The process for individuating TRIZ Inventive Principles: deterministic, stochastic or domain-oriented?

Abstract

Although TRIZ is widely acknowledged as a powerful aid to improve efficacy and efficiency of the creative design process, practitioners diffusedly experience difficulties in the selection of the most suitable tool. Such an issue represents a severe limitation in consideration of the large number of tools TRIZ offers. Here, Inventive Principles (IPs) are acknowledged as the most popular TRIZ technique, and their conjointly use with the Contradiction Matrix makes the selection of the appropriate IP a sufficiently supported task. However, the reliability of the Contradiction Matrix is often questioned and an agreement on a solid and reliable procedure for the selection of IPs is far from being reached. In such a context, the paper investigates the recurrence of IPs to solve contradictions, with reference to a classification framework that takes into consideration the nature of the problem to be solved and the technical-scientific domain it belongs to. The outcomes of the analysis reveal that leveraged IPs are considerably related with the technical-scientific domain and the nature of the problem to be solved. The found relationships are worth delving into and translating into selection guidelines.

Enhancing Engineering Creativity With Automated Formulation of Elementary Solution Principles

“…As shown by Borgianni et al (2021), the 40 classical TRIZ Inventive Principles and their subprinciples can be ranked according to the statistical frequency of their application. However, this ranking has more the character of a recommendation.…”

“…A recent comprehensive literature analysis of the application, selection, and modification of the 40 TRIZ Inventive Principles by Borgianni et al (2021) outlines the importance of refined approaches and strategies for identifying "appropriate" inventive principles depending on the type and engineering domain of a problem. The automated idea generation process described in this paper can be started when at least one of the problem definition categories is defined: A.…”

“…Among the many components of TRIZ, the 40 Inventive Principles are the most widely used tool for systematically improving ideation performance. These principles are easy to apply or modify for specific technical domains and can be easily integrated into brainstorming or the daily work of engineers (Borgianni et al, 2021). Over the past decades, the 40 TRIZ Inventive Principles have been widely used to solve technical contradictions in various engineering domains and have been enriched with adaptations, illustrations, and examples for specific fields of application.…”

“…The study of Russo and Spreafico (2015) classified the 40 Inventive Principles through functional behaviour structure ontology. There are also many proposals of examples illustrating the breadth of application in specific engineering domains (Borgianni et al, 2021), such as electronics, chemical engineering, food processing, ergonomics, maintenance, software engineering etc. The Altshuller' original 40 Inventive Principles (Altshuller, 1984) contain in total between 86 and 90 sub-principles.…”

“…Alternatively, one can apply the inventive principles in the order of their statistical frequency of use, such as: (35) Transform physical and chemical properties, (10) Prior useful action, (1) Segmentation, (28) Replacing mechanical working principle, (2) Leaving out / Trimming, (15) Dynamism and adaptability, (19) Periodic action, (3) Local quality, (17) Shift to another dimension, (13) Inversion, (18) Mechanical vibration, (26) Copying and others (Altshuller, 1984). A recent, slightly modified variant of the frequency of application of the 40 Inventive Principles has been proposed by Borgianni et al (2021).…”