How to Invent a Solution for Any Problem.
An innovation technique you’ve never heard of — being used by companies such as NASA, IBM, Samsung and others.
The theory of inventive problem solving.
In Russian it is known as “Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch” — more commonly known by the acronym TRIZ. This technique has been used in everything from Aerospace Engineering to To-Do lists. In this post I’ll be telling you what it is and how to use it.
A short history of finding method to madness.
In post Soviet Union Russia, inventor Genrich Altshuller developed TRIZ by studying over 45,000 patents and finding patterns between the patented inventions and the problems that they had solved. Altshuller and his colleagues found that only 5% of the patents were ‘new inventions’ while the rest were mostly improvements to existing systems.
TRIZ was developed to provide a systematic approach to defining and solving challenging problems requiring an inventive solution.
What do problems consist of?
According to TRIZ problems require inventive solutions when there is a contradiction that is unresolved. These contradictions can be categorised into a list of 39 contradictory elements.
