UX Study 05: Idea Generation Addendum — TRIZ
○ Genrich Saulovitch Altshuller
We live in an era of competition where we have to win on ideas and creativity.
Unfortunately, a lot of people still think creativity is innate — something you can't develop later through learning.
But anyone can become a creative person.
The creative process can be learned.
That means creative thinking and invention share common principles and patterns.
Study the commonalities of success cases → patterns, principles → insight into creative problem solving.
○ Eliminating the underlying contradiction
A methodology for finding and then overcoming the contradiction that's the key to getting the most ideal outcome for a given problem, arriving at an innovative solution.
○ TRIZ = Thinking Methodology + Standard Solution (Knowledge Database)
A. TRIZ as a problem-solving theory
: Not just a simple theory but a science-level one, covering the full process of finding, understanding, and solving a problem — and encompassing concepts, techniques, problematics, process, and more.
ТРИЗ = TRIZ [treez] (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving)
Теория (Teoriya — Theory)
Решения (Resheniya — Solving)
Изобретательских (Izobretatelskih — Inventive)
Задач (Zadach — Problems)
TRIZ's fundamental view is that innovation and the evolution of a system happen when contradictions are overcome.
So seeing through the contradiction is a vital part of TRIZ's problem-solving process. TRIZ's 'technical contradiction definition' is a technique for problem definition — an insight method that strips away information unrelated to the problem's essence and summarizes only what's core.
In acoustic psychology there's the 'masking effect' — the phenomenon where an important target sound gets drowned out by surrounding noise. The same masking effect works when we try to grasp the essence of a problem. Unless we clear away a mountain of noise information, we end up missing what truly matters (the target sound). When we grasp a system's essential functions and governing laws, see through the errors of generic solutions, and formalize that clearly and concisely (as a technical contradiction definition), only then can we set a direction for solving the problem.
Innovation is tied to creativity, which often implies a process that's unpredictable or breaks common sense. And yet, 'systematic innovation' is not an oxymoron.
The pillar of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) rests on the realization that contradictions can be resolved in an orderly way through the application of innovative solutions. This is one of the three premises underlying the theory:
( = There's no royal road [fastest shortcut], but there is a right path. )
1) The ideal design is the goal.
2) Contradictions help solve problems.
3) The innovation process can be systematically structured.
A problem is built out of contradictions, and there are methods for resolving those contradictions. Those methods have developed rapidly and are being used widely. Altshuller concluded that the key to understanding why systematic innovation is possible lies in finding the general solutions hidden inside the world's innovative patents.
The tools and knowledge database TRIZ provides
♦ Inventive principles: 40 common principles and patterns found in invention.
♦ Separation principles: principles that, in a specific inventive situation, help you generate ideas by separating things across space, time, and so on.
♦ Natural effects: an organized catalog of scientific — physical, chemical — effects that implement a desired function. Today more than 6,000 natural effects are built into software.
♦ Standard solutions: for complex problems, model the situation as substance–field and apply standard solutions to resolve it.
♦ ARIZ: a problem-solving algorithm that controls the flow of thought and helps you use TRIZ's other tools.
♦ Other principles — generalization of terms / DTC (Dimension–Time–Cost) / SLP (Small Little People).
B. Business-TRIZ
: A technique that takes parts of TRIZ — inventive principles, contradictions, systems thinking — and uses them to solve problems that come up in the management world (marketing, HR, conflict management, project management, etc.).
○ The centralized, top-down decision-making of the past — where only a few people solve problems — is showing its limits.
○ Rather than relying on leadership ability alone, you need a methodology and process where employees share and solve problems together.
○ Experiential thinking — relying on your own knowledge and experience — does sometimes produce good ideas that solve problems, but its downside is that it takes several rounds of trial and error, and sometimes it never finds a solution at all.
○ TRIZ has you first get at the essence of the problem and its contradictions, so you can break free from fixed ideas, and then presents the principles for resolving the contradictions that come up when you try new ideas — through a contradiction-resolution matrix built from patent analysis.
○ Technical TRIZ's problem-solving principles, derived from technology patents, are somewhat hard for office-support staff to understand and apply.
○ In 2003, UK professor Darrell Mann took technical TRIZ's methodology and tools as they were, shifted the topic and scope entirely to business, and completed the Business TRIZ system.
○ Innovation activities companies currently run — Six Sigma, management-quality diagnosis, and so on — derive improvement ideas through brainstorming that leans on experiential thinking.
○ By contrast, Business TRIZ's problem-solving matrix — unlike those existing innovation methodologies that rely on experiential thinking — produces systematic, creative improvement ideas.
○ Because Business TRIZ presents problem-solving principles based on business cases from management, it's comparatively easy for general office staff to understand and apply.
