Applying TRIZ Based Business Innovation Tools to Integrated Resort Development in Matsu

Abstract

After a prolonged debate and preparation, the controversial issue of opening up the gaming industry at Matsu, Taiwan has come to a conclusion with the pass of the referendum on the seventh of July, 2012. The gaming industry brings positive economic benefits as well as negative environmental and social impacts. Due to the limited land space and natural resources, the development of integrated resort brings a lot of conflicts between four major aspects, i.e., geographic, social, transportation, and eco-awareness. There is a need for efficiently solving the problems that may occur during the process of the introducing tourism and gaming business to Matsu. To better identify the conflicts and solve the problems, many of problem identification and innovative problem solving tools are created. Among those, TRIZ (The theory of inventive problem solving) is getting most attention due to its high efficiency. TRIZ provides a complete tool set ranging from problem identification to problem solving. While it was originally used in solving engineering problems, recent researches have modified and applied it to various areas, such as management and education. Cause-effect chains analysis, one of TRIZ problem identification tools, is now modified to identify service and business problems, namely RCA+ (conflict root cause analysis+) and BFD (Business Function Diagram). In any business body, conflicts usually exist between business goals and resources when trying to meet stakeholders’’ needs. Only by solving the conflicts appropriately can a business achieves excellence. After reviewing the factors that affect running a successful integrated resort, RCA+ and BFD are applied to identify the conflicts and problems in Matsu. Then, the fundamental TRIZ tool, modified contradiction matrix for management, is used to solve the conflicts and provides constructive suggestions. An important contribution of this research is evaluating the usefulness of TRIZ based tools in the gaming industry.