Valeri Souchkov
Published in The TRIZ Journal, March, 1999
First, this article should not be regarded as scientific. The only idea it discusses is how to view on TRIZ. I found this issue extremely important, because there is a lot of misunderstanding of what TRIZ is, in particular, by those who encounter with TRIZ for the first time. The questions I hear over and over again (even from those who took training in TRIZ) are ‘what is TRIZ? Is it a problem-solving method? Is it a science? Is it a methodology? Is it a toolbox? Is it something to help us with breaking our mental barriers and improve our creativity?’ And so on. So I decided to make a brief overview of what TRIZ really is, to shed some light on these questions.
In my professional opinion, modern TRIZ comprises four distinct directions:
1. Theory of technology origins and evolution.
2. Techniques for overcoming mental inertia.
3. Techniques for analyzing, formulating and solving inventive problems.
4. Pointers, which organize mapping between technical functions and specific design solutions, technologies, and knowledge of natural science.
In TRIZ, these directions did not evolve independently. However this could not be otherwise, as TRIZ originated from extensive studies of technical and patent information and has been developing since as a methodology for improving engineering creativity, and not as a science.
TRIZ was born as a problem-solving tool based on a systemic view of the technological world. The primary idea behind TRIZ approach to solving problems is that information about a specific problem must be first generalized, a solution concept has to be generated, and then the concept should be specialized in terms of a feasible solution. Generalization is a very powerful tool aimed at identifying new problems with pre-defined solution patterns, which can be found in TRIZ.
Studies of patent collections by Altshuller indicated that only two per cent of solutions were truly pioneering inventions; the rest presented the use of previously known idea or a concept but in a novel way. Thus the conclusion was that an idea of a solution to a new problem might be already known. But where this idea could be found? TRIZ helps to avoid numerous trials and errors and solve problems by using generalized patterns of previous solutions. Basic assumption behind TRIZ is that if two problems from different technological areas result in identical models, they must have similar solution patterns.
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