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June 6, 2006
TRIZ update: 'It *is* an equation for innovation'
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
">My post on the BusinessWeek TRIZ article has had a fair amount of comment, including one I will quote here, as it came to me in an email from TRIZ consultant Jack Hipple, with whom I have had a smattering of TRIZ training. Says Jack:
"I loved this quote:
'It seems to me that TRIZ is trying to create an equation for innovation,' says Harry West, the company's vice-president of strategy & innovation. 'I think it's a great aspiration. But if there's an equation for innovation out there, your competitor can do the same -- which means the competitive challenge can easily be lost.' '
That IS the whole point of TRIZ and this guy should be appropriately afraid. The reason we don't have to use trial and error to solve quadratic equations anymore is that algebra was discovered as a mathematical science A lot of fast guessers were put out of business. There is much less mystery than this guy thinks, and when more of the world discovers they don't need a magician (as opposed to a logical process that anyone can learn--ie science and not psychlogy) he will have a rude awakening as others in the engineering world have discovered. Egos are a terrible thing to waste...."
As for me, I'd like to think that there's a middle ground -- there's a little more mystery to innovation than the TRIZ enthusiasts say, and there's a lot more process to innovation than some of the professional creatives think.
You can read the rest of the comments at the end of the original post.
Comments (2)
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Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is 
1. Valeri Souchkov on June 7, 2006 5:39 PM writes...
A problem (or, I'd better say, a challenge) with understanding TRIZ and what it does is that modern TRIZ is big and has many layers and ingredients. I happened to become a TRIZ professional about 20 years ago, now it is a large part of my everyday job and still, TRIZ is growing every day. TRIZ cannot be easily defined since it has been a dare attempt to bring together a new philiosophy of problems solving, process-based invention, logic, and creativity. Looking at if TRIZ is trying to find a universal formula of creativity, I would say "no". Not of creativity. As Genrich Altshuller (the originator of TRIZ) used to say, "A right formulation of a problem is its solution". And that's what TRIZ partly does: it tries to find (and successfully) a formula that helps to reformulate "unsolvable" problems is such a way so that they can be solved easily; and triggers our creative thinking; but TRIZ certainly does not limit our creativity. It enhances it. Once we made a test: by applying lateral thinking to a problem within restricted period of time, 7 ideas that solve the problem were found. And with TRIZ, during the same time, 29 ideas were found. Whatever formula TRIZ finds, it expands our capabilities rather than limits them.
Permalink to Comment2. Howard Smith on June 8, 2006 3:45 AM writes...
I also don't agree that TRIZ is trying to find a formula for innovation. That is clearly impossible, and anyone who thinks a formula for innovation is possible (from the TRIZ community or any other community) is crazy. Rather, TRIZ provides a process for innovation. TRIZ cannot create innovation, only the application of knowledge can do that. TRIZ is a process. And with TRIZ, many inonvation processes can be designed as we are doing at Computer Sciences. The competitive advantage comes from getting skilled up around those processes, and being better at executing them than other firms. But let's also be clear. Knowledge can trump process, and processes without knowledge are pointless. So TRIZ is also expanding what we mean by knowledge management in innovation. Just as installing a knowledge management system does not create value, only using it intelligently, the same is true of TRIZ.
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