When I talk about 'tough' problems I am referring to the really difficult problems (often engineering based) that are encountered when trying to solve problems, innovate, make design improvements etc. The really 'tough' ones we face are often in the form of physical or technical contradictions. We need something to be short and long (a presentation pointer, long for usability and short for portability), hot and cold (a coffee cup, hot to keep the coffee warm and cold to be held), sharp and blunt (a pile, sharp so that it can be driven into the ground and blunt so that it can support when in use) as obvious day to day examples.
The purpose of this article is to introduce a systematic approach to inventive problem solving and expand on a couple of the many tools and processes that it encompasses to help solve these contradictions.
Before I do that it's time for a little history lesson about what is (or certainly was) potentially one of the world's best kept secrets.
Soon after WW11, a Genrich Altschuller was serving in the Russian Navy as a patent expert. When the Russian Government decided to give the German patent library to the United States he was furious and he let it be known. He was subsequently arrested by the KGB and sentenced to 25 years in a Gulag for anti Soviet propaganda.
However, after the death of Stalin he was released in 1954 and returned to his interest in patents and embarked upon analysing over 50,000 patents in search of inherent principals. This initial analysis concluded in him identifying just 40 inventive principals. Now hundreds of thousands of worldwide patents have been analysed and those 40 principals remain the same.
During the period of between 1956 and 1976, Altschuller formulated his Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ being the Russian acronym) which continues to be refined to this day and it made it's slow approach to Europe and the USA with the arrival of TRIZ Masters in the early 1990's.
It is now being used by hundreds of organisations including some of the world's biggest companies and names.
The history lesson is now over and we can now return to the subject of solving tough problems or physical and technical contradictions, a staggering 99.7% of which have already been solved.
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