TRIZ Overview

Description:

Triz is a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition. It accelerates the project team's ability to creatively solve problems.

This tool is spreading into corporate use across several parallel paths – it is increasingly common in six sigma processes, in project management, risk management systems, and organizational innovation initiatives.

This tool begins with the hypothesis that there are universal principles of creativity that are the basis for innovations that advance technology.

Researchers identified and codified these principles. When taught they make the process of creativity more predictable.

General Guidelines:

1. Problems and solutions repeat across industries and sciences. The classification of the contradictions in each problem predicts the creative solutions to that problem.

2. Patterns of technical evolution repeat across industries and sciences.

3. Creative innovations use scientific effects outside the studied field.

A TRIZ Example

At the highest level, this problem solving tools finds a way to produce the product with no waste, at 100 percent yield, with no added complexity.

One of the evolution patterns of  technology is that energy (fields) replaces objects (mechanical devices).

For example, consider using a laser instead of a scalpel for eye surgery. In this case, ultrasound can be used to break the cell walls or using an enzyme to "eat" the cell wall (chemical energy) instead of hitting them.

This may seem very general, but it led the pharmaceutical researchers to analyze all the resources available in the problem (the cells, the cell walls, the containment fluid, the motion of the fluid, the processing facility, etc.) and to conclude that three specific solutions had high potential for their problem:

1. Break the cell walls by sound waves (from the pattern of evolution of replacing mechanical means by fields).

2. Break the cell walls by shearing, as they pass through the processing facility (using the resources of the existing system in a different way).

3. Break the cell walls with an enzyme in the fluid  that eat the cell walls and release the contents at the desired time.

All three methods have been tested successfully. The least expensive, highest yield method was put in production.

Researchers developed these general solutions over the course of the 60 years of research and organized in many different ways. Some of these analytic methods include:

• The Ideal Final Result and Ideality
• Functional Modeling, Analysis and Trimming
• Locating the Zones of Conflict. (This is more familiar to Six Sigma problem solvers as Root Cause Analysis.)

Prescriptive methods include:

• The 40 Inventive Principles of Problem Solving
• The Separation Principles
• Laws of Technical Evolution and Technology Forecasting
• 76 Standard Solutions

In the course of solving any one technical problem, one tool or many can be used. The 40 Principles of Problem Solving are the most accessible tool of TRIZ. These principles were found to repeat across many fields, as solutions to many general contradictions, which are at the heart of many problems.