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Q. Everywhere I look it seems I
find a different view of what TRIZ is. What actually is it? Q. What’s the difference between
TRIZ and ‘systematic innovation’? Q. Is TRIZ/systematic innovation
going to do my thinking for me? Q. What about all the other
creativity methods? How does TRIZ compare with them? Q. I’m already quite creative, what
could TRIZ possibly teach me? Q. What sort of situations will
TRIZ help me with? Q. TRIZ sometimes gives the
impression that it is a cult, is this true? Q. Can TRIZ solve any problem? Q. I can’t find any examples of
TRIZ being used in the areas I’m interested in, what should I do? Q. No method is that good, what are
the weak points of TRIZ? Q. If TRIZ is as good as the hype
suggests why isn’t everyone using it? Q. If TRIZ is so good, why isn’t
the former Soviet Union better than it appears to be? Q. Why are there so few TRIZ
success stories? Q. I don’t have any problems. Why
do I need TRIZ? And now for some answers… |
Q. Everywhere I look it seems I find a different view of what TRIZ is. What actually is it?Part of the reason there is
so much variation in the descriptions you will find is because TRIZ is a very
rich and broad-reaching thing. It is possible to justify describing it as a
collection of creativity tools, a method and a philosophy. Which you think it
is depends on how much of it you have absorbed. In essence, it is a means
to achieve breakthrough creativity and innovation. It helps you to do this
because it is constructed from a distillation of excellence from all fields
of human endeavour. Using TRIZ can feel a bit like having the world’s finest
minds ready to help you. Many hundreds of pages have
been written about TRIZ. You might like to try here – What is TRIZ? – if you want
to read a few hundred words, or here – Chapter
1: HOSI for Business – if you have time to read a couple of thousand. |
Q. What’s the difference between TRIZ and ‘systematic innovation’?In many ways the two terms
are synonymous. In the strictest sense you might think of TRIZ as being one
part of a bigger ‘systematic innovation’ method, albeit, it is a very big
part. Systematic innovation has taken the original TRIZ ambition of ‘putting
all the good stuff in one place’ a step further and has integrated a number
of other tools and techniques into a (hopefully) coherent whole. That being
said, ‘TRIZ’ is much easier to say and quicker to write than ‘systematic
innovation’ and so tends to be used more frequently. |
Q. Is TRIZ/systematic innovation going to do my thinking for me?Unfortunately or
fortunately depending on which way you look at it, TRIZ will not replace the
need to think. It is not a machine that will invent things and it is not an
‘algorithm’ – at least not in the mathematical sense. What it will do,
however, is provide structure to the way you think, and it will ensure that
you cover all of the possible avenues of possibility. At the end of the day,
the more effort you put into TRIZ the more benefit you will get out. |
Q. I’ve been told it will take a year or more to learn how to use TRIZ properly. I don’t have a year to spare, does that mean I should forget about TRIZ?Some parts of the TRIZ
community will gleefully tell you how much time it takes to come to terms
with the tremendous richness of TRIZ. There are probably many reasons for
spreading this type of message (ego, exclusivity to name two fairly common
ones), but few of them bare close scrutiny. It is possible to get
tangible benefit from using just small parts of the TRIZ toolkit. Some parts
of TRIZ are more complex than others, but some of the simpler conceptual
thinking tools can be learned and experienced in a few hours. Check here – TRIZ for Everyone – if you
want to read in more detail about how others have been adopting parts of TRIZ
into their way of doing things. |
Q. What about all the other creativity methods? How does TRIZ compare with them?This is obviously a very big
question. In essence, TRIZ is significantly richer than most other
techniques, but it would be wrong to think that it replaces any. In fact many
people have found that they have been able to integrate just parts of TRIZ
into their current way of doing things to achieve substantial benefits. One part of TRIZ suggests
that system evolution trends are highly predictable: using these trends to
extrapolate what TRIZ – or ‘systematic creativity’ – will look like in the
future, firmly indicates that it will become much more closely coupled with a
wide range of other creativity tools and techniques. Click here if
you want to find out more about some of these relationships. |
Q. How should I get started? Another difficult question
