Cost = T + I + M + E + S

🔧 the formal tool is Resource Analysis · Ideality

The single slider

Push functions up · push TIMES down — there is no third move

Which letter is your "But"?

If: we close the ticket the moment the machine runs again,
Then: the customer is up today,
But: the cause is never recorded

The bill is I — and it is paid later in T: the same call, next month

Where the bill lands — Field · Factory · Future

🏥 Field — the hero engineer spends T and E — their hours, and their goodwill
🏭 Factory — one more inspection spends T; the rework it hides spends M
🚀 Future — saying yes to the loudest account spends T for every other customer

Every system is full of unused resources

The machine already logs everything — free I
The junior is already on the bench — free E
The drive back is already happening — free T

Before you ask for budget — spend what you already have

Task — put a letter on it

For your contradiction — which of T · I · M · E · S does the "But" spend?
Where does that bill land later, and in which letter?
Name one free resource already sitting in your system

Time Remaining:

Scan me — TIMES

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/04-TIMES.pdf

Reflection time

what did you enjoy doing?
where did you struggle?
what did you learn and can apply come Monday morning?

Time left for reflection:

Now you know what it costs

One sharp contradiction, priced — now swarm it with ideas

Silent Brainstorming

First, go wide, in absolute silence

Quantity first. Judgment later

Task — flood it

Generate as many raw ideas as you can against your chosen contradiction

One idea per sticky. No filtering

Time Remaining:

Day 1 — you now hold

A system map · priced contradictions · a raw idea bank

Day 2 — the plan

We work on…
Break the contradiction — TRIZ patterns + ideate
Putting finger to keyboard — build your 8-min pitch
Bulletproof — 3 rounds of ritual dissent
Final presentations to the Big Boss · close

Tool 4 — Break the contradiction (Ideation)

Silent Brainstorming - Part 2

Write down all ideas for your desired results
Keep track of the number of ideas
Set a target number of ideas and beat it

Time left:

Теория Решения Изобретательских Задач

TRIZ

TRIZ Nina Videos

TRIZ in one move

Someone, somewhere, has already broken your contradiction

Borrow the pattern — adapt it to your case

A simple example — the stubborn ketchup

If: you shake and squeeze the bottle harder,
Then: the ketchup finally comes,
But: it arrives all at once — everywhere except the plate

The other way round → store it upside down — gravity has already done the work

Warm-up task — flip yours

Apply the other way round to any generic problem — 3 ideas

Four patterns for Field · Factory · Future

The other way round
Do it beforehand
Split it up
Let it serve itself

🔧 the formal tool is Inventive Principles 13 · 10 · 1 · 25 — of Altshuller's 40

1 — The other way round

Field — don't fly the expert to the fault; stream the fault to the expert
Factory — the supervisor doesn't stop the line; any operator can
Future — don't ask the account what to add; watch what they work around

The reversal pattern, across all three pillars, and notice that each one breaks a conflict you named yesterday. In the field, instead of your best engineer flying to every fault, the fault comes to him — a video call, a live log, a guided walk-through — so a junior's hands do the work while the expert's head stays available to five sites at once. In the factory, the famous reversal is the andon principle: the authority to stop the line moves from the supervisor down to any operator who spots a defect, which is a reversal of power rather than of hardware, and the one most managers find hardest to grant. And in the future portfolio, reverse the requirement question itself — stop asking the loud account what to add, and go watch what nurses and engineers already work around, because a workaround is a requirement that someone has already validated for you.

The reversal is often a management move rather than a technical one. Ask who is currently travelling, deciding or watching, and try making it the other party.

2 — Do it beforehand

Field — the machine flags the worn part; a planned visit beats a scrambled one
Factory — kit every part before the shift; the line never waits
Future — gather the regulatory evidence during development, not after

3 — Split it up

Field — split the job, not just the machine: triage remotely, hands on site
Factory — small batches: a defect costs a tray, not a truckload
Future — pilot in one clinic before one country

Segment whatever is too big to handle. In the field the obvious version is modularity — swap the failed module in minutes instead of wheeling the whole machine away for days — but the version that changes your week is splitting the job itself: the diagnosis is one task and the repair is another, so your expert triages from his desk and a junior pair of hands does the work on site. One senior covers five sites in a day, and the junior finally starts learning. In the factory, small batches mean a defect found late costs you a tray, not a truckload. And in the future portfolio, launch in segments too — one clinic, then one region, then one country — so each step teaches the next one cheaply.

For a manager, splitting a role is usually easier to authorise than splitting a product, and it pays back immediately.

