TRIZ

TRIZ

Introduction to TRIZ (open in new window)

TRIZ has been originated in 1946 by a Russian inventor Genrich Altshuller. Altshuller was a patent agent in the Soviet Navy and he saw a lot of patents, both foreign and domestic, as a result of his work. He began to question whether invention was the result of creative genius alone or was there a structure or method by which inventions were made. Altshuller studied about 200,000 patents looking for structure in the inventions. Of the 200,000 patents he examined, he identified about 40,000 that embodied innovations. A further study of these roughly 40,000 patents revealed 40 patterns of invention. These patterns are themes or abstractions that recur many times. Altshuller believed that these patterns could be the basis for an innovation algorithm. Over his lifetime, Altshuller developed a number of innovation algorithms including ARIZ-71, ARIZ-77 and ARIZ-85. Virtually all of this work went unnoticed in the West because of the cold war. With the advent of Perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union, Altshuller’s work became recognized throughout the world, largely as a result of the emigration of TRIZ-trained people out of the Soviet Union, who began to publish and practice in the rest of the world. In 1992 many of the leading TRIZ scientists in the world relocated to the United States. TRIZ now has over 60 years of research and development and has been used to solve thousands of inventive problems in a wide variety of disciplines.

TRIZ grew to incorporate the knowledge abstracted from more than two million patents. Today, TRIZ has evolved into a true science of innovation that allows for the control, prediction and management of innovation.

A significant improvement was made in the early 1990’s by Sergey Malkin, Boris Zlotin and others at Ideation International. They combined the use of function models and TRIZ. The concept of function models was developed by Charles Bytheway in 1965. Bytheway built on the work of Lawrence Miles, the father of Value Engineering. The technique Bytheway developed was called Function Analysis System Technique or FAST. Function models reveal cause and effect in a system. In building a FAST model, the engineer asks how, when and why things happen in a system. The innovation developed by Malkin et al was to introduce useful and harmful functions into function models. The use of harmful functions makes it possible to use the function model to identify three basic ways to improve system performance: improve useful functions, reduce harmful functions and resolve contradictions between useful and harmful functions.

Despite the inherent power of TRIZ and the refinements made to applying TRIZ, TRIZ has had limited success as a widespread innovation method. This is due to the Fundamental TRIZ Contradiction: TRIZ is complex and can therefore be used to solve many challenging problems but the complexity of TRIZ prevents its wide-spread use in organizations, especially large organizations. Because TRIZ has been limited to so-called TRIZ experts, it has not been useful in project team environments which are typical in the United States. To resolve this contradiction, thereby making TRIZ widely applicable. Pretium resolves the fundamental TRIZ contradiction by using the TRIZ inventive principle, Separation in Structure between the element and the whole: Separate the function into two states and assign one of them to a subsystem and the other to the whole system.

To effect this separation, Pretium’s Guided Innovation Toolkit™ software provides direct access to a simplified system of inventive principles, which can be used by people with limited training to quickly brainstorm ideas. This is the “keep it simple” part. Guided Innovation Toolkit™ also provides a sophisticated function modeling tool to deconstruct complex systems to reveal cause-and-effect and identify the best ways to improve system performance. This is the complex part realized through Structured Innovation.