because we all prefer to learn in different ways. Probably the best way to
start is by not spending any money. The down-side of not spending money is
that it usually means you have to spend some time. Try typing the name of
something you’re interested in into the search engine of the TRIZ Journal
Archives page and see if anyone has done anything in that area already. Or
maybe just skim through a few issues. Or maybe even the CREAX Newsletter
archive. If you reach the stage
where you think you might be ready to invest more than time, you might like
to get yourself a book. The ones we recommend are:- -
And Suddenly The Inventor Appeared – an easy to
read introduction to TRIZ -
Hands-On Systematic Innovation – our book
(surprise!) -
TRIZ: The Right Solution at the Right Time – if
you want a book that’s arranged in an almost logical manner, and contains some
example problems to work on. If you’re looking for a
TRIZ book specifically for business applications, unfortunately it will be
another three months before our recommendation is ready. Next up would be a course
or some software. Check our education page for our course dates or www.CREAX.net for a complete
list of software options. If none of these suits, we
can sometimes help you get started by sending us a problem you’d like to
solve. We can’t promise to solve it, but we can let you know what sort of
problem it is, and which of the TRIZ tools is going to be most likely to help
you solve it. |
Q. TRIZ: How much is hype?
A sceptical attitude to TRIZ
is quite natural given much of the hype coming from some of the offerers who
often imply that there is some sort of underlying magic behind TRIZ. You shouldn’t be surprised
to learn that there is no magic. TRIZ is not a panacea. Sometimes, in fact, it
can be quite hard work. The best way to see if TRIZ
has anything to offer you is try it out on a problem. Preferably you should
do this with an open mind (a little scepticism isn’t necessarily a bad thing
however). If you give it a try and get stuck (don’t worry, it happens to a
lot of us!), drop us a line and we’ll see if we can help. |
Q. I’m
already quite creative, what could TRIZ possibly teach me?
Some people approach TRIZ
with a ‘me versus TRIZ’ attitude and a resulting determination to prove that
they can do better than TRIZ could. While this is not such a bad attitude to
take (especially if it gets you to a good solution – which is after all the
main point), it isn’t particularly helpful one either. Try thinking of it this
way; if TRIZ is a distillation of best creative practice from around the
world and you are creative, it already contains some of what you already
know. ‘Competing’ with TRIZ is therefore a bit like competing with yourself.
Far better to feel pleased that you’re already a part of the method (if you
have patents, you almost certainly actually are!), and leave yourself open to
the possibility that it may also contain one or two things you don’t know
yet. |
Q. What sort of situations will TRIZ help me with?Hard as it may be to
believe, TRIZ will help in most situations. It has been shown to add benefit in
all sorts of fields of application from technical to business to politics to
the arts. Probably the only
situations where TRIZ will not help are: 1. What might be called the
‘here’s on I did earlier’ problem situation – where we are simply looking to use
an existing solution and no risk is acceptable. These situations are
increasingly rare (despite our best hopes) 2. Problems involving
optimisation. There is no mathematics as such within TRIZ so if you’re
looking to work out whether the answer is 1% or 1.5%, TRIZ probably isn’t
going to help very much. TRIZ has the biggest beneficial effect when you are
looking for inventive steps or leaps. |
Q. TRIZ sometimes gives the impression that it is a cult, is this true?There is a tendency for
TRIZ users to become preachers. Especially when they find some poor
unsuspecting victim who has never heard of TRIZ. If you sometimes feel like
one of these victims, try to remember that the people that might come across
as cult members are mostly like that because TRIZ has helped them to solve
something they thought was impossible to solve. On a more frightening note,
they were probably once in the same position as you. TRIZ very definitely isn’t
a cult, it can just feel that way sometimes. Offering sympathy is likely to
be your best strategy. |
Q. There seem to be a rapidly growing number of TRIZ suppliers. How do I know which of them are good and which aren’t?Difficult question. There
are a growing number of people (and organisations) who think that attending a
two-day course makes them qualified to become ‘TRIZ Consultants’.
