Special Exception:
We advised above that Invention-On-Demand is a hands-on workshop training in how to conceptualize inventions, innovations, discoveries and solutions to technical problems. Except for certain very basic problem-solving skills, this is not a training in how to develop your inventions. However, one exception to that limiting statement is that we will feature, Sunday afternoon, the Win/Win-Finder as a means to search for backing and markets for such items as you (and/or we) choose to pursue development of.

Win/Win-Finder is a systems-based sorting and mapping of stakeholders and potential stakeholders, amazingly helpful in planning your strategies for seeking support and for anticipating, maneuvering around or even converting previously unsuspected sources of resistance. In a group, Win/Win-Finder is a lot of fun — but is also illuminating.

Other Caveats:
How practical can this Invention-On-Demand training be? As you know, few independent inventors any longer see their brainchildren make it through to development and remuneration. The only part of the world that beats a path to your door for that better mousetrap, are development firms which make their money not from development but from sale of their services to struggling inventors. However, a few positive exceptions to this have emerged, and also some options which most inventors haven't thought of. So: if you are acting as an individual, don't expect automatic easy riches — but don't rule them out, either.

For you, this weekend will be as practical as you can make it — more so while you have a workshop-full of fellow seekers and problem-solving partners to help you make it so.

If you are already part of a technological or scientific enterprise:  with or without your colleagues, this weekend can be the most productive of your life thus far. If you are in major projects, or if you are going after discoveries or inventions involving several advanced technologies together or which are otherwise complex, you will be especially interested in the team version of the Beachhead en scenario excursions, where you can marshal together some of your most advanced and varied specialists on common and highly challenging invention and discovery projects.

Getting a head jump on some of our methods:
This can only help you gain still more value from the Invention-On-Demand weekend, and this will also let you get a better idea of what you are getting into. Use the head start to build both your experiences at the workshop and the skills you take from the workshop to yet a handsomely higher level. Some of the already-published methods you might want to get an advanced start on include the following:

• Inclined toward making basic discoveries and toward formal scientific and/or technical problem-solving? Have a go at the four methods which are posted free online as a fair sample under Idea Generator, and which are yours to use now, for free. If you are a physicist, try out the last one of those four methods, especially.

• The above-mentioned Win/Win-Finder is described and self-taught via a set of specific step-by-step instructions.

• The late Leo Zajac's Inventing Method, derived from Osborn-Parnes CPS Method, begins on page 113 of Win Wenger's book, Discovering The Obvious. In exploratory group sessions this method was so very productive of invention ideas that participants were very reluctant to move on to any other method.

• Windtunnel problem-solving, a remote descendant of both Socratic Method and Osborn-Parnes CPS, is free online, as is its more private twin, Freenoting.

• The De Zanger Inventium Deck for inventing and for ingenious creative problem-solving, derived from the Russian-based TRIZ master-creativity system. Obtain the Deck directly from its creator, Andre de Zanger, at the Creativity Institute.

• Image-Streaming, the basic modern version of Einsteinian Discovery Technique, is now being applied by more and more systems, programs and authors. Many of its applications, and even how to teach it, are part of an entire self-taught curriculum free online here. This basic skill feeds into nearly every other skill and ability, not only such skills and abilities as are being taught in the Invention-On-Demand workshop.

• Several of the various Beachhead en scenario discovery and invention methods are self-taught on pages 123-165 of Win Wenger's book, Discovering The Obvious. This family of methods is the most advanced visual thinking work you will find anywhere, remarkably productive of understandings, insights, useful perspectives and workable detail.

Summary of resources you acquire in this training:

• Modern Socratic Method: Learn easy, highly productive ways to draw forth, from yourself and from others, your deepest, subtlest awarenesses on any topic, question or problem. Modern science now lets us understand why, over 2300 years, practice of even the traditional forms of Socratic Method always led toward high understanding and intellectual achievement. With modern understandings, our new forms of Socratic Method are not only even more productive, but much easier to perform. You will discover that you are brighter than you think.

• Einsteinian Deep Thought Discovery Method: We are pleased to advise that Project Renaissance has found a basic natural phenomenon, ongoing in every human being, which is the most sensitive and accurate known means to sort among and assemble insights from long-forgotten information and awarenesses, relating them to current questions and situations. This is an automatic reflex and always there. Better than 99% of all human individuals prove able to use the basic modern form of Einsteinian method — Image-Streaming — and the many other visual thinking procedures which stem from it. Had Einstein himself had the advantage of these modern forms of his process, he probably would have been able to discover his long-sought-after unified field theory, even from the base of the more limited understandings which existed then. Learn and practice this new version of Einstein's most powerful method of thinking and make it yours.

• Rapid Flow-With-Feedback: Both Freenoting and Windtunnel are descendants of both Osborn-Parnes CPS Method with its "brainstorming" feature and the "Flow" principles developed by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. Even more important to creativity than "suspended judgment" is speed of process, in surges which literally pull forth hidden insights and awarenesses. Alternate these with critical judgment phases in order to "pull the weeds from the gardens of truth." Critical judgment is very much needed — but only after the creative new idea is fully out on the table so there is something there worth judging. Such creating and judging are like two feet of the mind — you need to move each foot freely in its turn to get very far. (In this regard, most people try to hop through life and career only on the one foot or the other, and wonder why things are difficult.)

