From a Methodical Inventive Workshop to a surprising technological patent

A learning contest and internalization of the innovation workshop

KLA-Tencor is a hi-tech company that develops, manufactures and markets wafer defect and surface quality inspection products for the semiconductor industry.

Of all the activity at KLA-Tencor, the most interesting was the work with the senior development team for its next generation of products.

The company’s R&D group includes world-renowned researchers who hold PhDs in physics, solid state and semiconductor physics, materials and mechanical engineering.

In the beginning, the experts were extremely skeptical: what else could we possibly have to teach them? After all – they really had seen everything and thought of everything….

The team leader, Dr. Michael Adel, challenged the team by saying: “We are all testing Gideon Gilda and Methodical Inventive Thinking. That’s obvious. But we are also being tested on our ability to learn from something new, to internalize and apply it.

The study of a method of thinking during a workshop requires desire and serious intention on the part of the learners to use what is said and come up with creative ideas on their own.

We see the workshop just like anything else in life. Most people deal with the question of “Why can’t this work for me?” “Why is this not suited to our kind of business?”

A minority, however, sees the workshop as an opportunity. Since competition was created within the team at KLA-Tencor as to who would best understand and adopt the method, the level of internalization was excellent.

After a day of workshop and practice, we set about trying to solve a real problem – something that the experts had actually been working on for some time but without reaching a satisfactory solution.

After formulating the challenge and using the various thinking tools, 2 or 3 surprising ideas were put forward….. a strange kind of silence ensued…. In the end, another amazingly creative idea popped up – offering a solution to the problem.

Some of the researchers said they thought it was just luck and we decided to look at an additional challenge of equal difficulty. Here too, after a precise definition of the challenge, the analysis of the world of the problem and the application of thinking tools led to a new solution.

The solution to the second problem was highly innovative and went on to become a registered patent!! Both ideas were developed into new products for the company.