TRIZ

What Is TRIZ?

TRIZ is a formal system of problem solving aimed at people with practical problems - engineers, scientists, inventors etc. The name stands for "Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadatch" which is Russian for the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TIPS).

TRIZ was initially developed in the 1940s by Genrich S. Altschuller. Since then it has been used and refined by many researchers and companies and you can even buy specialised TRIZ software.

Psychological Inertia

One of the objectives of TRIZ is to overcome what is called psychological inertia. Techniques such as brainstorming are great for coming up with new ideas but they do have their limits. It is very difficult for anyone to brainstorm an idea that is completely outside their field of expertise - for example, a chemist is unlikely to think of an approach that might be commonplace in computer science.

One of the aims of TRIZ is to help people to think "outside the box" in this way and to overcome this psychological inertia. Very often the solution to a problem already exists in a different field if only it could be identified and adapted.

Contradictions and Solutions

Altschuller studied over 200,000 patents trying to analyse what made them special. He found that the vast number of these contained simply an enhancement or standard improvement of an existing system. Very few actually contained what he considered a genuinely creative, inventive solution.

Altschuller also discovered that many problems had in fact already been solved - but in a different field. Most of these problems involved trying to deal with some sort of contradiction where attempting to improve one facet of a design makes another one worse - for example creating something that is both powerful yet energy efficient.

One approach to such contradictions is to compromise - depending on one's outlook, this could be seen as either taking the best or the worst of both worlds. The truly creative, inventive solution involves eliminating the contradiction entirely.

Altschuller's approach - and the foundation of TRIZ - was to analyse these contradictions. He identified 39 fundamental properties of physical systems that a designer might want to improve - for example speed, brightness, power, temperature, etc. By placing these on a two dimensional grid he created a matrix of the various contradictions that could occur.

40 Inventive Principles

The other key element of TRIZ is the 40 principles. These are fundamental principles that Altschuller identified from his study of patents which have been used to solve these various contradictions. These 40 inventive principles include "Segmentation", "Extraction", "Inversion", "Feedback", etc. Each cell in the matrix of contradictions contains a list of principles which have been used in the past to solve the contradiction.

The TRIZ methodology can thus be summarised in very simple terms as defining a problem in terms of its contradictions then examing how standard principles of innovation have been used to solve those contradictions in other fields.

This idea of "reusing" solutions is echoed in the field of design patterns.

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