Lilly Haines-Gadd - TRIZ For Dummies

TRIZ For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester,www.wiley.com

This edition first published 2016

2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chichester, West Sussex

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ISBN 978-1-119-10747-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-10748-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-10749-1 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

Are you looking for a better way to solve problems or interested in developing your creative ability? Or are you seeking a method for generating innovative thinking, in yourself and in the team around you? Perhaps your organisation has become so lean and efficient that you dont know how to get people thinking innovatively again. Or maybe you want to find a way to encourage everyone to share and develop ideas together as a team. If any of these ring true, or youre just looking for a novel new way of navigating the many rapids you encounter along the river of life, TRIZ will help you. Youve come to the right book!

TRIZ is the outcome of extensive research into patents and scientific journals. It has a wonderful engineering and scientific pedigree, and as a result, many case studies and examples youll hear about are technical.

However, and this is the important thing, it works and Ive seen it work on any kind of problem: management problems, business problems, social problems, even personal problems. What TRIZ gives you is the ability to think very clearly and creatively. You unpick thorny issues, define your problem correctly and are then given useful suggestions regarding how these problems may be solved. You use your brain to the best of its ability and, in fact, many of the TRIZ tools are based around changing the way you think by repeating the thinking patterns of the most creative and successful problem solvers. These principles are helpful regardless of the subject matter.

TRIZ gives you both skills in creative thinking and confidence in your creative ability. After reading this book youll be able to put some TRIZ magic into practice and enhance and extend your natural creativity and problem-solving ability.

TRIZ is a Russian acronym that stands for Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch, which translated into English means Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. As this is a bit of a mouthful, we generally use the acronym, but its helpful to know what it stands for; in fact, TRIZ is more than just a theory, its a practical toolkit, a method, a set of processes and even a bit of a philosophy to help you understand and solve problems in clever ways.

Genrich Altshuller, the mastermind behind TRIZ and a very clever engineer, scientist, inventor and writer (of both TRIZ books and science fiction), asserted that anyone can be creative. TRIZ shows you how!

This book isnt the ultimate guide to TRIZ. Instead, it gives you a short (and hopefully fun) introduction to the TRIZ tools and processes, based on how it can be used (and how I use it at work), rather than explaining every detail of the theory. You can start anywhere because each chapter stands alone and provides insights into new ways of thinking about problems and finding solutions. As you read youll come across occasional sidebars, which contain additional information about the topics at hand (and, if youre lucky, the occasional joke). Reading these is optional because theyre not necessary to understanding the main text.

Most books about TRIZ are written from a technical starting point. I read many when I first encountered TRIZ but found them hard to read, because most of the examples were based on engineering problems that I struggled to understand. Even the non-technical examples were often described in language that seemed very technical to me (most TRIZ experts are engineers) and didnt reflect how simple the tools can be to pick up and use for anyone. So in this book, I make things as straightforward as I can.

As TRIZ has always been used for any kind of problem solving, I thought it was time for a general book that even a dummy like me would understand. To that end, every example is general and non-technical. Even when I describe a technical system, I use everyday items that youve probably used, such as a cheese grater or toilet brush (not together!). Im regularly asked, Will TRIZ work for me even though Im not an engineer? I wrote this book to (hopefully) show you that the answer is yes! And to start to show you how.

Because I describe things as simply as possible, I may use slightly different terminology to what you might find elsewhere. TRIZ was first conceived in Russian and then translated into other languages, not always consistently. On top of that, its developed by a whole community, not one individual, and isnt owned by any one person. As a result, a number of different terms are used for the same tools, and some tools are arranged in different ways. Some derivative approaches also exist, whereby people have tried to extend or develop TRIZ and created their own toolkits and methods as a result. In this book, I describe classical TRIZ, which is based only on the framework developed in the original research.