TRIZ, the Altshullerian approach to solving innovation problems

Abstract

In the current socio-economic context, companies are required to pursue an on-going reduction in terms of the time-to-market process while increasing their innovation capacity. Yet this objective is hindered because the relevance of the solutions depends on human creative, intrinsic and random skills, which means that any technological and economic forecasts related to the new product (or technological system) are necessarily uncertain. The basic notion behind systemics suggests, therefore, that a certain distance should be taken from these situations and that they should be observed according to a systemic time/level reference, which should enable the company to forecast the development of technical systems. There are an impressive number of studies that present analyses of developing the technique. Most of these studies are backed by the formalisation of laws. The emergence of a theory on innovation proposed by Altshuller also offers an advanced study of these laws. This chapter aims to give a brief presentation of TRIZ (from the Russian acronym for theory of inventive problem solving) from a methodological and structural angle, and to put forward how it might be integrated into current Western approaches.