.Dust

In late 1940’s the bril­liant soviet inven­tor Gen­rich Alt­shuller had the idea that it’s pos­si­ble to develop a scheme in order to free inno­va­tion process from the inevitabil­ity to progress by attempts. Ana­lyz­ing thou­sands of patents, Alt­shuller noticed that, at the right level of abstrac­tion, the inven­tive prin­ci­ples that sus­tain the most inno­v­a­tive ideas were a few, even if in dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tion fields, and were about the over­come of con­flicts that arise from dif­fer­ent tech­ni­cal needs. He detailed the TRIZ method (TRIZ stands for Teoriya Resh­eniya Izo­bre­ta­tel­skikh Zadatch, or The­ory of Solv­ing Inven­tive Prob­lems) that, appar­ently in con­trast to tech­niques such as brain­storm­ing (that is based on ran­dom idea gen­er­a­tion and dis­cus­sion), wants to cre­ate an algo­rith­mic way to ana­lyze prob­lems and find new ways to solve them. After sev­eral years of obliv­ion, now the process is still alive and TRIZ matrixes are going to became one of the most tricky dis­pute between peo­ple who “knows” the truth…Do you need more expla­na­tion about TRIZ or you are skilled enough about? Here is what you need (if needed).

I was imme­di­ately aston­ished by the idea that a sci­en­tist, even if a Russ­ian sci­en­tist (Rus­sians are so pecu­liar), could start to think about a way to “help” the cre­ative process estab­lish­ing rules and methods…It depends on the fact they are (most of them) (Rus­sians I mean) athe­ist? So every­thing needs to be explained or, bet­ter, guided, fit­ting in a matrix all the pos­si­ble results of your think­ing and match­ing the results in order to guide your thoughts to a ratio­nal end? I’d like to know which kind of process he fol­lowed in order to obtain this inno­v­a­tive idea…Do you think that such a Teoriya Resh­eniya Izo­bre­ta­tel­skikh Zadatch (or some­thing like this) can sub­sti­tute beer in the dif­fi­cult task of open your mind and enlighten the Mys­tery of the Universe?

Why do I blog this?
We can dis­cuss for a week about cul­ture, knowl­edge, rules and con­ven­tions, but every­thing looks like the expe­ri­ence of a chess player: he started to study how to move the Knight and the King, then he goes deeply into Over­tures and Cen­ter Con­trol & Occu­pa­tion, and then the Final, and then he goes to the Club and loses the match against a twelve-​years-​old-​spotty-​girl named Sue. There is always a moment dur­ing the fight where the­ory leaves you alone and you need your genius to sur­vive to Sue’s attach. And I’m con­vinced that TRIZ can’t sub­sti­tute your genius.

Related posts:

1. Junior or Senior? Ded­i­cated to…
2. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Innovation
3. Don’t be tempted!
4. Some sim­ple thoughts about RFID tags
5. Sources of uncon­ven­tional innovation