What is TRIZ

Introduction to TRIZ will present you with the basic knowledge you need to analyze and solve inventive problems.

TRIZ (pronounced "trees") is a Russian acronym for the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, a method rooted in the study of technology rather than psychology.

During the late 1940s, Genrich Altshuller was working in the patent department of the Soviet navy. His primary responsibility was to assist inventors in filing patents, but because he was himself a gifted inventor (he received his first patent at age 14), he was often asked for help in solving problems encountered during the innovation process. Assuming that methods existed to help people solve creative problems, he went to the library and began researching. Several methods (such as brainstorming) had been developed to overcome psychological inertia; that is, to "force" people to generate ideas "outside the box."

But Altshuller soon began to realize the difficulty of obtaining objective information on the innovation process through psychological means, as the results were neither measurable nor reliable. In contrast, he reasoned, technical information is objective in nature. While there are no tools that allow us inside the human mind to study the process of innovation, the results of this process can be easily observed by studying the inventions themselves, or the patent literature associated with them.

Realizing that an innovation represents a fundamental change to a technological system Altshuller turned his attention to the patent fund, screening over 200,000 patents from all over the world. He identified 40,000 patents that constituted "inventive" achievements, and began a rigorous analysis of these. The results of his efforts formed the theoretical basis of TRIZ and laid the groundwork for the problem-solving tools that would later be developed. As the TRIZ methodology grew over the next four decades, the patent research continued; by 1990 over 2 million patents had been investigated.

Genrich Altshuller determined that the process of inventing could be significantly enhanced with a systematic procedure which provides guidance to the area of the best solutions by access to the accumulated experience of innovation.

Next