TRIZ For Dummies

Lilly Haines-Gadd

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119107484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Use TRIZ to unlock creative problem solving

Are you new to TRIZ and looking for an easy-to-follow guide on how you can use it to enhance your company's creativity, innovation and problem-solving abilities? Look no further! Written in plain English and packed with tons of accessible and easy-to-follow instruction, TRIZ For Dummies shows you how to use this powerful toolkit to discover all the ways of solving a problem, uncover new concepts and identify previously unseen routes for new product development.

An international science that relies on the study of patterns in problems and solutions, TRIZ offers a powerful problem-solving and creativity-generating solution for companies looking to promote innovation, especially in the face of having to do more with less. Inside, you'll find out how to successfully apply this problem-solving toolkit to benefit from the experience of the whole world—not just the spontaneous and occasional creativity of individuals or groups of engineers with an organisation.

• Learn to think like a genius with TRIZ
• Discover the benefits of TRIZ as a tool for businesses
• Find fun and simple exercises for putting TRIZ into practise
• Benefit from industry examples of where TRIZ has worked—and how

With the help of TRIZ For Dummies, you'll get the skills needed to see the wood for the trees and solve complex problems with creativity, ingenuity and innovation.

Part I

Getting Started with TRIZ

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In this part …

Get an introduction to the TRIZ tools, process and fundamental logic of innovative problem solving.

Understand the TRIZ philosophy and learn how to start thinking like a genius.

Chapter 1

Going from Zero to TRIZ

In This Chapter

Appreciating the powerful TRIZ logic

Getting going with TRIZ problem solving

Developing ninja problem-solving skills

We’ve all got problems, right? And largely we can work out how to solve them, even when the problems seem really tough. Human beings are designed to be problem solvers, and we’re generally really good at it, so why do we need to go back to the drawing board and learn a new way to tackle problems?

Well, because it’s possible to learn from each other – and from problem solvers in the past. TRIZ is an attempt to try to cut across different disciplines and ‘bottle’ the fundamental logic of problem solving for everyone no matter what their job, speciality or area of expertise.

The greatest achievements in the arts and sciences have come about because people have been able to build on the previous work of others. When developments and breakthroughs have occurred – whether the drawing of perspective in art or the theory of gravity or the discovery of DNA – they’ve been shared so they can be built upon rather than rediscovered over and over again. However, these developments, and the preceding problems and solutions, are typically described in the language of the discipline in which they happened. As a result, only people with specialist knowledge are truly capable of understanding these developments. While this situation’s great for them, it cuts out everyone else. Because problem solving is seen as being specific for each discipline – the assumption being that lawyers, for example, must face very different problems to chemists – people tend to stay within their own industry and field of expertise when they face problems and are looking for solutions.

TRIZ takes the opposite approach.

One of the cornerstones of TRIZ is that the same problems occur again and again across different disciplines and applications, and that people are constantly reinventing the wheel by solving them from scratch every time. At the heart of TRIZ is the belief that, if you can understand how your problem is similar to someone else’s, you can reapply his clever solutions.

When you use TRIZ, you’re able to access the clever thinking of genius problem solvers from all areas of science, engineering and technology and can reapply what they’ve learned. You don’t reinvent the wheel – you find new and exciting ways of and ideas for using clever existing concepts to give you what you want.

And generating new ideas will be very easy for you because you have TRIZ. If you need solutions to a problem, you can just apply a simple thinking tool. If you hit a dead end, hit the problem with TRIZ. If you have a solution that looks pretty good, improve it even more by teasing out its problems and solving them. You can always do more TRIZ, which means that solutions and improvements are always out there to be discovered. It’s an exciting journey, and you and the people you’re making it with will appear to be geniuses as you find the right solutions to all the problems you encounter along the way.

Getting to Know TRIZ

TRIZ subdues complexity and keeps detail in its place. TRIZ logic demands that you have a clear idea of where you are and where you’re going, which helps you keep your eye on the prize and avoid getting tripped up with irrelevant detail, waylaid by trivial issues or seduced by premature solutions.

Increasing Ideality

The main goal of TRIZ is to increase Ideality. Ideality is the TRIZ equation for working out how good something is, as shown in Figure 1-1.

Illustration by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Figure 1-1: The TRIZ Ideality equation.

