"TRIZ: ALGEBRA FOR CREATIVITY"

"TRIZ: ALGEBRA FOR CREATIVITY"
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Put your self in a time machine and transport back to the Middle Ages and then pretend that you're in your high school math class and your teacher asks you to solve this problem:

3X2 + 5X + 2 = 0

Remember, you're in the Middle Ages and algebra doesn't exist. What's "X"? How would you figure it out? Trial and error, right? Why don't you do that any more? Well, because mathematicians figured out that if you generalized the problem to:

AX2 + BX + C = 0

that an equation (-b +/-, etc.-you do remember it don't you?) would give the exact answers (note there are two-would you stop after one if you were guessing?). Around 1950, a brilliant patent examiner in Russia did the same thing for inventive/creative problem solving. He recognized that, after reviewing thousands of patents, there were a limited number of inventive principles (40 to be exact) that were constantly reused to solve any problem. He captured this knowledge in a number of forms, including lists of these principles, a contradiction table (most significant inventions resolve contradictions as opposed to compromising around them), a general problem solving algorithm, lines of evolution used to forecast technology development, and an algorithm for failure prediction. It's interesting to note that, even after 60 years, no additional basic inventive principles have been discovered! Knowledge and use of TRIZ eliminates the inefficiency of generating hundreds of non-useful ideas which have to be sorted through. The effort is spent upfront in the problem definition stage to map a problem against known solutions.

These tools have been used by major corporations such as Boeing, Siemens, Dow Chemical, and General Electric to solve problems they couldn't solve with psychologically based approaches such as brainstorming, CPS, and DeBono tools. TRIZ is comparable to a brainstorming session where you have all of the world's inventors in the room with you as opposed to stimulating the brains in the room. It is now also being used for failure analysis and prediction and in the intellectual property area to improve patent filings and to circumvent existing patents.

The big barriers to the use of TRIZ are:

1. Ego. It is hard for people to believe that their difficult problem may have already been solved.

2. Problem definition time. It is "fun", but not productive, to generate hundreds, maybe thousands of ideas or to solve the wrong problem many times. The time spent in TRIZ in modeling and generalizing a problem is a barrier to many people, despite its documented effectiveness.

A simple way to get started with TRIZ is to eliminate all the jargon and special words used only in your company or industry and rephrased your problem as if you were describing it to a ten year old. Then ask yourself, "who else has this kind of general problem? How do they solve it?"

Websites for TRIZ materials:

http://www.innovation-triz.com http://www.triz-journal.com
http://www.triz40.com http://www.aitriz.org http://www.etria.net

Jack Hipple
Innovation-TRIZ
Tampa, FL
813-994-9999