4 — Let it serve itself

Field — the machine keeps its own fault history — the cause writes itself
Factory — every station logs and reports its own maintenance
Future — consumables reorder themselves before the patient runs out

Make the system perform its own auxiliary functions. In the field, this is the direct answer to the red arrow we found yesterday: if the machine keeps and uploads its own fault history, the cause records itself and no longer depends on a tired engineer typing one line from an airport lounge. The same machine can also disinfect and self-test between patients, so the nurse checks a green light instead of running a procedure. In the factory, every station logs its own hours and asks for its own maintenance, so nothing waits on an inspector's clipboard. And in the future portfolio, the consumables watch their own level and reorder themselves, so a patient at home never faces an empty shelf.

The managerial reading of this pattern: any report you have to chase people for is a candidate to be generated by the work itself.

Task — break yours

Generate ideas using those 4 patterns
Add them to your list of ideas (in the appropriate place)
⭐ mark every idea that uses a free resource from your TIMES sheet

Scan me — the four patterns

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/06-Ideation.pdf

Reflection time

what did you enjoy doing?
where did you struggle?
what did you learn and can apply come Monday morning?

Time left for reflection:

A wall full of ideas

Your ideas — put paper on screen

A Learning Topic

Tool 5 — Putting finger to keyboard

From the wall to the screen

📸 Photograph everything — your grids, maps & stickies are the evidence

For the next round

Create your presentation (Presentation time: 8-minutes)

A simple customer story
Illustrate your main problem
Solution - Describe your concept visually and with one sentence
- Highlight your unique selling proposition (USP) of your solution
- Supplement by adding a feature list

Improvements or Advantages (Think metrics, numbers)
- for the customer
- for the company
- for the stakeholder(s)
Plan of Action (Include Prototyping and other milestones with time)
Support from leadership (Networks, Funding, Personnel)

Task — build the pitch

Create a compelling 8-minute presentation from the template

Time remaining:

Scan me — the Pitch

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/07-Presentation.pdf

Reflection time

what did you enjoy doing?
where did you struggle?
what did you learn and can apply come Monday morning?

Time left for reflection:

You have a pitch

Now let's try to break it — before the boss does

Tool 6 — Bulletproofing

Rules — for the presenter

Select 1 presenter per team
Present to the assigned team — one-way, 8 min
Then turn your back — note down every piece of dissent, in silence
Return to your team — patch the pitch (8 min)
NO discussions with the dissenters — none

Method courtesy — https://cognitive-edge.com/methods/ritual-dissent/

Rules — for the dissenters

Presentation — style, clarity, the 8-minute discipline
People — is the customer story real, is the empathy earned
Problem — does the analysis hold
Solution — novelty, feasibility, implementation detail
Advantages — for the patient, for Vantive, for the stakeholders

Attack the idea — never the team

Round 1 (N+1)

Round 2 (N+2)

Round 3 (N+3)

Scan me — Bulletproofing

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/08-Bulletproof.pdf

Reflection time

what did you enjoy doing?
where did you struggle?
what did you learn and can apply come Monday morning?

Time left for reflection:

Final Presentations — the Sistla Tank

8-min pitch + hard Q&A — in front of the Big Boss himself

You've pitched and defended

Here's what you carry out the door

Now What?

You walk out with

A system map + a named contradiction for a real Vantive problem
A wall of concepts — and the one your team chose to back
An 8-minute pitch — battle-tested through 3 rounds of dissent
A one-page pocket method — reuse it on your next problem

Phase 2 preview — "Blue Sky"

From reacting → anticipating:
Ideal Final Result & S-curves — read each product's maturity
Tech-trend scouting — sensing, miniaturization, closed-loop, home autonomy

Go deeper — the course

Design Thinking — A Primer · IIT Madras · free on NPTEL / Swayam

Go deeper — the book

Karmic Design Thinking — look at it free at https://dt.balaramadurai.net, but buy it 😀

Bring the method back in

Coaching sessions with the teams
Run it on one live problem — next Monday, not someday
Phase 2 — "Blue Sky" — when you're ready to look further out

Love to keep in touch

https://balaramadurai.net/about/

bala@balaramadurai.net

http://in.linkedin.com/in/balaramadurai

My LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/balaramadurai/

Acknowledgments

The Vantive Field, Factory & Future teams — for the real cases that made every exercise real
Sistla & R&D leadership — for backing the move from firefighting to systematic
The two lettered man Dr. Ch
Genrich Altshuller — who turned 200,000 patents into a method, from a prison cell
Claude (Anthropic's AI) — studio buddy on these slides, who learned the hard way to drop every full stop

Scan me — everything after

kdt.balaramadurai.net/2026-Vantive-Innovation/09-NowWhat.pdf