The Ideality of a system is the ratio of its benefits compared to its costs and harms:

• Benefits are all the outputs that you want, expressed as outcomes (not solutions).
• Costs are all the inputs required to create a system (not just money but also time, materials, cleverness and so on).
• Harms are all the outputs from your system that you don’t want (even neutral things that aren’t actively harmful).

A system in TRIZ is a very general term: it means any kind of product or process that’s created and used to meet a need.

Ideality is important because it’s very simple, and very brutal. It holds in the front of your mind the reason you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing. The benefits are the outcomes that you want but no mention is made of how you get those benefits. That’s deliberate because it keeps your focus on the outcomes you want and not on exactly how you’ll achieve them. This approach stops you becoming enraptured with solutions too soon, and always reminds you that other ways of getting what you want may exist. When you think about benefits, you consider all the things you want and not merely the outcomes you believe are achievable. This drives you continually to find new benefits you can deliver, and ways to increase the levels of benefits you’re currently achieving.

You’re also aware of all the downsides associated with the various ways of getting what you want. This is important because it forces you to look for problems, which means in turn that you’ll be able to solve the problems and improve your system continually, in an iterative way.

Ideality identifies two kinds of problems:

• Costs (all inputs)
• Harms (all outputs you don’t want)

TRIZ is always looking for ways to reduce costs; not just money but also time, parts, materials, effort – any kind of input required to create your system, in fact. TRIZ thinking pushes you towards creating simple, elegant systems and solutions to problems, which often involves finding innovative ways of getting what you want. While many traditional approaches also consider both costs and benefits (or sometimes functions), thinking about harms provides additional power.

Harms are all outputs you don’t want – they needn’t be actively harmful but are things produced by your system that aren’t useful to you. Examples include things that may seem ‘neutral’ initially, such as heat from a laptop or noise from a washing machine, any complicated features you don’t use on a smartphone, and waste or even potential risk. Thinking about harms encourages a more holistic view of your system, in which you consider its impact in the bigger picture. It also drives you towards simpler, more efficient systems, because all harms are things you’re fundamentally paying for in some way: heat from a lightbulb may not be actively harmful but it is wasted energy, and finding a way to reduce that heat output will result in either more light (increased benefit) or reduced energy use (reduced cost).

All TRIZ tools exist to improve Ideality. They increase benefits, reduce costs or reduce harms – or all three! Ideality is referred to throughout this book because, while you can use it as a standalone tool (see Chapters 5 and 9 for details), it’s also more of a fundamental way of understanding TRIZ and its purpose.

Ideality expresses in a nutshell the duality of TRIZ. On the one hand, you have one eye on utopia and all the benefits you want (even though you know you probably won’t get them). On the other hand, you’re searching for all the problems that exist in your real-world system (so you can get rid of them). TRIZ helps you connect fantasy and reality: you allow yourself to imagine perfection and engage with the nitty-gritty of practical systems. Obviously, this behaviour is a contradiction; however, TRIZ says the world is full of contradictions and you shouldn’t be afraid of them, ignore them in the hope that they’ll go away or compromise too soon in an attempt to resolve them. Ideality is a concept that balances the good and bad in any kind of system, and holds them together at the same time. Understanding and appreciating the conflict between the good and the bad allows you to work in an ambiguous, creative and potentially very fruitful space.

Uncovering patterns in human creativity

The logic underpinning TRIZ is that patterns exist across problems and the solutions that have previously been found to those problems. If you can understand how your situation is similar to previous situations, you can short-circuit the problem-solving process and generate very creative solutions.

TRIZ was observed, not invented. The earliest research found that the same problems occur again and again across different industries, and that very similar solutions are found to these problems (Chapter 2 gives you the lowdown on how TRIZ was developed).

For any problem you encounter, chances are that someone else will have seen something similar in the past – and found a solution. Even more excitingly, the solutions people come up with also exhibit similarities. What the TRIZ community has captured are the patterns that exist in both the kinds of problems that people address and the way in which they solve them. These patterns have been encapsulated in a series of thinking tools that the rest of us can apply to solve our problems.

Learning to think in the abstract

All TRIZ problem-s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting Started with TRIZ
• Part II: Opening Your TRIZ Toolbox
• Part III: Thinking Like a Genius
• Part IV: Understanding, Defining and Solving Difficult Problems with TRIZ
• Part V: The Part of Tens
• Part VI: Appendixes
• About the Author
• Cheat Sheet
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement