How To Invent (Almost) Anything : 5. Basic TRIZ

5. Basic TRIZ

In 1946, a Russian Naval Patent officer, Genrich Altshuller, noticed similarities in invented solutions from different fields. He had the temerity to suggest to Stalin that he could improve inventing and was sent to a Siberian Gulag for thinking too much. Fortunately for him, the labour camp was also home to many other thinkers, including physicists, chemists, engineers and mathematicians, who helped him continue the development of his theories. After Stalin’s death and his subsequent release, he continued his research via an ‘underground University’ of like-minded scientists. Anyone could join, provided they analysed a few thousand patents!

After some 1500 person-years of research, including analysis of over 200,000 patents, Altshuller developed and refined the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, or ‘Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch’ in Russian, which gives the acronym TRIZ (pronounced ‘trees’). What Altshuller discovered is that most patented ideas use a relatively small number of objective principles and are based on a finite number of physical, chemical and geometric effects. TRIZ is the condensation of this knowledge. He also found that 90% of problems had already been solved, often in another scientific field where the inventor lacked knowledge of these existing solutions. Another finding was that only 1% of the real inventions came from real scientific discovery (32% of inventions are from personal knowledge of the inventor, 77% are from within the company and 95% are from within the industry).

At a recent conference it was stated that it might take 5 to 7 years for someone to get to be an expert in TRIZ. We are not going to try to make you an expert in this chapter, but by the end of the chapter you will understand some of the key principles and be able to use the basic TRIZ tables and lists.

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5. Basic TRIZ

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