The TRIZ world has lost a champion—Mark Reeves

A short while ago, we lost Mark Reeves. He passed away after a short, but valiant battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease in his early 70’s. Not many people in the TRIZ community knew Mark, but I got to know him well as we both received our “basic training” in the same class from TRIZ Masters Boris Zlotin and Alla Zusman. He retired from 3M as one of its most prolific inventors, including a training system used for US athletes in the winter Olympics. His basement in his house in the Minneapolis, MN area was a hot bed of innovation and he continued to make a unique tape testing machine for 3M in his basement. He was always my partner in doing TRIZ workshops that were focused on his expertise areas of mechanical engineering and physics and we did several joint workshops and training for corporate clients over the past 20 years. There was no one else in the TRIZ community that could stimulate “out of the box” thinking as Mark could.

His business practice was focused in the Minneapolis area with clients such as 3M, General Mills, and Target. He decided to focus his TRIZ energy in intellectual property and obtained his patent agent license in Minnesota and assisted clients in expanding patent coverage and circumventing patents using both TRIZ software tools and Su-Field modeling. There was never a patent he couldn’t find a way around! He did this type of work long before it became a “hot” topic in the TRIZ community.

Though he is no longer with us, the impact of his TRIZ work will survive with the people and companies he worked with.

We’ll miss you, Mark!

Jack Hipple