• Notice-Focusing: Noticing little oddities, even noticing the seemingly common-place, is behind many great inventions and scientific discoveries. Those "lucky few" who made those breakthroughs? "Most men stumble across breakthrough discoveries," said Sir Winston Churchill, "but most of us then pick ourselves up and walk away." Everyone has ongoing streams of awareness within themselves, containing elements which, if noticed and focused upon, would make for such breakthroughs. You can obtain an example demonstration at the DEAM method and Evoked Sidebands, and trying out the easy step-by-step instructions there.

• Unifying Principles behind all patented inventions? The TRIZ system, developed in Russia and imported to the States, analyzed out most of the principles to be found behind all patented inventions and discoveries. These principles readily guide you to solutions to current technical and scientific issues and problems. Normally, it takes months or years of intense applied study to learn and make good use of the TRIZ system. Andre de Zanger's Inventium Deck system puts most of this into your permanent easy use and command in an hour or less.

Inventing for the Developing World:
We didn't invent these two wonderful devices but would have liked to. Others did. These are the kind of utterly simple, accessible, inexpensive inventions within everyone's reach which we believe would come out of an Invention-On-Demand training workshop, if we had participants who also shared our interest in that.

One of the things we didn't invent, but which is an example of the kind of invention that would come out of a Developing-World-Focused Invention-On-Demand training, is the African refrigerator, or refrigerator-without-electricity. Put two large clay jars, one inside the other. Fill the space between one and the other with mud, straw and water. Evaporation keeps the contents of the inner jar at refrigerator temperatures without electricity. No matter how poverty-stricken or driven into refugee status someone may be, if he can own two large clay jars, he can own a refrigerator.

Another example is even simpler:  pre-spraying mosquito netting with insect repellent, before selling or distributing that netting. That may save hundreds of thousands of human beings from malaria.

Simplicity. Ingenuity. Devices which can benefit the human beings who most need them. Devices which will save or much improve the lives of millions of human beings. If there are people and enterprises interested in pulling together an inventor-training workshop in South Africa in 2008, please bring that to the attention of Win Wenger. We believe that dozens of such humanity-enhancing devices can come from this training.

Further — if circumstances and resources don't permit the bringing together of a professionally facilitated training in inventing in your country or area, but you are willing to pull people together and work harder on your own, contact Win Wenger and we will work to devise with you a curriculum which you can pursue on your own, free of charge.

Facilitators:

Charles P. Roman has an MS in Nuclear Engineering and is a certified senior reactor operator instructor. Chuck is also certified as a Project Management Professional and has been a project manager for Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh for over 15 years. He has co-authored, with Win Wenger, the new CoreBook, Image-Streaming, and teaches classes in creative problem-solving at a Pittsburgh community college. Chuck is also a certified trainer on behalf of Project Renaissance, the non-profit education and research firm through which most of these methods and techniques have been developed and made available.
 

Win Wenger, Ph.D., is the source for much of what will be taught in Invention-On-Demand. Founder and president of Project Renaissance, Win has invented and developed more than one hundred new methods of creative problem-solving and innovation, many of which are now in professional use around the world. Win has facilitated workshops in many locations around the world. He has authored and published fifty books and is co-author of the international near best-seller, The Einstein Factor. He taught at the annual Creative Problem-Solving Institute, a kind of world Congress on creativity, for 30 years straight, and is the one who discovered that every effective creativity-related method can also serve as a powerful accelerated-learning method. He founded the branch of social theory known as Sociotectonics. A few of his inventions can be viewed online here under Inventions.

Directions:
Holiday Inn Gaithersburg, 2 Montgomery Village Avenue, Gaithersburg, MD 20879, phone 301-948-8900, fax 301-258-1940. It faces major route 355, and only one block off interstate I-270. Because of its convenient location, various shuttle services run directly to this Holiday Inn from Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., and BWI in Baltimore, Maryland.

Room rates at the Holiday Inn for this event, if you announce as part of the Project Renaissance training there, will be at discounted group price, per night, double or single, plus 12% tax. Exact cost to be announced. Please make your own reservations directly. To qualify for this special lower room rate, advise operators that you are in the group affiliation "PRR." Phone either Central Reservations at 1-800-465-4329 or the local Holiday Inn directly at 1-301-948-8900.

Terms:
Tuition for all three days combined is $795 ($695 if you register before January 1, 2008) for this training session of the Invention-On-Demand program. Register online via our secure shopping cart by clicking the REGISTER button below. When the order form opens, select "Registration" in the pull-down menus for shipping and sales tax to prevent these from being automatically added by the program.

Close associates of yours may register for only $595 (save $200.00). Group rates are also available—inquire to Win Wenger.

Register by mail:   Print out and send completed registration form with payment of $795 ($695 before January 1, 2008) to Project Renaissance, Box 332, Gaithersburg, MD 20884-0332.

Register by phone: 301-948-1122, with your credit card.

Register online: Click the "Register" button.

3-day Invention-On-Demand Training Workshop, $795
($695 till Dec. 31)