TRIZ

TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch), the ‘theory of inventive problem-solving’ was developed by a Russian guy called Genrich Altshuller in the 1940's and 50’s. It has been used by many American Fortune 500 companies and until 2005 was called 'the quickest methodology' for generating patentable ideas.

But TRIZ has never been quick to learn, is not always quick to implement, and its certainly not a theory of any sort.  

As Anja (the founder of PRIZM) did her early research, she realised that Altshuller never investigated the actual steps or process of inventing. What he did was look at the end results of inventing - the patents - and then he used his own intuition to explain how people got there. 

That is important to know, because TRIZ is much more usefully described as a set of '11 thinking tools for engineers', which were developed in bits and pieces over 40 years. It is also important to know, since many of the tools in the TRIZ toolkit have counterparts in other disciplines, which were independently created, and effectively used for many years by people who never heard of TRIZ.

The fact is, the only really unique selling point of TRIZ lies in Altshuller's analysis of over 50,000 patents - something he did 'by hand', before computers were invented.

Altshuller was only interested in world-changing inventions. When he looked at his patents, he set apart the top 5% of solutions in their class. He abstracted the answers from all of these and in the end he realised there were really only 40 things inventors ever did. The list of these final solutions is known as 'The 40 Inventive Principles'.

Altshuller then re-classified the problems that provoked those patents in the first place. Anja explains it in three steps.

1. He basically said 'these inventors didn't have a problem, they just had a contradiction' (he was politically correct, before anyone cared). And all that means is that they had 'something that they wanted' and 'something they didn't want', both happening at the same time.
2. He reworded all contradictions using a short list of only 39 possible engineering terms. 
3. He made a Matrix, putting all 39 variables on two axes - one for the 'wanted' variables, and one for the 'not wanted' variables. In the middle he put the 40 solutions. This became the 'Contradiction Matrix’. 

Accessing the '40 best answers in the engineering world' via the Contradiction Matrix allows any engineer to significantly reduce her solution-finding time by avoiding:

1. guesswork
2. historically and statistically non-viable solutions.

To date, the Matrix has been checked and updated with over 2 million patents, but its solution structure was never changed - it remains a breakthrough. So, of all the thinking tools Altshuller came up with, it is still the quickest, most statistically valid way for engineers to borrow and re-use ideas from other engineers who have faced similar problems and solved them.

Would you like to know how to turn a complex problem into a simple and appropriate two-word-contradiction?

The ‘TRIZ-Masters’ who worked with Altshuller memorized and internalized this Matrix and related thinking over several decades. When Russia opened, they moved to the US companies and quickly became famous for finding solutions faster than anyone in the West had seen before.

But the Russian way of thinking was not the same as the West, and when they tried to teach others how to do the same, TRIZ ran into many problems. The main sticking point became obvious to Anja when, in some cases, she saw new participants in TRIZ workshops could not reformulate their problem as a contradiction after 5 days of training. And as this concept is core to TRIZ, without it, TRIZ does not work at all.

For over a decade, the community of TRIZ practitioners tried to develop strategies to better apply Altshuller’s original thinking in a way that is useful in the West.  However, they all assumed that everyone knew what their problems were, while Anja realised that hardly anyone ever does. In other words: the problem our boss gives us is rarely what the problem really is. And 'the problem we think we have' is just the tip of the iceberg.

In short, it is impossible to find the right answer if we do not have the right problem. 

And finding the right question requires 'problem-finding' to be seen as a vitally important part of the process of creation. Finding the right contradictions to solve does not 'just happen'. 

Prior to creating PRIZM, Anja had support from the IMRC at the University of Bath to fill the gap left by Altshuller. She analysed 'the way everyone thinks while creating', and plotted the steps in a world-first 'Innovation Map'. When you add this map to TRIZ tools, you can now find the right problem and develop a precise problem statement or contradiction in under 20 minutes.

In fact, Anja has shown people how to generate hundreds of real problem statements and find Altshuller's answers to each of them, in less than one hour. This is at least 10 x faster than is possible without this tool.

Anja partly chose the word PRIZM for the Game, because her Russian friends jokingly made an acronym that stands for ‘super-advanced method that incorporates and supercedes TRIZ'.