Unfortunately there is no reliable way of telling the good from the bad from
the indifferent at this time. The European TRIZ Association is trying to set
up some kind of recommendation process, but this is not in place yet. The only vaguely reliable
test is to check out the publications of the various suppliers. If you see
something you like, give them a call. Beyond that, you’re left with trial and
error or word of mouth. If you decide to try either
of these routes, but especially the trial-and-error one, please remember that
all you’ve discovered at the end of your investigation is whether a
particular person has helped or not, and not whether TRIZ is any good. If we had a dollar for every
person or company that had said to us ‘we tried TRIZ and it didn’t work’,
we’d be living in the Seychelles and giving all of our stuff away for free.
Please remember you tried a TRIZ provider and they didn’t work. Blame the person wielding the tool not the
tool. |
Q. Can TRIZ solve any problem?Edwin Land once famously
said that if you can define a problem, it can be solved. We tend to believe
this statement. TRIZ is probably not going
to give the world cold fusion or a cure for world hunger or a decent football
team in Bradford, but then we don’t know whether they are the right questions
yet. For the great majority of other problems, we tend to hold the view that
TRIZ will point you towards good solutions. More importantly, we also
believe that it is when we start applying the constraints that we turn a
solvable problem into an unsolvable one. |
Q. I don’t particularly like the idea of ‘systematic’ – one of the things I enjoy most about creativity is the freedom from structure – does this mean I should stay away from TRIZ?TRIZ is all things to all
people. For those that want structure and system, it has all you could ever
want; for those that don’t want any, elements of the method can be used in a
very un-structured and free manner. |
Q. Do I need software?Some people think software
helps and some will strongly argue that it doesn’t. As in many things, there
is no either/or choice to be made; if you find software helps use it, if you
don’t, TRIZ can be used perfectly well without any kind of software support. If you’re not sure, and you
want to try some software out, you can usually obtain demos of the leading
packages. If you want to try CreaTRIZ, for example, it is possible to
experiment with the on-line JavaTRIZ package at a very reasonable cost. Well designed TRIZ software
exists to reduce the mechanistic burden during creative sessions. It will not
think for you. |
Q. I can’t find any examples of TRIZ being used in the areas I’m interested in, what should I do?Have a go yourself. Just
because no-one has been there before doesn’t mean TRIZ won’t help. The main
philosophical pillars of TRIZ are robust and work everywhere people have
tried them so far. The fact that no-one has used TRIZ in your area may mean
the scope for benefit is at its greatest. |
Q. I’ve been working in my field for many years and think I know it pretty well. What could TRIZ possibly do to help me?No TRIZ advocate worth
their salt will ever claim that they would possess the same detailed
knowledge that a subject expert would. They do know about TRIZ though.
Coupling some of the thought processes contained within TRIZ with the
knowledge of the subject matter expert often makes a highly beneficial
combination. At the very least, the TRIZ expert will offer some new
perspectives and access to solutions derived in other areas of endeavour. It’s not about expert
versus TRIZ; it’s about expert plus TRIZ. |
Q. No method
is that good, what are the weak points of TRIZ?
Although TRIZ is one of the
most comprehensive creativity and innovation aids ever conceived, it is not
perfect, and is still under development in many ways. The current areas in
which TRIZ is under-developed are design for reliability issues in a
technical sense, and politics and social science in others. In all of these areas, the
main pillars of TRIZ still stand, but the validation and integration of
external knowledge is incomplete. |
Q. If TRIZ is as good as the hype suggests, why isn’t everyone using it?One of the great paradoxes
of TRIZ. Cultism, bad presentation, in-fighting amongst TRIZ providers (if
only we could all use TRIZ to think about spreading TRIZ!), failure to
acknowledge and integrate with other good creativity strategies, providers
making it sound more complicated than it really is, and over-selling talk of
‘automated’ creativity are all factors. The biggest one is probably
that TRIZ makes you think, and thinking can sometimes feel like hard work.
