What Is TRIZ?

First the difficult bit, TRIZ is an acronym for the Russian phrase “Теория решения изобретательских задач” (Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch) meaning “The theory of solving inventor’s problems”. It is pronounced like the big things that grow in forests “TREES”.

Now the easy bit. TRIZ works and it is to a greater or lesser extent mostly in the public domain. That’s right the most prowerful problem solving technique in the known world is available for Free. (Some knowledge is held by commercial organisations and copyrights are held by the authors and their estates of course, but by and large what you will need is out there)

TRIZ pretty much has as it’s working hypothesis that there are underlying or universal principles of invention. That if these principles could be discovered and taught then the process of invention would become easier, more predictable. The raw materials that are analysed are the patent databases that detail human invention from the past and across nearly every country in the world. There have been over 2 million technical patents analysed and really smart people have looked to see if the described invention fit a known pattern of change or used a standard solution or a scientific phenonemen. This one of the things that really appeals to me about TRIZ. It looks backwards. It asks why inventions has been successful and extracts the formula. It has structure and channels for the creative processess. You still need your natural creativity and imagination but TRIZ says to you “Everyone in recorded human history with a problem similar to yours solved their problem by having ideas in this area. Come on over.”

The results have been tweaked over time but the key findings are pretty much as follows.

• The same principles have been used time and time again to solve problems
• Technologies evolve over time but this follows patterns that happen across technologies and sciences
• There is a cross-pollination effect where scientific effects end up jumping technical or scientific fields and solving problems far from where they were invented.

The body of work that TRIZ practitioners have put together can be described as TOOLS to make your life easier. Some tools are going to be easier to pick up and use than others. Some really require you to read the manual first. We will start off looking at those principles of innovation, there are 40 of them. On this website use the tag cloud to find examples that use a certain principle.

TRIZ is only about 50 years old, so is really only a science in it’s infancy. Full of potential but also prone to tantrums, egocentric behaviour and drawing on the walls. Only the latter is to be encouraged.

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