TRIZ

The Author has a very personal connection to the creator of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), Genrich Saulovich Altshuller, and to his method. The Author was in his early twenties and a junior faculty member at the Warsaw University of Technology (it was 1972 or 1973) when he attended, by a pure coincidence, a seminar on TRIZ and unexpectedly discovered a way of thinking entirely different from the traditional analytical thinking of structural engineering. Next came a small book by Altshuller, a translation from the Russian. The translation was bad and the book was written in a Soviet propaganda language that all Soviet writers, including engineers, were required to use, but the message was intriguing and fascinating at the same time: We can create inventions on demand. The Author had found his calling. About six months later, the Author became a cofounder of the Heuristics Group of the Polish Cybernetic Society and tried to invite Altshuller to Warsaw. The invitation was sent by a person traveling to Moscow and was mailed from Moscow, otherwise it would never have reached Altshuller (the KGB in action). The reply came in a similarly convoluted way: “I would love to come but I am under a house arrest. A prototype of one of my inventions caught fire during the tests and I was accused of sabotage.” (Only much later the Author discovered that this invention was a semiautonomous floating device for cleaning oil spills in ports.) The Author’s next personal interaction with Altshuller came more than ten years later (in the mid-1980s), when the Author was working on a talk he had been invited to give on design research in Eastern Europe, and he contacted Altshuller about his contributions to this area. This ultimately led to cooperation with his disciples and with Ideation International Inc., which was cofounded by several close associates of Altshuller and is now the leading TRIZ company in the world. (In fact, the two key TRIZ experts from this company, Alla Zusman and Boris Zlotin, named TRIZ masters by Altshuller, have cooperated with the Author to make sure that the chapter on TRIZ truly represents Altshuller’s ideas and the state of the art.) Obviously, this chapter is only an overview of the method, and while it is sufficient for those who want to

learn about it on the conceptual level, it is definitely grossly insufficient for becoming a TRIZ expert or even a TRIZ practitioner. Fortunately, there are many books and articles on TRIZ (Altshuller 1984, 1996, 1999; Altshuller et al. 1999; Altshuller and Shulyak 2002; Arciszewski 1988a; Clarke 1997; Orloff 2003), and several companies, including Ideation International Inc., offer all kinds of courses on the topic.