The choice between hard work and less hard work can be quite a difficult one. |
Q. If TRIZ is so good, why isn’t the former Soviet Union better than it appears to be?TRIZ Question number one.
The answers are many and various. That TRIZ never received any significant
state support is one factor. Also, the West tends to see more of the negative
aspects of Soviet creativity rather than the positive. The Mir space station;
for example, was the subject of some ridicule by the Western media
immediately prior to its return to Earth, but the station contained some
technologies that the West still do not understand. Where TRIZ has penetrated
(mainly in the military and aerospace) it has resulted in some truly
astonishing pieces of engineering. If reliability issues had been as high up
the agenda as they are in the West, it may well be the case that TRIZ would
have helped create some astonishing feats in this area too. |
Q. Why are there so few TRIZ success stories?Many companies have been
reluctant to talk about their use of TRIZ supposedly due to commercial sensitivity
issues. A vague sense of embarrassment that they needed to (or were
instructed to) import a creativity tool has been another factor for more than
a few others. All these sorts of reasons, however, miss the real point. The real point is ‘what is
a success story?’ The great big problem with ‘success stories’ of any sort is
that they can always be shown to include an ‘ah, but’ moment – ‘it was a good
solution but they got lucky’, or ‘it was a good solution, but anyone could’ve
found it if they’d looked’, or ‘it was good, but it was bound to be because
they got to spend two whole days on it’, etc, etc, etc. Every success story
can be shot down, because our brains are usually much happier attacking
something than seeing its positive side. This is not an excuse for
the lack of TRIZ success stories, merely a way of reversing the question in
order to pose a more useful one; what would cause you to believe TRIZ worked?
If you think you can answer that, then let us know. Here at Systematic Innovation Ltd. we believe
that if we can help you get to a real solution to a problem situation you
don’t think is solvable, it ought to be the only success story you’ll need. |
Q. We already have millions of ideas. We don’t need a method to help us generate more; we need something to help us get some of our current ideas off the starting blocks for a change. We don’t need TRIZ for that, do we?Employing a method to help
generate more ideas when you already have a warehouse full of unused ideas is
futile and can be very frustrating (especially if a boss has instructed the
use of TRIZ). Our usual response to this situation is to use TRIZ to help
identify why ideas don’t make the transition to practical reality. Very
often, the things preventing successful exploitation of ideas are internal
contradictions; things that TRIZ is admirably suited to help tackle. |
Q. We’re very busy and TRIZ sounds very time-consuming. Using TRIZ will slow us down. How can you solve that contradiction?A question we’ve had from
several companies and individuals. The simple truth is that TRIZ will very
rarely take any longer to get to a solution than any other. Bearing in mind
that a ‘TRIZ solution’ very often involves some kind of patentable or never
seen before solution, the fact that there is no time penalty starts to appear
an insignificant side-effect. Another important feature
underlying this question is that our brains are usually much happier in
‘problem solving’ mode than they are in ‘problem defining’ mode. TRIZ will
almost always encourage users to stay in ‘defining’ mode than they would
normally. This is very commonly the feature that makes people believe that
TRIZ is not as quick as they think it should be. The simple answer to this,
of course is to spend less time defining the problem. As usual, ‘simple’ is
rarely the same thing as ‘right’. |
Q. I heard that TRIZ research stopped in the 80’s. How could it still be relevant to today’s problems?TRIZ research has continued
to some extent continuously, albeit the focus has shifted markedly away from
analysis of existing solutions to shuffling (and re-shuffling) the method. We believe the initiative
CREAX started in 2001 to re-commence systematic analysis of patents and other
solutions is, at this time, unique. |
Q. I don’t have any problems. Why do I need TRIZ?One of the main problems of
the name TRIZ and its translation ‘Theory of Inventive Problem Solving’, is
that it fails to capture the existence of many innovation situations which
have nothing at all to do with problem solving. TRIZ is as much about ‘opportunity
identification, creation and exploitation’ as it is about problem solving. A system that apparently has
no ‘problems’, will most definitely contain contradictions and an ability to
evolve. Both of these things represent opportunities to make it better. |
