TRIZANewApproachtoInventiveProblemSolving.docVIP

TRIZ: A New Approach to Inventive Problem Solving by Jack Hipple, Innovation-TRIZ What is the biggest challenge you face as a leader? Solving problems? Resolving contradictions? Developing ideas and concepts for new products, new ideas, or approaches? What is TRIZ? TRIZ (Russian acronym for “Theory of Solving Inventive Problems”) is an inventive thinking and problem solving process. A brilliant Russian patent examiner, Genrich Altshuller, refused to accept the fact that invention and creativity were random acts. Altshuller thought it was illogical that the creative process, alone, was impossible to understand in a logical scientific way. He thought we should be able to teach the process for developing new, successful inventions. Altshuller’s vehicle for creating TRIZ was to study global patents, recordings of documented inventions and intellectual property throughout the world. In studying patent literature, he distinguished between mundane and trivial patents (with little inventive challenge), and those few patents (10%) that were truly groundbreaking. After analyzing the groundbreaking patents, he identified a common set of inventive principles and processes used across numerous areas of technology. Altshuller codified these inventive principles to make them useful across various areas of technology and business. Not until 1990 did TRIZ arrive in the US. Today, many Fortune 500 companies use TRIZ, including Proctor Gamble, Dow Chemical, Hewlett-Packard and BMW. They use TRIZ to design better products, less complicated processes, understand disruptive market trends and improve their handling of intellectual property. TRIZ has become an umbrella that covers a family of inventive concepts, tools and processes that have been used repeatedly to solve difficult problems and provide a general approach for inventive problem solving. This summary will review just a few of these principles and show how they are used in real problem solving situations. TRIZ Prin